This You?

“People tell me how amazing it is that I accomplish all that I do,” Amy said, “But I feel like I’m screwing up everyday.”

What Amy Cueva, co-founder of Mad*Pow, was referring to was getting pinched between work and life. Being a mom is challenging. Being an aspiring professional is hard. Combining the two? Even harder. And so moms and dads like Amy wind up feeling bad. If they’re at work, they’re worrying about their families. When they’re with their families, they’re fighting the urge to bury their noses in their smart phones.

And it’s not just parents. A lot of us feel this way.

We’re running faster and faster. We tell ourselves, “If I try just a little harder…” So we work longer hours. We get new technologies that are meant to help us keep up. We latch on to GTD as if it were a life raft in a stormy sea. Yet the sense of drowning continues. Spitting and sputtering, gasping for air.

It should come as no surprise that all the fun goes out of it. And by it, I mean practically everything.

One dad responded by putting a poster on his wall with a photo of a little boy who looked like his son. The word on the poster was “Priorities.”

A teensy problem. Priorities compete. They jostle and fight for attention and bandwidth and energy and time. We attempt to referee the contest by prioritizing. That would work great if your priorities ranked neatly one, two, three. Except they don’t. There are ties. Which is to say, there are many number ones and the rest are number two.

There’s good news: there’s really only one Number One Priority. No matter how good you are at multitasking, you only have one number one priority at a time. Because if you’re not doing it, it’s not a priority.

If being with your family is a priority then when you’re with them, turn the Blackberry or iPhone off. If being reliable is the priority, then do your review and know what the deadlines are far enough in advance to meet them or renegotiate.

Time passes so fast. Don’t wait until your children are grown to figure this one out. Don’t wait until your marriage founders. Don’t look up one day and say, oops, I forgot to have friends or kids or vacations.