Modern life floods you with demands on your time and other resources in ways that extend far beyond what our ancestors faced. Buried amidst the flood of ever-more-complex tasks, limitless information, and constant contacts from others are potential actions that are vitally important: life-changing information to learn, crucial connections to make with people, and critical decisions to make.
It’s easy to expend your resources on what is quick or easy, and most do, but few have developed effective ways to find and act most meaningfully.
What is most important is not always clear. What seems minor might be very important. In fact, this mix up occurs so often that an inability to notice or unwillingness to do those seemingly little things can frequently be the very reason we fail to attain what we hope for in life.
It’s typical to think of many things as equally important, but importance varies quite a bit between the options for action in a given moment. One’s ability to find the needle of what is useful in the haystack of what is not is essential to modern success. Filtering out what is useful requires a method for sorting through the options quickly and accurately. You need a measure of importance. Your prioritized values give you both a way of measuring importance and a method for organizing your response for the greatest impact.
Values are the key to overcoming the tendency to conflate what is easy and fast with what is meaningful. By referring to your prioritized ranking, you can recognize and boost the importance of any seemingly small idea or action that connects to a value near the top of your list.