Prioritization

Prioritizing things to do is important. I've just started to have that concept sink into my head recently. Time is becoming scarce. During the weekdays, I have work and come home usually brain fried; meaning that I don't want to do any other work after work. Weekends are dedicated to going out, meeting people or other recreational things. This leaves me with the feeling that I don't have much time to do anything else and I see that as a problem.

I equate the the flow of a person's life to a position-velocity-acceleration kind of physics model. Basically, you are at some position, moving in some direction at some speed at some time in your life. Work needs to be applied to change one's momentum to change the vector of your direction and speed to get to desirable position.

Excuse the looseness of the language but to affect change in one's life occurs when one produces that "work" which I define as work = effort*time. In other words, no effort or time means no change.

I view work (as in working for a company) as "dead time" which is where a person trades time for money. Relaxation time is a by product of recovering from work which also falls into this category. Whatever is left can be invested into one's self into productive means... if one so chooses to do so and it is this kind of time that I find precious.

This is where prioritizing comes in.

When I used to be a student, my priorities used to be relatively simple. I had a set of courses that I needed to pass/obtain good marks in and I would allocate time to do what was necessary. Being human, it was usually the allocation of the "minimum" amount of time to do what was necessary and the rest to do whatever else I wanted to do, which was goofing off. Life back then was simple because my priorities were simple.

Now that I have graduated from University and moved into the work force, those priorities are gone. Now what?

What are your priorities?

I've been trying to prioritize what I've been wanting to do for the last while but couldn't come up with anything then it dawned on me for a second that I wasn't sure of what my priorities were. It wasn't one of those black and white moments that whacked me in the face, but one of those "maybe I don't know what my priorities are" kind of thoughts that made me want to write about this.

In no particular order of importance, my general priorities are :

1. Enjoy life
2. Maximize income for minimal work
3. Do work/projects that I enjoy
4. Travel
5. Have an awesome girlfriend
6. Have a circle of friends that is talented, reliable, active and fun
7. Family

Short term priorities:

1. Establish a reputation at current company
2. Perfect my Japanese
3. Learn Chinese
4. Head into automation technologies (both informational and physical)
5. Improve memory
6. Increase muscle mass, get a mild 6 pack
7. Passive income stream
8. Develop a network of talented people
9. Reduce time wasted goofing off

The list is by no means definitive and will likely chance in as my priorities change, but I'll leave it as an alpha version for now.

It's obvious that there are many things that I want to do and there isn't going to be enough time for me to do everything. Being ruthless at making decisions is not one of those things that I am particularly good at but when it comes to having a tight time budget, one does not have much of a choice when it comes to making a plan. Playing an active role in making a time table for one's self personal life seems as something unnatural, but it is going to be something that I need to do.

The other thing is that I also have a bad habit of getting sucked into events and work that aren't particularly aligned to my priorities. I just have a terrible habit of saying "yes" to everything and I am going to have to put an end to that because I've been stretching myself too thin in the time department recently.

Well, here is a start and we'll se how things go.