If You Don’t Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will

One of the things that causes a lot of disruption throughout our days and workflow are the requests of others. Someone needs this, asks for that, thinks one thing is more important than the next… And if you let their agenda overpower your own, then you’re living by someone else’s design.

In the book “Essentialism”, which I read once a year, Greg McKeown dedicates an entire page to highlight this one quote:

“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

Essentially, what this means is that your time can either be filled with the things you want to do or the things that others want you to do. And the more you allow others to use you as a vehicle to get what they want, the more they’ll use it.

Prioritizing your life involves two things - Being clear on what you want, and being strong with your boundaries so that you can enforce them. It might be overly simple, but that’s all it takes to make sure your life is filled with the things that matter to you.

Setting boundaries is one of those things that’s ‘easier said than done’. You can have the intention to stay focused on what you're doing and decline a request, but when that decision gets challenged it becomes harder to follow through on that intention. It's especially difficult when someone comes from a place of authority or there’s a power dynamic at play, like having a ‘no work boundary’ in the evening to prioritize personal time but a client or boss makes a request.

Strong boundaries come from having self-respect. If you genuinely value your life and what you want, then you can confidently communicate that to other people who might try to compromise it. It’s an energy that influences others. I’ve found that the more you own your standards and what you stand for, the less people try to push you to get what they want. Because they know that you’re serious about it, and they’re more likely to respect your boundaries once you’ve established that you respect yourself.

I put this into practice this past weekend. I was at a friend’s birthday dinner and she wanted to go out to a bar afterwards. She didn’t really ask me to come… She told me to. And I responded with my boundary that I was going to go home. She pushed harder but I didn’t give in, and eventually it was resolved.

No one wants to say “no” to the birthday girl, especially when it’s someone who’s so important to you. It would’ve been easy to let her win and accommodate her request, but out of self-respect and a commitment to doing what most serves the life I want to live, I declined.

You prioritize your life by holding strong to it. By knowing you deserve to get what you want, and that your ways of collaborating with others need to fit within your terms. Th self-respect required to enforce your personal boundaries is built one interaction at a time. So the next time you feel like your boundaries are being put into question, communicate your side of the story, ask for their compassion, and stay strong.