Making Time for the Important Stuff (part 2)

However good we are at prioritising, we may never find time to do the things that are most important to us.  Oliver Burkeman writes that “unpursued dreams have a tendency to stay in the background, gnawing at you only quietly, until suddenly it’s too late”.

One way to make sure you do some of that big stuff before it’s too late, is to rethink the roles you have in your life and work out how satisfied you are with the way they are going and the time you spend on them.

Roles can accumulate – we take on more but never get rid of any. It’s a bit like buying new clothes and never getting rid of the old ones – eventually the wardrobe is just too full to find anything.

We have many roles in our lives and they all come with obligations and expectations.  You probably have roles in relation to your family, such as spouse, partner, parent, child, sibling. Then you have roles to do with how you spend your leisure time, such as gardener, photographer, sports person, artist, cook etc. And finally, you have roles in relation to other people, such as neighbour, friend, citizen, volunteer.

For each role, you can assess how satisfied you are with it and set yourself some simple goals to make changes.  You might even decide that some of the roles have to be dropped or that others need to be expanded.  Try out this tool to assess how satisfied you are with your roles and set yourself some simple goals to make changes so you can do the really important stuff.