Busy moms are often so busy because they have a hard time setting priorities. Does everything feel super important? Do you have a hard time choosing when there are 100 tasks on your to-do list? You might have a priorities problem.
In today’s episode, we are talking about setting priorities based on “Secrets of Supermom” chapter Supermoms Know the Most Important Thing | The Secret of Setting Priorities.
In this episode, you will find the secret of setting priorities:
- When you are making plans for your future
- When you have to make a choice
- When you have too many things to do
- When there are too many options
- When things feel out of control
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Rather read? Check out the show notes and episode content right here!
Show Notes and Transcript
Hey, hey friend! Welcome to Episode #13 of The Secrets of Supermom Show! We have officially completed Part 2 of the book and are starting the final part of the book which is Part 3: The Secret Skills supermoms use to succeed. This week, we are diving into the first skill based on Chapter 12: Supermoms Know the Most Important Thing: The Secret of Setting Priorities.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
As moms, we often have a to-do list of 1000 things. We have tasks for home and tasks for work and tasks for the kids, maybe even your partner. There will always be an overflow of work expectations, parenting expectations, relationship expectations, social expectations, and the list goes on. Everyone will want all of your time. Everyone will have an opinion about how you choose to spend it.
Just because it is all on a list, doesn’t make it ALL important. When it is time to choose, supermoms know how to set priorities so the most important things get done, and the true priorities get the focus.
If you have read the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown, you might have read that the word “priority” came about in the 1400s and meant the very first thing. Not “priorities”. Priority. Just one. In the 1900s, businesses pluralized it and now we walk around with everything feeling like it is the most important. Everything is the very first thing. We have to remember that if everything is important, then nothing is important. This is true for our teams, our families, and for us personally.
How do you know what is most important? In Secrets of Supermom, we talk about several strategies for setting priorities based on what goal you are trying to reach and what you are actually trying to prioritize.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Setting priorities when you are making plans for your future
- Setting priorities when you have to make a choice
- Setting priorities when you have too many things to do
- Setting priorities when there are too many options
- Setting priorities when things feel out of control
Setting Priorities When You are Making Plans for Your Future
What goals do you have? Where do you want to be next year or in five or ten years? In next week’s episode, we are going to talk specifically about how to map out long-term goals. For now, how can you make sure you will get to your goal? If you are going to make your dreams a reality, you need to continually make sure that the steps to reach the dream are at the top of the list. They need to be a top priority.
There is a story you may have heard about a philosophy professor who fills a jar with rocks and asks if the jar is full. The class tells him, yes, but then he adds small pebbles around the rocks, again asking if the jar is full. He progressively adds sand and then water. Picture that the rocks are your big goals and the water signifies your “nice to haves” or minutiae or extra things. If you fill the jar first with water, you have no space for rocks. Don’t let the water of your life displace your rocks. Focus on the rocks.
Setting Priorities When You Have to Make a Choice
I tell the story in the book of a time when I missed my oldest daughter’s opening night of her show for a business meeting. One of my coworkers said, “Wow! You’re a really bad mom.” Now, he was kidding (probably), but man if that is hard to hear. Would he be a bad dad if he missed the same thing?
For times when you have to make a hard choice, I like a plain old pros and cons list. For this particular case, I looked at each option and the pros and cons of each. What would be the benefits of me staying and seeing the show? What would I have to sacrifice? Then I looked at the meeting and again, what were the benefits of going versus the sacrifices of missing the meeting? When I was able to break it down like this, the cons could be easily remedied but the pros were super important.
I like this strategy because you might find that the choice is almost a no-brainer. You might find out that the sacrifices you have to make are not that big of a deal after all. Or, you might find that despite a list of amazing pros, your cons list causes you to sacrifice a non-negotiable in your life.
Setting Priorities When You Have Too Many Things to Do
What do you do when you have too many things on your to-do list? When you truly just have more to do than time will allow or than your sanity will allow, you can use a decision matrix often called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. This strategy has you create a way of deciding things that are important and urgent versus not important or not urgent.
You will create a chart with a big plus sign (this is also in the Secrets of Supermom Workbook–if you don’t have that you can grab it below). On the top, you will split the section into important and not important. Down the left side, you will split the section into urgent and not urgent. You know have four quadrants or buckets to assign your tasks.
Urgent and important tasks need your immediate attention. These often are tasks that only you can do or that you need to do right away and have no time to delegate—like a kitchen fire or angry client who is at the front desk. The goal is to keep this quadrant small and managed. We can’t prevent sick children or always prevent angry clients, but if we are constantly spending time in the urgent and important, we have no time to plan for the things that are most important in our lives.
Ideally, you will get to a point where most of your time is spent on important but not urgent items. This means that you are managing your time, you are working on tasks that actually move the needle, and you are allowing yourself time to plan and strategize. These tasks bring you the most fulfillment and lead you to a long-term goal. Important but not urgent tasks are things like date night. Date night, while not urgent, increases the quality of your relationship in the long term. Planning your second-quarter goals at work leads you to workplace fulfillment.
Urgent but not important tasks are those that must be done but don’t need to be done by you. Are you the only person that can pay bills at your house or can you delegate or set up auto-pay? Are you the only person that can schedule your business trip or can you have a travel agent or assistant do that for you? One way to manage these urgent but truly unimportant tasks is to delegate them to a team member, a family member, an assistant, or someone else you hire. Your other option is to do your best to minimize them—interruptions, for example—or automate them. These tasks still must get done, and soon, but they don’t necessarily need to be done by you.
The final bucket of tasks are the non-urgent and not important tasks. These are often the terrible time-wasters that we will talk more about next week. Checking social media for the fifth time, organizing things for the sake of organizing—not to make life truly easier—procrastinating, and watching TV all fall into this bucket. For these tasks, your goal is to eliminate them as much as possible. Need thirty minutes of TV to decompress? Schedule it purposefully, and don’t allow it to turn into three hours of mindlessness.
Setting Priorities When There are Too Many Options
We talked about making a decision and using a pros and cons list. What about when there are simply too many options and you need to narrow things down to keep them from overwhelming you? Deciding on a child’s school, a new refrigerator, or where to host your fall retreat might fall into this list.
When Jeremy and I were building a pool, we used this strategy. We called it the ranking method. We chose the three most important components of our decision. You could include 4 or 5 but really no more than five. For us, we decided that the three most important things about the company we would work with were the design of our backyard, the budget, and our desire to work with the company and project manager we had met. We ranked each company on each item and then combined our values. We easily removed 4 companies from our decision and were left with two instead of six. This was a much easier and more efficient way to set our priorities than discussing all the components of each company one by one.
Setting Priorities When Things Feel Out of Control
Does your list just have a million things on it? Do things feel out of control? This is a good method when that is the case. And it’s easy. This method was coined by Brian Tracy and is called the ABCDE Method.
First, brain dump all of your tasks. All of your million things. You put them all on paper. Then, you go through your list and rank each item with an A (super important), B (less important), C (nice to have), D (could be delegated or skipped), and E (unimportant and could be eliminated altogether).
Once your rankings are complete, group all A’s together, B’s together, and so on. You will then rank those in order to create an A1, A2, A3, and so on.
This method allows you to quickly find the most important tasks and decide where to start (at A1) and move through the list accordingly. Brilliant, right?
One Small Step
A big challenge for setting priorities is a list that is too long and all those “need to dos” are floating around in your head. Our one small step for today is to brain dump everything you need to do. Get ALL of it out on paper. Whether it is a work task, a home task, a family task, whatever, get it all out. That, my friend, is the first step to starting your priorities assessment using the strategy you like most from today’s episode.
Alright, friend, before we say goodbye today, if you are on my email list, you might have seen that we are working on something totally new at Secrets of Supermom. We are creating a new program that will be an amazing community for moms who want it all. You won’t just have the book and the workbook to apply the strategies on your own, but a community of accountability and fun to become your version of a supermom. If you missed it, send me an email at lori@secretsofsupermom.com, and I will send you all the details. It is going to be amazing, I can just feel it! See you next week!
