Your Personal Priorities Aren't "Luxuries"

It’s 6am and your alarm goes off. You told yourself you’d work out this morning. You even laid your shoes by the bed last night. But before your feet hit the floor, you check your email. A client needs a report by 8:00 am. Your chest tightens. You feel the pressure. You skip the workout, telling yourself, “Tomorrow. I’ll workout tomorrow.”

By 11am, you’re in your third back-to-back meeting. Your head is foggy, your body is restless, your brain is begging for a 15 minute break. You check your calendar and there's another meeting immediately after this one. You take a deep sigh, and rally your brain to lock in for another meeting. 

Lunchtime finally arrives. You had promised yourself an actual lunch with a healthy meal, and maybe even a walk outside. Just as you're getting up from your desk, your partner reminds you the proposal has to be out by 1pm to the client. She's right, that's important. DoorDash it is, and another lunch hunched over your keyboard.

By afternoon, your calendar says “focus time.” You’re supposed to research and write to advance your business. Instead you scroll through messages and email, trying to close as many loops as you can. It feels productive, but you know it’s not progress.

The day finally ends and you’re brain is fried. Dinner with your family is a blur. You want to show up with energy, but there’s nothing left in the tank. Your spouse says "you need a vacation", and the though alone puts you in a cold sweat for fear of all the projects on your plate. 

Sound familiar? You're not alone. The vast majority of knowledge workers skip their personal priorities, and 76% of them will experience burnout THIS YEAR. 

The hard truth: those personal priorities you keep skipping - your workout, your lunch, your brain break, your family dinner - are not luxuries. They are lifelines.

Personal priorities are the fuel you need to get the life you want. 

So why do you keep skipping them? Pretty simple: fear. 

Fear Makes Us Skip Personal Priorities

Your to-do list is like a 4-alarm fire in your head.

Each item, if left undone, represents something that can hurt you (e.g. Miss my goal, miss my incentive payout, lose my job) or hurt someone whose opinion you care about. 

In this situation, your brain is hardwired to create fear, and this fear puts you in fight or flight mode. 

If you're reading this blog, you are wired for impact, and I'm assuming you go into fight mode, which causes you to skip your personal priorities in order to put out the fire. 

This makes skipping prioritizing personal priorities easy to understand: they don't "feel" on fire, particularly compared to the other items on your list.  

Personal Priorities are Lifelines, not Luxuries

You think of personal priorities as things you'll get to “if there’s time.” But that’s backwards.

- Your workout doesn’t cost you productivity, it energizes you for all the other priorities on your calendar.
- Your mental break or lunch break isn’t laziness, it's recovery time to help your brain operate at top form.
- Dinner with your family isn’t indulgence, it's an anchor that keeps you steady when work feels chaotic.

Even further, they are often the purest expression of what you value. Skipping them only increases stress and overwhelm, as it makes you feel inconsistent with who you want to be.  

Personal priorities are your lifeline to get the life you want. They are fuel for the journey. Ignore them long enough, and your pace turns frantic, then unsustainable.

- Skip your priorities for a day, and you feel tired.
- Skip them for a week, and you feel worn down.
- Skip them for a month or more, and you begin tempting burnout. 

You can keep grinding, skipping the very things that give you life, and call it sacrifice. Or you can decide that your personal priorities are not luxuries. They’re the fuel that makes everything else possible.

"But there's not enough time for my personal priorities!", I hear you screaming at the screen. 

You're right, and they're never will be. Keep reading. 

There Will Never Be Enough Time for Personal Priorities

Your to-do list is infinite, and it always will be. 

The average person has 121 items on their implicit or explicit to-do list ALL THE TIME. This means that every time you check an item off your to-do list, more items appear: more problems to solve, more fires to put out, more relationships that need tending. You get the picture. Our to-do lists are effectively infinite.

You wake up each day with roughly 16 to 18 waking hours, and you get to work on that infinite to-do list with as many of those waking hours as you can. You fight fires, you focus on priorities, you tend relationships, you answer email. And coming to the end of your day, regardless of the the number of hours you worked, what do you find: undone items on your to-do list. You could work every waking hour of every day, and still have more items on your list. An infinite to-do list will always remain undone.

So you're right. If you're waiting for time to magically free up for your personal priorities, it will never happen. 

Here's what to do instead. 

Pay Yourself First 

Financial planning 101 says to pay yourself first: put money in savings or investments FIRST before you spend money on anything else. This ensures your long term needs are covered FIRST, before you start spending on short term needs. 

Time is no different.

In the incredible Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman popularized the idea of paying yourself first when it comes to time. If you want to be at your best, you have to cover your essentials first. That means blocking your calendar for your personal priorities, and making that time off limits to other priorities. 

- If you need 45 minutes to work out, block it.
- If you want lunch away from your desk, schedule it.
- If family dinner matters, treat it like your most important client meeting.

Your future self doesn’t need more hours in the day. Your future self needs you to protect the personal priorities that keep you energized, clear, and present.

"But I feel underwater. Where do I even start?". I got you, friend. Start small. 

Start Small Next Week

Before you end your week, pick one personal priority and block it on your calendar for a single day. A workout, an afternoon walk, an actual lunch, whatever you want. 

Treat it as non-negotiable. Make that time unavailable to any other priority. You can do it. It's only a single personal priority on a single day. 

Here's why this will work: your brain thinks a single personal priority on a single day is "easy", which means you'll actually do it. And by doing so, you are creating experiential evidence for yourself that you can prioritize your personal priorities AND not die AND in fact be more effective with everything else on your calendar. 

Do this for a week or two, then add one more personal priority, or do the same personal priority on two days instead of one. You see where we're going. Slowly but surely you are taking back time for the personal priorities that will become your lifelines. 

Your future self next week will be incrementally better. Your future self six months from now will be exponentially different. 

Bet on future you. 

Personal Priorities Are Part of a Healthy Weekly Time Framework 

Paying yourself first is just one aspect of a healthy weekly time framework that gets you the results you want, maximizing your impact, without any risk of burnout. That's exactly what Time Boss is, and you can learn it in 90 minutes with the Time Boss Masterclass.

If you've watched the Masterclass, tried to implement Time Boss, and realize you need additional support, consider the upcoming Master Your Week Course.

In just 6 weeks, the Master Your Week Course helps leaders like you get 35% more done, win back 4 to 10 hours a week, and finally feel in control of your time. 97% of participants report less overwhelm and more peace. The next cohort is launching soon, and seats fill fast.

If you're not sure the course is right for you, or would like to discuss your unique situation, please grab time with us here. If nothing else, we'll give you feedback on your current situation and offer an easily implementable tactic or two to relieve some pressure.