Last week my wife, Daya was preparing a good authentic lunch. While sauteing onions, she told me to get the mint leaves and I opened the fridge to look for it.
“ We don’t have mint leaves, dear. I forgot to buy it. ”
She turned to me and said, “ You don’t forget to shit, right? ”
We can never be late in shitting. We do it at the right time and let me be honest here, it feels good and relaxed when it’s done. If we’re late, it will not make us look good and people will keep a distance from us. I was wondering what if we can give the same value that we give to shitting for the things that we do in life. So here’s me trying to change the above sentence a little.
I can never be late in writing. I have to do it at the right time and let me be honest here, I feel good and relaxed when it’s done. If I’m late, it will not make me look good. People will keep a distance from me.
With that one dialogue by Daya taught me about prioritizing things in life. It made me think about the stuff I do to keep myself busy and also if they mattered the most. But how do we decide what matters the most? Is it because we just want to get things done and move on or should we think about why are we doing it?
Two months ago, I used to have 25 items in the Today section of my GTD app ( Wunderlist ). It was impossible for me to get all of it done in a day because I didn’t know the most crucial thing in that list.
Making everything important is like making nothing important. So I continuously failed in getting them done because I couldn’t prioritize the 25 items and didn’t know the criteria to do it.
Setting up criteria for your TODO items is like fixing a direction when you travel. It could be money, happiness, growth, exploring.. etc. Having lot of stuff to do is good but we need to prioritize it based on something or we’ll be like machines who get their work done on a daily basis.
Maybe some random self-questions might help like for whom am I doing this or will this bring any change in my life. So to fix the 25 things in my Today list, there’s a smart GTD rule that I followed:
Do only five things in a day
I never cared about the 6th thing. The first goal was to get the 5 most important things done. As you get better at prioritizing stuff, you can definitely do more than 5 in a day.