If You Don't Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will

The wife and newborn example sure does evoke an easy, "duh, dude, you screwed-up" response.

The trick is knowing, in the moment, which alternative action will best serve which subset of priorities over which time frames.

It's not always so obvious as newborn vs client meeting. Sometime it's flying an airplane vs client meeting.

This is a great article, I hope you don't mind my submitting it to the main page. I was half-expecting it to forward me to past discussion.

You have to set boundaries and expectations, so before leaving on break tell the boss "I will not be online this weekend at all no matter what. Period. Have a nice weekend."

You don't have to worry about being fired for that because 1) boundaries are healthy and 2) they obviously can't operate without you so they wouldn't dare fire you for having a personal life.

Even worse, the more of yourself you give 24/7 to the business, the more the boss expects that of you, and gets disappointed when you slack down to 23/7. Establish firmly that you can give 110% during business hours but also you have a personal life that doesn't belong to the business.

If the business can't operate continuously without you then the boss either needs to invest in more staff or prepare to suffer the consequences. It's not your fault and don't let anyone guilt you into working 24/7 because they're not investing in enough staff and infrastructure for true 24/7 coverage.

So customers be damned? Perhaps, but that was your boss's decision when they failed to hire a full staff, not your fault.

What if you are the boss and owner, is it still customers be damned? What's the point of having the freedom of being your own boss if you don't use that freedom? So sometimes you say "no" to customers and partners, they are adults, they will get over it.

Your job is not your life. Believe it and live it.

Nice article. I think it highlights the challenge of trying to balance multiple sources of priority, all of which are important to you. Of course, we can say that the family is the most important (which it should be), but, if you always prioritize family events over work, you might not have much of a career. Beyond maintaining an awareness of your internal decision process, I think it is important to communicate to everyone your commitments and stick to them. In the long run, being reliable is more important than being being a hero in a specific situation. In the Gandhi example, he did not prioritize his grandson to the exclusion of everything else, but he did make a commitment and followed through consistently.

Of course, this type of prioritization issue also applies to work within a startup. There's always more to do than you can possibly finish, and you need to pick between multiple urgent tasks...

Good article. Before quitting my day job, I was constantly surprised at the number of meetings I could miss. I would sleep through many morning meetings. Other meetings looked boring and I would choose to miss. If there was anything important in most of the meetings, someone would find me later and catch me up in a minute or less. It is very easy for people to spend their whole day doing what they think is required of them, even if very little of it is actually required.