A Framework for Prioritization

I am a person who gravitates to frameworks. Finding the context for how life’s events or tasks fit into a bigger picture is, to me, important.

Years ago I learned a straightforward way for “checking in” with myself, that I have used regularly. When I am on a flight of have a quiet moment, I find it useful to reflect using this method. Simply, you draw a pie chart with 6 “wedges”- where each wedge is labeled as below:

What each means is as follows:

Physical- how am I doing with my health, whether diet, exercise, sleep, regular checkups at the doctor or dentist- or whatever else might be going on with me physically. How am I investing in my health?

Family — How am I doing in spending time with my family, or keeping up with each one of them. I might write down everyone in my immediate or extended family and consider both the “have to do’s” (like help my son with High school applications) or the “want to do’s” — like planning to take a weekend trip with my mom

Faith- am I spending the time I need to spend to build up my spiritual life? That could be directly related to worship and scripture reading, but it could also be how I am doing in giving back to the community or time in prayer.

Social- Am I nurturing my relationships with my friends? Do I want to throw a party or take a trip to visit someone? Is there someone I haven’t seen in a while that I should connect with?

Money- Have I saved and invested the way that I want to? Are there other things, like philanthropy, that I have given the right amount of attention to? In my younger life, this would also be the “can I pay my bills” category.

Intellect- what am I doing to continue growing in my learning? Am I intellectually stimulated or am I stagnating? What are the concrete things that I am doing (what am I reading, am I learning a new language? Am I learning a new business?) to grow?

Once I have considered where I am relative to where I want to be- and that is the key to this- this is not about comparing myself to someone else, it is really about how am I doing vs my own goals- I then shade in the graph to reflect my assessment. It would (hypothetically) look something like this:

The shading represents the percentage of how I am doing relative to where I want to be, where no shading would mean a 0% and a full wedge would be 100% satisfied. The idea is to create as much balance as possible, so that the “wheel” can roll. In this example, my social life and my intellectual growth are the two areas that need the most effort to get back on track, and financial, family and faith are doing well. Physical could also use some work.

I showed this framework recently to a teenage boy, and he asked me where I would put video games (if I were a teenage boy who liked video games). I told him that the purpose of this exercise isn’t to eliminate things from our lives entirely that are strictly recreational- and in fact video games could be in social if you are doing it with friends, or it could be in physical if it is part of something that recharges your batteries.

But it is also the case that things that waste our time (perhaps video games, social media, binge watching tv etc) could be taking time away from things that really matter- like time with family or friends, or in learning something new. The idea here is that it gets us started on being conscious of where and how we are spending our time, and prioritizing what matters most. At the end of the day, we probably won’t lament that we didn’t spend enough time playing video games, no matter how much fun that could be for some. But we know for sure that not spending enough time with loved ones timis something that we will certainly not want to short change.