If you prioritize your schedule, you are operating based on the picture right in front of you. This is important, but it can also be a trap. By only looking at a To Do list (one day at a time), deadlines can creep up and big goals can be missed. By prioritizing your schedule for the day, you’re basically in a reactive mode. You look at your schedule and say, “Ok. I need to do x, y, and z today to put out these fires or, at the very least, not let the fire spread.”
The more you can step back and look at the whole picture (instead of only at the part immediately in front of you), the quicker you’ll be able to reach your overarching goal. Retired Navy Seal Jocko Willink describes this as “detaching” from the situation by looking up and out.
If you are looking down the scope of a gun, you are less aware of your surroundings. Every once in a while you need to take your eyes off of that extremely narrow point of view so you can see what’s going on around you – you need to detach to see the whole picture. By doing this, you can reprioritize what is the most important thing you need to do to get you to where you want to go.
The further out you can look, the better you can plan. You can look at what you need to get done for the year, reverse engineer that to what should be done at the halfway point, what should be done by the end of the quarter, by the end of the month, end of the week, end of the day, and what you need to be doing right now to make sure you’re on track to completion.
If you only prioritize what is on your schedule for the day and don’t look ahead, you will feel like you’re doing a lot, but you’re not moving closer to achieving your big goals. Never confuse being busy with being productive. Schedule your priorities or your priorities will get tossed aside by life.