Your Priority Stack

When recovering from dental surgery last week, I watched 14 episodes of The Staircase, received some TLC from my husband, was grateful for some wonderful friends who popped by with soup and flowers, and I had a whole lot of time to think. When you are an A type doer like me, it is truly a shock to the system to go from productive and fast-paced to dependent and barely moving. Being forced to stay in bed for three days was a silver lining. When you come to a complete stop, your world becomes smaller and it forces you to rethink what's important. 

We all struggle with decisions and I have always advocated making decisions fast. When it comes to the small daily decisions, there is little correlation between time spent and the quality of the choice. So it is best to make a decision and move on. But for some of us, this is still a struggle. The devil is in the decisions.

Having a priority stack is one of the best ways to make all decisions fairly easy. Look at your life and write down your priorities in order. Put the most important pieces on top like an old-fashioned nutrition pyramid. Note that this is not a stack of what gets the most time. Rather, it is a stack of what is most important to you. Usually, you don’t have that much control over your time. You have to spend xyz hours at work or sleeping etc. Most often these decisions have to do with your discretional time. 

Then when faced with your next decision, ask yourself where it falls in the stack. This doesn’t mean kids always trump friends or that your spouse always trumps work. Just like your nutrition pyramid, you need a balanced diet of priorities. Make time for the margaritas and the meetings. Make time for the family meal and your gardening project. Just remember to make sure that the top of the pyramid is being watered. When the top layers of your stack are watered, they flow down to the other layers and your whole stack can flourish.

For your next decision-making hack, just use the stack.