Triage Your Life

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.                Dwight Eisenhower

Before becoming President, Eisenhower served as a general in the US Army and as Allied Forces Supreme Commander during World War II. He learned to make tough decisions continuously about what to focus on each day. This finally led him to invent the world-famous Eisenhower principle, a priority matrix in which tasks are evaluated using important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent criteria. Ask yourself, ‘What is most important to me?’ or ‘What am I spending time on that drains me or waste time?’

Today, more than ever, this prioritization of our life allows us to break the tyranny of being so busy we have no space for ourselves and the things most important to us. In nursing, we call it Triage (French, to sort or sift), to assign degrees of urgency to patients. To use computer coding parlance, elimination before optimization, which is to edit out the ineffective code first.

Time is not the enemy, but the things in your lower right box are. In order to achieve high level wellness and spend more time on what’s most important to you, eliminate the nonsense. To engage in our highest priorities, we have to channel our inner Ike and fiercely protect our priorities.

Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking                                  and indiscriminate action.                               Tim Ferriss