In life, I’ve learned that priorities often determine our decisions. Thomas S. Monson, President and Prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints taught that, “decisions determine destiny.” The choices you make in this life will determine where you end up and what you become. You need to make time for the important things in life, which really means that you need to discover and maintain good priorities. So how do we do this? I’ll show you what I do.

Make a List of Your Priorities

Have you ever tried to list out what is most important to you?

My initial list began something like this—

1. Writing
2. Family
3. God

I stopped right there and realized I had a problem. Here were three things that were very important to me. I’ll admit that my family and God didn’t come first. I think that’s a natural inclination, but that doesn’t make it right. I always thought maintaining the right priorities would come naturally and easily. But my natural instinct to put my needs above others, and that isn’t the person that I want to become. So, in order to become that person, I had to shift my priorities. Now this is a really simple example. I also want eat well, exercise to build lean muscle, and I can think of dozen or more small hobbies that I am extremely interested in. The unfortunate truth is that there is not time to do it all. This is why we must prioritize, because if we don’t we’ll most likely fill our day with superfluous activities.

My list looks more like this now:

1. God
2. Family
3. Writing
4. Exercising/Healthy Living
5. Good Financial Practices
6. Etc…

Track & Manage Your Time

Here’s an example of when I used my limited time wisely—

I’m actually on a lunch break at work and as I’m typing this, I have less than four minutes to return. My break was only thirty minutes long and after you eat it can be a challenge to get anything done, but unlike times past. I am determined to make every minute count.I can hear the hissing the soda machine as an associate attempts to take the final drops of Mountain Dew from our soda machine. The people are commenting on how annoying it sounds and I casually made a joke that I’m writing about it. They don’t believe me, but I know it’s true.Wow, look at that over a hundred words in about two minutes. It’s incredible what you can do when you set your mind on something.

This is what I call making time for your passion.

How do you do this? You find the little minutes in your day and you pursue it. True. It’s a little bit easier for me as a writer, but even if you can just read or learn about your passion that’s what matters the most! 196 words in four minutes. Got to get back to work! The little decisions we make on what to do each day, no matter how small, will eventually pile up. I chose to take four minutes out of my break and write. I could have easily said that I didn’t have enough time and returned back to work, but I made the most of the time I had. Really make every minute count.

I am a believer in planning. I’m not, however, a believer of planning life down the minute or second, but to plan things by the hour has certainly helped me track and manage my time better. It’s also a good idea to track what you do in 15-30 increments. This can help you identify where you waste most of your time and make the necessary corrections. Microsoft Excel is great program to keep this log. Once you’ve learned to manage your time well, you can actually stop keeping this log if you like.

Now that you have your list of priorities. I’d recommend that you look at your day and plan according to those priorities. If you’re not a big in to planning and have no desire to give it a try, then make a short list of the things you like to do that today. This will help you keep to your priorities list. Do those things each day and change them as needed. Remember to put the most important things first! As with anything there are exceptions to this rule. Time for my family and time for God are nearly of equal value. If I need to spend time studying the scriptures, I’ll generally try to do that first, but in some cases my wife or son may need my attention. It’s okay to shift these main priorities around, what’s important is that each of these priorities take place during the day. Consider also how time sensitive your tasks are. Some things may be important, but perhaps they can wait until after something more pressing has been achieved.

Don’t Treat Life Like Checklist

It took me a long time to understand this concept because I am a big fan of checklists. Checklists are a very useful tool to help us accomplish our goals, but what don’t want to do is treat our life like it’s something to be marked off for completion. “Adam fell that men might be and men are that they might have joy.” (2 Nephi 2:25, emphasis added). Life is truly meant to be enjoyed and it can be really hard to enjoy the journey if we only focus on finishing it! Now that you have your priorities savor the time you spend with each one. Be sincere and genuine in all your actions.

Now there will be days when doing the things that matter most will wear on you. You will struggle to be sincere. You will fail to be genuine. I experience this frequently in all aspects of my daily life, especially at work lately. Often I feel like I’m doing it because I know I need to and not because I genuinely want to. But each time I pick up the scriptures or sincerely pray to God I can feel a difference in my life. Each time I influence a coworker’s life in a positive way, I can feel great joy in my heart. The same goes for when I take time to spend time with my family. When I am with them, I strive to put away my phone and focus on their needs and wants. I show them that I am really there for them. In short, I strive to be genuine and sincere in everything I do.

Finals Thoughts

What do you do with your time will largely determine who you become. Have you ever heard Dave Ramsey’s saying in his book The Total Money Makeover? He teaches, “If you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.” This principle also applies to time management. If you are smart with how you manage your time and your money, then later in life you’ll be able to live life to the fullest!

This is not easy to do. It’s very easy to rationalize that you don’t have enough time, or that you really want to do this or that. Normally after our Writer’s Group Session, Levi and I would play some videos games. For the first time in a long time, I did not feel the need to do this. I wanted to get to back to work and prepare for our next meeting. My desires have changed as I have learned to love writing much more than I ever loved videos games. Does this mean that I’ll never play video games again? No, certainly not. We all need to take break now and then, and I still love video games. But my passion is more important to me. Right now, I’d much rather pursue my passion because it’s worth my time.