Prioritization: In Life and Work

What We Include Matters as Much as the Order

I was watching a video clip about cleaning on TikTok recently.

@cindellkimbroughSo glad I learned this cleaning system 😭 #cleanwithme #howtoclean

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In the clip, the woman discusses how to effectively clean rooms and houses quickly. It is very useful information, so you should take a look.

What bothered me about the specific room, however, was that it wasn’t dirty. I could tell how quickly someone would be able to clean it. Which is probably great for a video demonstration, but there is hardly anything in the room. Even though there are items on the floor and beds, and it looks a little messy, there isn’t that much to do.

So her focus is on the order to clean. Again, great advice. Start with picking up, then make your way around the room, etc.

But what happens when there is simply too much in the room? What about when you have too much stuff and it just doesn’t fit into that space? In her example, it’s clear that everything fits. There is hardly anything in the room, so everything can be put away neatly and cleaned up. But what happens when that’s not the case, and the pile outside the door of every room becomes huge?

Prioritizing Life and Work

While the video is about cleaning, it’s generally about prioritizing, which is what I think about frequently, and what I want to discuss here. Specifically, how can we prioritize all the tasks we need to do, whether in life or work?

Often, as I look at my to-do lists, they seem unconquerable. As someone who likes to just get shit done, I always take on more than I ought to. And work seems to find me. So there will always be something that doesn’t get done. Whether it is finalizing a document, booking a trip, finishing the landscaping, or cleaning up my office. I always have more than I can do.

You may feel the same way. How can we fit in everything that needs to fit?

Focus on the Essential

First, we must prune out the non-essential items and focus on the essential. In the video above, that means clearing out the clutter. To have a room that is easy to tidy, it can’t be filled to the brim with stuff that can’t be organized.

Likewise, to get meaningful work done, our lives can’t be filled to the brim. We have to be able to focus on the important.

In one of my favorite books, Essentialism, Greg McKeown offers this advice:

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”

We have to pursue less to get more done. And those things should be the most important.

“You can do anything but not everything”

Make Essential Tasks Smaller

But what happens when you narrow your focus, cut out the non-essential, and still don’t have enough room? Going back to the example of the room, I feel like I’ve cleaned and organized my office over and over, but keep running into the issue of not having enough space for what I consider essential. What then?

I wrote a book review about Effortless: Make it Easier to Do What Matters Most:

In this review, I discussed this problem:

I am a believer in essentialism, and am constantly pruning away non-essential items in my life (though I’m imperfect at it). But there is still never enough room. What happens when you truly can’t fit in the essential things? I feel like this is a genuine question for many of us, especially many of you reading this.

Unfortunately for my office, there is little I can do to physically shrink the stuff in it. But for the work we do or the tasks we take on, we often have the option to shrink the size of the essential tasks we have.