Priorities – Being Personally “Busy”

Hand in hand with my other post on priorities is the inherent waffling in telling yourself you’re too busy. 

What you choose to do, moment to moment, inherently defines what your priorities are. Period. If you don’t have time or money to do everything that needs to be done within a given time frame or budget, then you need to figure out which of those you’re going to drop or push off until later.

You can tell yourself all you want that you wish to learn to play an instrument, but if you watch TV or read instead of making 15-30 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week, minimum, available to practice, you will never gain proficiency.

You can tell yourself that you wish to be more fit, but if you sit around all day in front of a TV or monitor and don’t do something every day that makes you use your body’s strength and balance, then build up to do more and more, then your muscles will be just as flabby as they were the entire time you’ve been sitting on your butt beforehand.

You can say you want to lose weight, but if your choice every meal, or even every day is to down a bowl of ice cream, a cake, or a few cookies, instead of making them an occasional treat, or you constantly load up on empty calories, then you will gain weight.

You can “want” to learn to program, or write, or draw, or whatever, but if you go play darts at the bar and don’t take the time to practice writing, drawing, etc., how badly can you really, really say you want to do learn those skills?

There’s nothing wrong with watching movies or TV. I love to read, and it’s a valuable life skill as well as a form of entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with spending time with friends, playing darts, drinking beer, or having a huge dessert every once in a while. Just be honest with yourself.

If you look back at the week, and see that you haven’t spent some time every night working on the things you supposedly want to do, because you decided to do something else at every “what to do” decision point for the next half hour, then it’s obvious what your priorities were, eh?