Before I'm 40... Part 3, Determine your priorities

Some people never get much achieved simply because they never work out their priorities.

Many of us live under the tyranny of the urgent. The urgent is that thing that screams for your attention, and demands an immediate answer. The urgent is probably represented most powerfully in our culture by the phone – it rings or beeps and cannot be ignored. People will break off a conversation with a real live person, interrupt a meal, ignore their kids, just because someone else has sent them a text message, that probably isn’t important anyway. Technology magnifies the urgent – phones, email, social networking sites – all demand instant attention.

Truth is, most things that are urgent are not priorities.

There is a great scene in The West Wing (of which I am an avid fan) when the grizzled former Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, gathers the senior White House staff late at night and rebukes them for spending their whole day chasing the urgent. The President only has 365 days left in office – our priority has got to be achieving something in those remaining days that will leave a legacy. We can’t afford to lose days to the urgent. We’ve got to get clear about our priorities.

We might not be working in the White House, but we can easily lose days, months and in the end years to fighting fires and never get anything built. We have to find ways to prioritize the priorities, and this means we have to know what they are.

For me its simple. My priorities are these:
1. My God
2. My wife
3. My kids
4. My church

Everything I do needs to be done to the glory of God. That’s No. 1. After that my main priorities are to love my wife and pastor my kids, and then behind that my priority is to love and pastor the church where I serve.

Being clear about these four things makes it easier for me to prioritize the other stuff. For example, In my role as a pastor I have to be careful to prioritize time for the development of other leaders and keeping the church focused on mission. There are many other urgent things that would scream for my attention, but they have to be moved down the to-do list. They can’t dominate.

The thing is that the priorities don’t normally scream at us. They tend to stay quiet, and so can get neglected and ignored. That’s why so many pastors have no real devotional life, crappy marriages and disillusioned kids.

My experience is that when I ignore the screams of the urgent, chances are that the next day the thing that was screaming at me wasn’t so urgent after all. And then I don’t feel so guilty about focusing on the priorities.

Not a bad habit to be in.