Setting Your Priorities(Part 1)

The first and most important step toward achieving your passions is setting your priorities. I know that this sounds like something coming out of a motivational guidebook, and to be honest it kind of is, but that doesn't make it any less important for you. Lets' face it, most of the people who write those books do it in their spare time while working full-time jobs, so they have a lot of experience with being busy. Setting your priorities simply means choosing which activities are more important to you and making those things a priority. I know what you are thinking, on Monday I said that you could have it all, and now I am telling you that you have to choose, so let me explain:

I first discovered the importance of this step during my second semester as a freshman in college. During high school, I rarely had to choose between two things that were important for me. I had the fall to play soccer, the winter to ski, the summer to raft, kayak, and hike, and somehow, school just seemed to work with all of those activities. There were not a lot of conflicts in my schedule. However, as a Freshman at BYU, I found myself wanting to do more activities more often. With the indoor practice fields, I could play soccer all winter long. Now that I was only 30 minutes away from the closest ski hill, I decided that I wanted to go skiing 3 or 4 times a week. Oh, and it turns out school work is a little bit more difficult at BYU than it was at my high school. To sum it all up, my schedule quickly became a nightmare. On many nights, I wouldn't get home until 10:30 only to go straight to bed (well, actually it took a lot longer to go to bed) and wake up the next morning at 7:00.

As you can imagine, after several weeks of doing this, I had had enough. The activities that I used to love, lost a lot of their excitement, and I constantly felt tired and beaten down, so I decided that I would have to change something. Essentially, I sat down and created a list of everything that is important to me. Once I had the list, it was pretty easy for me to make adjustments. The ones at the top of the list had first priority, and whenever there was a conflict between two events, I simply picked the event that was higher on my list. Before I did this, I frequently tried to juggle conflicting events, and it never worked. Once I decided what was most important for me, it became easy to give up certain activities, and to tell the truth, after I did this, I found that I had more time not only to do those things at the top of my priority list, but also to enjoy everything on my list, because I no longer wasted my time trying to figure out what I was going to do.