Should You Always Start with Your Top Priority?

Given how short life is, you would expect that all of us would be laser-focused on making the most of our time.

But we’re not. We waste time being angry or feeling useless or even making the world worse.

It’s worth asking yourself: what could I do with all the minutes, hours, and days I’ve spent on the wrong things? How can I prevent more waste in the future?

That’s the question at the heart of the meta-problem. With limited time and resources, which problems should we individually choose to solve? Which problems should we collectively choose as a society or planet? What should our criteria be to make those decisions?

I try to make the right choices each day in my personal life, so I won’t have regrets tomorrow. It’s not always clear what those choices are – we live in a fundamentally uncertain world which makes it tricky to make choices in the present. Still, I do my best. I’ve shared tools in the past like projecting forward to see how my different options might impact the world, as a way to help me choose.

A little over a year ago I was lamenting my massive to-do list. I prioritize what I need to do each day, and used to make sure I was working from the top to the bottom. On the third day in a row where I didn’t get my highest priority thing done, I noticed how many hours I’d wasted not doing anything at all because I was so stuck on the first thing on my list.

I thought about how, if I wasn’t going to make progress anyway, it would have been nice to at least spend that time on something fun: Maybe making a piece of jewelry or taking my kids on an adventure.

I’d felt like I had to stay locked on to the highest priority thing. But because I wasn’t in the right mindset to make any progress, instead I did nothing. I’d wasted that most precious resource, my time.

On that day I made a commitment to myself. Just because something was the highest priority didn’t mean I had to get it done first. If I was working on a task and 30 minutes in I wasn’t making progress, it was time to try something else.

In short, I accepted that priority should depend both on my goals and my ability to execute towards them.

It’s a commitment I’ve generally kept since. I try to make sure my priority list always has a mix of tasks so I can find something that I can succeed at, no matter my mood. If I want to try something at the top of the list that might be a stumper, I give myself limited time to give it a shot. If I’m making good progress, I can always extend that time. But if I get stuck, I remember I’m better off re-prioritizing than wasting the rest of the day and getting nowhere.

Since I made the shift, I’ve gotten a lot more done. I even get more of the tough stuff done, because I make sure that I spend my focused time on those things that require focus.

But the real win is the improvement in my quality of life. I waste so much less time which gives me more hours for the fun stuff.

Because at the beginning of the day, while I can’t get more hours, I can choose how to use them.