Are You Filling Your Days With Other People's Priorities?

If you feel like you never have enough time or energy to focus on your priorities, you're not alone. Here's why it keeps happening.

I know I’m not alone in getting up on Mondays and feeling like it’s a clean slate to attempt to do better on certain things than the week before… only to feel as if you’ve pulled off Yet Another Groundhog (Mon)Day by the afternoon that possibly paves the way to Yet Another Groundhog Week. Or, at least, I used to feel like this until I enforced a hard stop on entrenched routines that drove me batty by eliminating or putting on hold a lot of the things that used to consume my days.

Why do we do it? Because whether we’re trying to please others, avoid conflict, or distract ourselves from something we’re afraid of, we’re, essentially, making other people’s priorities into ours.

Sound familiar?

• You start the day with the highest intentions to get something done or avoid falling into the same traps but wind up looking at email. Then you respond to something or a number of somethings, and next thing, your day slips through your fingers, or you lose the mojo to focus on your priorities.

• You’re busy doing your thing, and there’s something that someone else could or even should be doing, but you make what might be a split-second decision to do it yourself. Maybe you don’t want to “inconvenience” them, or you feel like it’s a hassle to explain it or that it’s quicker if you crack on and do it yourself. Boom! You look up several hours later and wonder where the frick the day went and how you’ve managed to be busy all day and not get around to the things you intended to do.

• You prioritise being a Good Something (e.g. Employee, Boss, Parent, Daughter, Son, Partner, Spouse, etc.,) possibly a number of Good Somethings, and so you go against and deprioritise yourself. As a result, when someone connected to these roles appears to have a need or makes a request, you say yes even if you don’t need to or someone else could do it. Or maybe you pile yourself up with a load of things to do in service of being the Good Something, so your needs and priorities fall to the back of the queue. And then you wonder why you feel tired/neglected/frustrated/resentful, etc.

• You know you have something important to do, maybe something that would really move the needle on a goal or project but put it off to do something of lesser importance. Maybe you don’t know where to start, or you start but wind up critiquing what you’re doing or figure you’ll do it another time when you’re feeling more motivated to do it. So then you start vacuuming or scrolling through Insta or doing admin tasks, and, of course, the important thing doesn’t get done, and you might quietly feel a little (or a lot) shitty about yourself.

• Someone asks if you’re free or whether you can do something and you drop everything to respond to their seeming need. Or you’re in the middle of working and your phone rings and you feel like you should answer it “just in case it’s urgent”, only for it to be your fam or your friend wanting to have a natter because, you know, you’re “only” working from home. Next thing, you don’t have time to have lunch or are way behind on your day.

These are just a few common examples of how we can wind up devoting our days to other people’s priorities, and if you’re tired of feeling as if you never get around to your needs, your priorities, here are a few thoughts on shifting out of this frustrating habit.

Responding to emails (and texts and even unintentional social-media scrolling) is the fastest way to wind up making other people’s priorities and even non-priorities your priorities. Unless your job is to be on email/text/social media all day responding to stuff, none of this stuff is your highest priority. Don’t use your best energy on this stuff; do put it off to later in the day if you can; communicate your boundaries about your availability; and definitely don’t pressure yourself to respond immediately or quickly.

Find those seemingly “minor” decisions and actions that have a domino effect on your day so that you can solve for them.

For example, one of my clients felt exhausted, demoralised, and low. She worked long hours, weekends and even during her vacation time and couldn’t understand why she was never “caught up”. So, I asked her to take me through a typical day. In less than a minute, I spotted the culprit—doing her assistant’s job between client appointments, which meant she didn’t have time to do her notes between sessions, which meant it built up day after day, week after week, month after month.

What can feel like “minor” decisions and actions can have a catastrophic knock-on effect on our entire day and possibly our weeks and months if we keep repeating them in some form.

Trying to be a Good Something inevitably puts you at odds with yourself because you’re performing at being that thing, which gets in the way of listening to yourself.

For instance, you might think that a Good Employee never says no and always accommodates, but when you have little or no bandwidth for non-work-related priorities, it will encroach on your well-being and intimate relationships. Or, let’s say that you think a Good Partner always does what their mate wants, so you stay up late because they go to bed late, so you’re too exhausted to put aside time to work on your business idea or to do something that’s just for you. What if your idea of being a Good Something isn’t healthy and realistic?

The decisions we make when we’re unaware of our intentions are very different from when we’re aware and taking care of ourselves.

When I realised that I tend to “suddenly” have the desire to tidy up or run errands when I’m, on some level, escaping my feelings, it put me in the position of making more conscious choices. Being aware of our intentions helps us to enjoy more successful outcomes. Asking,Why am I doing this right now? or Why am I making this a priority at this moment? can help us to stay connected with, instead of distancing from, ourselves. Also asking, Does choosing to do [this other thing] instead typically work out well for me? can help us acknowledge a pattern we don’t necessarily want to repeat.

We need to be mindful of where we reflexively say yes or behave like we have to respond to everything as if it’s urgent.

It’s easy to kid ourselves into believing that we’re “spontaneous”, “conscientious” and “giving”. We need to check ourselves—our reflexive yes is more likely a symptom of not considering ourselves. What would happen if we prioritised doing our stuff first? What would happen if we took a beat to consider our needs, desires, expectations, feelings, and opinions? And, no, the sky wouldn’t fall down!

If most of what’s in your days is about fulfilling other people’s priorities, there’s not enough of you in your life. You need to have some priorities, activities and free time that isn’t about catering to others. Identify these as a matter of urgency!

Also, and I talk about this in an episode of the podcast about how we are allowed to rest, free time is not the same as availability!

Where can you do things at 70% instead of 100%+? Where can you let go of arbitrary deadlines and responsibilities you’ve saddled yourself with? What guardrails can you put in place so that you’re more responsible with your bandwidth? For example, I’ve taken to leaving more margin in my days and calendar and really taking time to consider the cost of doing something.

Given that your ‘yes’ represents your commitments and how you’re going to be using your bandwidth, you need to be mindful of how you throw them around, including where and what you turn your attention to. Experiment with saying, “Let me get back to you”, and take the time to consider your bandwidth, including your current schedule, energy levels, commitments, the week ahead, the ask and whether you actually need or want to do the thing.

Spend a week tracking how you spend your yeses, nos and maybes, and you’ll soon pick up on what is causing you to be unable to focus on your priorities. I share how to do this in The Joy of Saying No.

Ultimately, filling your days with other people’s priorities is what happens when you’re not saying yes to stuff authentically. If you’re always saying yes to everyone else, you’re always saying no to yourself.

Becoming more mindful of how, why and what you say yes to allows you to make more authentic choices that express your priorities and include you in it as a given.