An important part of the life plan is making space for the most important things. Living a life plan will provide you with more resources in at least two ways: first, by freeing up the resources occupied by low impact actions and emotions, and second, by replacing them with high impact actions and emotions, which share the quality of increasing your resources.
Writing and prioritizing your goals will help you make space for the most important things, ensuring adequate resources are allocated for the greatest possible outcomes.
If resources were infinite, there would be no need to prioritize anything, but because resources are finite, all goals compete with each other to a certain degree. As a consequence, it’s important to understand the relative priority difference between goals.
The higher the impact of the goals you set, the more likely they are to require significant resources. Audacious goals require greater sacrifice over a longer time than lesser goals. Audacious goals require resources; trying to accomplish them in an already full life is like fitting large objects into an already-full box—it just won’t work.
Goals can be ranked by importance, according to their impact on your purpose. As you consider the resources required for your highest priority goals, you may be surprised at just how few goals you can pursue at once. Though a clear purpose and other aspects of this framework provide you with a mechanism to pursue multiple goals, you will find that your resources will limit progress to the small set of goals most important to you, and cascade towards other goals only after these are completed without being replaced by something more important.
Goals can relate to each other in helpful and unhelpful ways. Some goals will independently contribute to your purpose. Other goals will boost each other, and some goals will diminish one another.
In some cases, one goal will so thoroughly disrupt another that it will make its accomplishment impossible. Any goals that are mutually exclusive to more important goals should be abandoned. A goal could be a wonderful idea in isolation, but still shouldn’t be pursued if a more important goal exists.
Higher impact goals should be prioritized above lower impact goals. Furthermore, the limitation of resources makes it so that goals that boost resources as a result of accomplishing them tend to have a higher priority than goals that do not.