How to Prioritize Well
This is life isn’t it? You wake up, go to work, meet up with friends, serve at church, study, fix your car, do your laundry—the list goes on and on. At the end of the week, you feel exhausted and wonder where all your time went. And your schedule is so full that you need to plan a month in advance just to have coffee with your friend or go on a date with your significant other.
Brothers and sisters, welcome to a busy season of life.
My experience with busy seasons is that they can be very draining physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Living in Silicon Valley, I especially feel like there is a never-ending list of tasks that all seem urgent. With so many things vying for our personal attention, pausing in our busyness to think through and set our priorities can be one of the most challenging tasks we do.
But, even when circumstances outside our control dictate our season and schedule, it’s really important to take ownership of our time in ways that honor God and us. And in fact, with some intentionality combined with practical tools, a busy season can actually be life-giving and meaningful.
Live an Intentional Life
A very common misconception in both the church and secular culture is that a person living a busy life is also living an intentional one. In fact, I would argue that busy lifestyles are often a product of a lack of intentionality.
Intentional life can be defined as knowing and living with purpose. When we don’t know what our purpose is, it’s really easy to fill our schedule with things that seem important or productive but, in the end, don’t lead us closer to God and aren’t life-giving.
If you’re currently in a season where you don’t know what God wants for you, it may be a good idea to do some exploration. After I graduated from college, I thought about what I wanted my priorities outside my job to be. Career exploration was one. Being part of a church—finding and developing community as well as serving—was another. So I was intentional about creating time to go to church events and networking to develop friendships.
Whether you want to focus on personal growth, missions, community, or some other category in life, intentionally choosing what is most important to you in your current season will allow you to prioritize tasks and better manage your time.
Know Your Needs
Once we know what our purpose and priorities are, it can be easy to chase after our goals without any thought of what our needs are. But to prevent burnout or exhaustion, taking care of ourselves is as important as living with intention.
Each of us has our own set of financial, emotional, social, and basic physical needs. But often, we’re not aware of what our individual needs are. Rest, in particular, is something many of us rarely prioritize because it seems secondary compared to productivity (especially in Silicon Valley!).
Understanding my own needs and being aware of them, however, has been really helpful in determining what to say yes to and what to say no to. For example, I enjoy spending time with friends and relationships are important to me, so I’m intentional about planning activities with others during the week.
But I also know that, as an introvert, I need time alone and rest after five long days of work, so I usually plan a Sabbath day into my week. Protecting that time to rest in the midst of my job and side projects has been a hard struggle for me; I feel pressure to spend more time perfecting my work or getting ahead in my career. But making Sabbath a priority has allowed me to re-center my life on God and has given me space to be present to God in a schedule that would not otherwise allow it.
Make Prioritizing a Priority
Prioritizing is hard. It requires taking a step back from our life and looking at it from a different angle. It also requires us to make sacrifices and say no to things that feel urgent, like extra hours of work. But it’s so important, and worth it.
Once I identified my purpose and my needs, prioritizing tasks and making decisions became much easier. I was able to develop a schedule that was in tune with my life goals and that was healthy, balanced, and sustainable. And I’ve realized that these skills only become more important as more responsibilities have been heaped on me since graduating from college. Learning to manage my time well leads to life-giving experiences.
Take some time now to think about what’s most important to you. What can be taken out of your current schedule? What needs to stay? You can start to dictate your schedule and set your own rhythm in whatever season you’re currently in.
Alex is a University of California—Davis graduate and InterVarsity alumnus. He attends a church called The River in San Jose and currently serves in the church’s worship and youth ministries.
For more help prioritizing, check out these resources:
Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most
Crafting a Rule of Life: An Invitation to the Well-Ordered Way
