How to best prioritize what matters?

Questions, questions...

Howdy and welcome to Traipsing About, my newsletter about reclaiming creativity and ditching tired personal paradigms.

Straight to it this week to tell you about a new project!

---

I’d love to be the type of person who can sit quietly in a room with my thoughts and emerge nibbling on a calming kernel of the universe’s wisdom.

Sadly, I am oh-so-very human and cannot. I lack the disposition and focus, not to mention the flexibility to sit cross-legged.

Instead, I seek learning from brilliant thinkers, often through reading. And over decades of turning pages, I’ve amassed a treasure trove of quotes, a personal library of passages that challenge and inspire me.

This led me to the new project:

I’m going to mine my library of wisdom with a weekly question. The overarching theme is one I’ve pursued in recent years—self-awareness.

Self-awareness because many of the things that frustrate or thwart me are tied to that. Things like:

1. Not focusing on what I can control. “Gee, maybe I’ll see what the German elections mean for the world AHHHH!!!”

2. Not feeling content with current life circumstances when life hucks curveballs (as it always will).

3. Not being patient with others.

Plus many more…I’ve got a long way to go.

Hell, I still fail to recognize simple things like knowing when I’m losing my even keel because I’m hungry! This has happened enough that Chelsea has a name for me—NARG.

My take on what NARG looks like.

*sigh* I suspect that like meditation, increased self-awareness will be a lifetime practice.

Anyway, this quote from Alain de Botton seems close to what I’m aiming for:

"Maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun."

I’ll be doing the work anyway, so I’m launching it here on Traipsing About. I’ll post weekly on Thursday as a quick hit, or sometimes as part of a longer full newsletter like you long-time readers are used to.

Think of it as a 3-minute zap of wisdom late in the week to help keep you grounded.

So, here we go. Since my energy has felt scattered this past couple of weeks, my question is:

How can I best prioritize what matters?

Anybody else feeling this way?

1. Be wary of stress. Yup, there’s a lot of it out there right now! And as Laurence Gonzales writes in Deep Survival,

   "Stress causes most people to focus narrowly on the thing that they consider most important, and it may be the wrong thing."

   I’m not trying to survive in the wilderness (luckily). However, focusing on the wrong thing absolutely applies to me even in the comfort of my home when I’m on tilt from stress.
   Soooo… how do I choose what to focus on?
   

2. Eliminate options: It’s possible to apply Greg McKeown’s concepts from Essentialism to just about every decision or dilemma, starting with:

   Nonessentialists tend to be so preoccupied with past successes and failures, as well as future challenges and opportunities, that they miss the present moment. They become distracted. Unfocused.

   Yeah, whatever. That’s not me…
   Ok, fine, it is. So what to do?

   “As you evaluate an option, think about the single most important criterion for that decision, and then simply give the option a score between 0 and 100. If you rate it any lower than 90 percent, then automatically change the rating to 0 and simply reject it.

   
   This way you avoid getting caught up in indecision, or worse, getting stuck with the 60s or 70s. Think about how you’d feel if you scored a 65 on some test. Why would you deliberately choose to feel that way about an important choice in your life?"

   This ties in nicely with McKeown’s concept of the importance of safeguarding our ability to prioritize—if you don’t prioritize your life, other people will do it for you!

   Relatedly, as Brené Brown says in Rising Strong,

   "The solution is getting totally clear on the people whose opinions actually matter."

3. Another couple of truisms from Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek (an oldie but a goodie):

   1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

   2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

   And then Colin Wright in Considerations talks about how most truly happy and successful people are masters of:

   1. Deciding what changes they want to see in their lives.

   2. Immediately working to create habits that will help them make those changes manifest.
      

   My distillation: Picture the end goal, then build the scaffolding and daily habits to support those goals. Focus on the process, not the results. (And reread Atomic Habits by James Clear every year!)
   

   Still too many options? A wise Englishman has an antidote…
   

4. Decide what to fail at: Oliver Burkeman writes in Four Thousand Weeks, "Decide in advance what to fail at. You’ll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your time and energy are finite. But the great benefit of strategic underachievement is that you focus that time and energy more effectively."

   Burkeman also recommends tackling your most valued activities head-on to ensure they happen, which he likens to “paying yourself first.”
   

   Another reminder from him that is so important right now: make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world versus online.

My takeaway for the week: We can’t do it all, and that’s fine. Prioritizing is just strategic quitting—so quit the right things and do something that counts.

Action Items

Three things I’ve been doing that help steady me, all attempted with a goal of dailyish—I don’t always get it right.

1. Morning walks or playing piano: Starting with even 15 minutes of a grounding activity works wonders for me. Whether it’s a morning walk with Chelsea or immersing myself in studying piano, I start things off centered and calm instead of a suffocating elephant of stress squashing my chest.

2. Don’t start or end the day with a digital device. I’m striving to avoid email in the morning or evening. I get it right most days. (See #1 for how to recenter: exercise or a flow-state hobby = magic!)

3. No decision making after 6:30 p.m. I am far more likely to spin out in the evening, so I’m avoiding taxing conversations, reading, or decisions late in the day.

Please let me know what you think! If you enjoyed this, please forward to a friend who would dig it.

See you next Thursday! Good luck tying up those loose ends.