I wanted to write a few posts this week on changing our lifestyles and building a lifestyle priority list. This is critical if we want to make the most of our lives. I know that I am probably not alone in the feeling that a lot of hours and days go by without really working on the things in my life that I feel, but have not acknowledged, are important to my life.
What are our top 10 list of things to do? Do you know what your priorities are at all? I know that I have a list that helps and I wanted to share a bit of a process on building a lifestyle priority list.
Why Building a Lifestyle Priority List Is Important
The beginning point of building a priority list is to make sure that you know what your goals and where you are headed. I find that most of us may try to make changes in our lives but other people and situations will force us to give these up and stay a bit more mainsteadm. Do you feel this way as well?
For you, building a lifestyle priority list is your chance to decide what in your life is important. We all have to work or have an income to stay living indoors and have food in the cupboard but work only takes 40 or so hours a week for many of us. The questions really comes down to how much control do you exert in your worklife for the changes that you want to see, and outside of work how do you spend your time.
I know last year at this time I was very much a couch potato at home after work and workouts but now I have fallen behind on almost all of my TV and am spending more time online seeking to learn how to make change, spending more time with my kids, and getting involved a lot more with both of my kids schools parent associations.
What is a Priority List?
So make a list. Start the list today and let it get bigger. Remember this list is not a todo list (my todo list has over 100 items just for my online stuff on it). But a priority list is really a way to get around those mission, vision, and value statements that people almost never do and that companies love. I have mentioned making mission and vision statements for the family before and my life looks at my like I was growing an extra head.
This priority list is certainly less formal than making a statement but I like to put action kinds of terms on there and it really makes sure that you are “heading” in the right direction where a todo list is just making wure you have stuff to check off when complete.
Here are the kinds of things that I have on my priority list. Traveling overseas, buying less “stuff”, spending better time with the kids, losing track of TV shows, exercising every day, posting, and tweeting often.
You see this list may look obvious but it is not always true. I will spend a lot of time online (I think we all tend to) and then realize that this time should be spent with the kids, or working out. I don’t plan vacations but when we go away I force us to go on a plane instead of just spending a week at home.
What About a ToDo List?
So I still do have a todo list. I keep on my itouch. I find that I get ideas and then they float away so I don’t get very emotional usually about how big this list is and then every once in a while I realize that one of those parts of my life has really drifted in priority and I get back to knocking things of the list. This happened to me this weekend when I was doing some modifications to this blog, hanging with the kids a lot and not getting any posts out.
I think that giving everything that I can to this blog is important and tweaking things may make your experience a bit better but content is more important than how pretty that page is. I started looking at my list and decided that I needed to write more so here it is. One more thing off the todo list.
Getting Started With Priorities
So today is the day that you should start this. Make sure that you have an angle, a direction, priorities, lifestyle that is important to you and then you have a way to live a better life. Make priorities and then you will be able to move forward and get rid of those3 conflicting feelings when you are doing something when you know you should be doing something else, whatever that is.
I will be furthering some of these concepts more this week on building a lifestyle priority list as I have not done any of these kinds of posts since I did a motivation week on the blog a couple of years ago. I think it is important to get away from post after post of loss and muscle gain and improve our lives a little.
Are you going to do this? I would love to see some comments as I never know if I am going off topic too far on this blog. Is building a lifestyle priority list something that you feel would be important to you and to know more about?