In this post we share 5 steps you can follow to set your life priorities. More importantly, we share the questions to ask yourself to help you clarify your thought process to get the best out of these simple 5 steps.
Table of Contents
The recent family challenges I’ve been through have made it clear to me that I must place my health as a top priority in my life. This year alone, I lost my grandfather, my father-in-law underwent brain surgery, I become a new mom and got married. With all these changes & challenges, I found it important to set my life priorities so that I can focus my time, energy and resources on what truly matters.
When I decided to set my health as a top priority, it made me realise that I need to decide what all my life priorities are. This sent my mind raising with all sorts of questions because in the past whenever I tried to do set my life priorities
- I struggled to gain clarity
- Or I had conflicting goals &
- Sometimes I would procrastinate and eventually never get it done.
This time around, I spent 7 whole days to create and refine this process into 5 simple steps that I can share with you. I have also created a free template that you can use to follow the steps shared below to set your life priorities.
Yes these steps are simple, with step number 5 being the easiest one to perform. But it’s important to do the step in sequential order, meaning one after the other. If you skip any other steps you might not gain the clarity you need and will regret it later in life when you are older because you would realise that you focused you life on the wrong priorities.
Step 1. Make a list of focus areas you are interested in.
- Think of your life priorities as being focus areas.
There are tons of focus areas in life, some might be relevant to you and other’s not. For example, traveling is not high up on my list of priorities at the moment, but it might be for you.
To come up with these focus areas ask yourself these 3 questions:
- What my current interests are
- What do I constantly seek information about
- What am I always trying to improve in my life.
Personally, I noticed that over the year I’ve been reading books and searching the internet, looking for information that will help me in one or more of my focus areas.
Interests | Over the years I come back to the same kind of topics. I buy books, search the internet and follow youtubers who cover my interests. |
Constantly seeking information about | I’m constantly seeking out information about ways to grow my wealth. |
Trying to improve | I’m always trying to improve my money spending habits. |
I kept assessing my interest and came up with 5 focus areas for my life. In no particular order, I listed my focus areas as:
- Relationships
- Wealth
- Health
- Career
- Hobbies
Focus areas are deeply personal and this is by no means a complete list. What I have as focus areas might not be suitable for you at all. So, if you are struggling to put your interests into words, you can use a tool like chat GPT to help you list a few focus areas and then choose a few from that list that are suitable for you.
Step 2: Write down the purpose of each focus area.
To come up with the purpose for each focus area, ask yourself:
What problem or challenge you are trying to solve in this area of your life?
Let’s take the focus area Wealth to use in our example.
Question: What is the problem you want to solve in this focus area?
Personal: The problem I want to solve is to build wealth. I know I currently don’t want to stop working but if anything happens and I have no means of income. I want to have build enough wealth that I don’t stress about the roof over my head or about what we will eat. I also know that I want to build a legacy for my kids.
For someone else, having wealth as a focus area could be because the problem they want to solve is to:
- Get out of debt & stay out of debt
- Stop living paycheck to paycheck or
- Financial stability
- Have a comfortable retirement
For each of your focus areas just keep asking yourself this question. What problem am I trying to solve in this focus area? This is a deeply personal question so if you do this exercise, you will come up with something different to what I have said here.
Step 3: Think of the habits you want to develop to solve the problem or challenge you mentioned in step 2.
To do this, ask yourself:
Question: What behaviours or actions can I take that will help me resolve this problem or overcome this challenge in this focus area?
These can be small, easy actions that don’t take too much time and you would be able to do for the rest of your life. They should be easy enough to do so that they become part of your lifestyle.
Sticking to wealth as an example,
Personal: Because I want to grow my wealth I have build 3 habits for that focus area.
- When I receive my salary, I make sure to use my personal financial statements to remain profitable each month.
- Provide enough money for my automated savings to run smoothly.
- Automatically fund my investment portfolio to buy shares each month.
These actions have helped me save and start to build my wealth over a long period of time.
So, if your purpose is to:
Purpose | Habit |
Get out of debt & stay out of debt | If credit card is used – Pay off the entire credit card balance as soon as you recieve your salary. |
Stop living paycheck – paycheck | Use a budget, limit your out of budget spending and, start saving. |
Financial Stability | Create an emergency fund, not be touched unless there’s a real emergency. |
Step 4: Determine how important each focus area is to you.
This is where you need to dig deep for each focus area and again look at your life and find what is uniquely important to you.
This might be hard to do when you get started so to help you along, ask yourself these 3 questions:
Questions:
- How much do you value this focus area?
- Are you willing to keep the habits you have build for this focus area for the rest of your live?
Which focus area are you obsessed about and keep coming back to it time and time again?
To answer the first question, take a look at the money, time and effort you have invested in that focus area.
Personally: For example I value the wealth area because:
Spend money | I have spent money buying books to gain knowledge |
Time | I spent time create my own budget I also spent time learning how to invest, and choosing investment strategies I want to follow. |
Effort | I make an effort to do my research and analysis the companies I want to invest |
And the second question: Am I willing to continue with the habits I have build for this focus area for rest of my life? Yes!
Once you have asked yourself these questions, then only can you move on to the last step.
Step 5 is the easiest step. Which is to place the focus areas in the order of importance which you have outlined in step number 4.
Based on how important each area is to you, you then arrange each area in numerical order starting with the most important area first.
Below, we have provided a free template that you can use to follow these 5 steps and set your life priorities.
