Priority

When I was in the corporate world, I experienced so much pressure to treat everything as high priority.

This is much too common. You start off listing tasks as A, B, C, then discover that most things are A priority so now you create A1, A2, A3 to separate them apart.

But then you see that most everything becomes A1, so you throw up your hands in despair. Or is it just me?

Personally, I work well against deadlines. So I’ve learned how to create even artificial deadlines to push myself across the finish line.

But here’s the problem: The important things don’t give me convenient deadlines. And since nobody is bugging me about them, they just … sit. And wait.

Now you know all this – it’s basically how jobs work. So you’re not surprised, it just feels like you’re stuck in a pattern.

The most useful way I’ve found to break out of this pattern is to create a conversation with someone. OK, so I’ve been meaning to write down that job description for over a year now and never really got started. So I’ll start a discussion with a colleague or friend and talk about this topic.

Maybe I’ll get some useful advice, maybe I won’t. But the breakthrough comes when I tell them that I’d like to write a first draft and send it to them by Friday this week.

Notice that this person didn’t really need it. What I did is to make a promise to myself. So I created a deadline and I know how to handle deadlines well.

By the way, this is one of the secrets of what coaches do. We help our clients to make a concrete commitment to themselves and then can follow up on it in the next session. It’s much difference than “assigning homework” because that creates the resistance that we’re all familiar with.

But making a promise to a friend? Much more likely we’ll follow through on that.