Daily Dose 9: Problems Pinpointing Priorities

So, how’s the list coming? If your thought was just to keep reading until you found some practical hint to try, why not just give the list a whirl? If, on the other hand, you jotted down pages of things that need doing, but not so much the why it is important you be doing those specific things, today and tomorrow are just for you. Priorities are something of a middle ground, the space between tangible to-dos and grand values. While you continue working with your own list on your own time, we are going to read about some of the underlying reasons why pinpointing priorities is difficult for most people.

Defining Priorities

To begin, priorities reflect a blend of responsibilities, interests, preferences, constraints, habits, abilities, character traits, and dreams that are unique to each of us. That alone explains why it is hard to list “everything” we need or want to do. Once we get beyond the to dos floating about our mind space, applying their special pressure that we need to do them, or applying their special guilt that we should feel like we need to do them, and once we throw in a few wild bucket fancies (these mostly to prove to ourselves we are not complete robotons churning through the same daily motions of me doing mostly what others wants me doing more than I want to be doing), we get stuck.

And as if writing is not daunting enough, a strong suspicion hovers: once everything gets on the list and is staring back, won’t that just make more work…well, who wants to go there?

To top it off, some tendencies of human nature complicate successful thinking about personal priorities, and may be playing a strong hand against you in this listing game.

We Don’t Concentrate on Big Ideas for Our Lives

To start, most of us are unpracticed with pondering life in any comprehensive way, let alone our particular priorities in any specific way. The job is made even more formidable once we realize that our priorities grow from our values—an area of even greater mystery and vagueness to us than priorities. We don’t do vague, with minds completely occupied with day-to-day. We don’t consider the “big ideas” that should directly motivate our day to day. The big and beyond thinker parts of us are, frankly, more out of shape than most of our bodies. That’s why you want to face the list for several days, to see if something “big and beyond” in there wakes up and wants to be counted.

We Want to Keep Open a Blame Escape Hatch

Most of us are also comfortable living with a subtle mental contradiction in our own lives. We like to think we are independent self-thinkers, leading our own lives. But in a mental back pocket, we also want to maintain an extensive list of potential blame agents for when things don’t work out. Then, instead of my idea not working (which means, of course, that I have failed in some way and that is demoralizing), part of me can console other parts of me with the deceit that, really, it was mostly “their” plan, or “their” demands, or “their” expectations that didn’t work out in my life. “Their” in this case could be a friend, spouse, parent, relative, pastor, counselor, society, peer pressure, religion, even philosophies absorbed from books, classes, media.

Now all of those people and entities do influence us, and can either help or hinder clear thinking and a sharp definition of our priorities. The problem is when their influence and counsel are blind substitutes for grappling with ourselves what God wants us to be or do. This makes pinpointing personal priorities less clear and direct.

Influences on Compiling the Ultimate To-Do List

Maybe if you are taking this list-building project seriously, look over what you’ve written. Can you identify who or what has influenced  your choices? If they were completely out of the picture, what would be left?  What would change? Stay the same? What on your list is there because you need it there to be true to yourself, regardless of who or what has influenced and shaped your life?

This is not a call to disown or dismiss influences that have help shape the you-package your priorities represent. In fact, most of us are better served to embrace their influence than to discredit them, but to do that well, we need to pull their contributions to our decision-making and priority-building from the murky mists of mental dormancy, and get them front and central in an actively engaged mental process.