The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
—Warren Buffett
I recently asked my email subscribers where they were getting stuck in life. One of the most frequent responses I got was that people were getting stuck with prioritizing their overwhelming life—there’s too much to do, too many people fighting for their attention, and too many directions they’re being pulled in.
I’ve been there. We feel like we need to do it all, but we recognize that we can’t. We know we need to set some priorities. So, how do we do that?
The 5-things rule
It might seem that the way to do this is to figure out what to focus on. But, actually, we might do better by figuring out what not to focus on. Where we often go wrong is not that we don’t have important goals, but that we get distracted by our less important goals.
Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha” and one of the wealthiest people in the world, has a useful strategy for prioritizing goals and avoiding distractions:
- Write down the top 25 goals that you see as key to success in your career and life.
- Review your list and circle the five goals that are most important to you.
- Cross the rest off your list.
A lot of people do the first step. Some do the second step. The crucial step to success, however, is the one that most people skip: the third step.
The key to actually doing our top five things is by not trying to do all 25 things on our list at the same time. Prioritization is not just about ordering our goals. It’s not just about knowing which things are most important in your life; it’s about doing the things that are most important. And a good way to avoid getting distracted by the less important things is to actually cross them off your list. They are your enemy. As Warren Buffett says, avoid them at all costs until you’ve succeeded with your top five.
Isn’t that a bit crazy?
But should we really cross out the majority of our goals? Isn’t that a bit … extreme?
That’s what I thought too. Until I did it. I wrote down my goals, circled my top five, and crossed out the rest.
That last part was hard. There were a lot of things on that list that I really wanted to do. But then I thought more about why I haven’t made as much progress on my top five things as I want.
I thought about where my time goes each day.
A lot of it goes to my 2-year-old and 7-year-old. That’s a function of the current season I am in. Little kids need a lot of time and attention. That’s a priority for me, which is why it’s in my top five.
Some of my time goes to time wasters—mindlessly scrolling Instagram, binge watching Netflix, worrying about something I had said that day, or checking my email a million times.
Some of my time goes to my job teaching ethics. While grading papers might not be in my top five, I do like getting a paycheck and grading comes with the territory.
Some of my time goes towards writing my book. This is another thing that’s in my top five right now. And, yet, as important as this goal is to me, I haven’t spent as much time working on it as I would like.
Why?
I used to think it was because of the activities that I knew were distracting timewasters. If I could just spend less time on email and social media, then I’d be able to accomplish my most important goals.
But then I looked at my list.
And when I looked at all the things that I had crossed off my list, I realized that a lot of my time was going towards those bottom 20 things. They were my greatest distractions. They were also a lot sneakier than the normal time wasters. Since they were all good things—things that I actually wanted to accomplish—I hadn’t recognized them as distractions; I had just seen them as “goals.” And thinking of them as goals makes it easy to justify spending time doing them. Which leads to spending more time doing them. Which means spending less time doing the things in my top five.
This is a problem.
If I can only do five things well at a time, clearly I want it to be my top five. That’s why I put them in the top five.
While it might seem extreme to sideline most of our goals, it’s only when we mistakenly believe that we can accomplish 25 things at once that we don’t want to let go of any of our goals.
Finding better balance
But if we only focus on five things, won’t we neglect a lot of important things? Won’t our lives be really out of balance?
Actually, as long as we have balance within our top five goals, then focusing on fewer goals can actually help us achieve more balance in our lives.
Having fewer goals helps us think about our goals differently. If we have 25 goals, the default way to think about them is like items on a checklist. If our goals are like a checklist with the ultimate goal being to complete the checklist, then any item we can check off the list will bring us closer to the finish line. For instance, if you check off several work goals, you might feel like you’re making good progress on your list. What might be less apparent is that you’re only making progress in one aspect of your life.
When we have 25 items on a checklist, we tend to focus on the parts, not the whole.
When we concentrate on only five goals at a time, however, it’s easier to think more holistically. With five goals, it’s easier to see when we’re neglecting some.
Looking at our goals holistically doesn’t just help us see the negative tradeoffs we’re making; it also helps us see the potential synergy between our goals. It helps us see when tackling a goal in one area of our lives might help us improve other areas of our lives.
For instance, taking care of our bodies and minds helps us work better and be less cranky to our loved ones. Having satisfying relationships at home helps us be more productive at work. Pursuing a career or volunteer work or a hobby makes many parents better parents.
The precise effect that one goal has on another will vary from person to person because everyone’s different. That’s why it’s important to know your own goals and how they interact so you can find better ways to pursue your goals and new ways of improving your life as a whole.
Having only five goals also helps motivate us to make time for things that really matter but seldom feel urgent, like taking care of our bodies and minds. When something is in our top five list, it’s easier to see how important it is to set aside time for it. After all, even if it doesn’t feel urgent in the moment, we’ve already decided that it’s one of the five most important things in our lives, so wouldn’t it make sense to prioritize it in our daily schedule?
If you only have time and energy to do five things really well, don’t you want it to be your five most important things?
This is the first post in our Getting Unstuck Series. Check out the rest of the series here:
- Getting Unstuck: How to Follow Through on Your Priorities
- Getting Unstuck: How to Achieve Work-Life Balance
- Getting Unstuck: How to Change When Change Is Hard
- Getting Unstuck: How to Change Your Life in 5 Seconds
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Also published on Medium.
The best advice I’ve read about prioritising in a long time!! I’ve shared your post to Twitter, bless you my friend xx
Thanks, Chrissie! I’m glad you found it useful! And thanks for sharing it with others!