A Simple System to Align Your Life with Your Priorities

I promised to send you emails on the science of self-improvement.

While many of my emails, like last week’s conversation with Team GB athlete Rio Mitcham, focus on the physical side of self-improvement—this week I want to shift gears and talk about the power of intentionality, quantifying our priorities, and how to live a life you respect.

That’s pretty ambitious and I have no idea how successful I’ll be, so I better get into it. . .

The key idea of this email is this:

There’s a lot of power in being intentional and scientific about things that most people are unintentional and casual about. 

What does this mean?

I think it’s a fair statement to say that we all have things in life that we care about. We also all have things in life that we care about more than other things. 

In fact, it would be true for nearly everyone that there are a few things in our lives that we care about the most.

But if I were to put someone on the spot and ask them to immediately list the 10 things in their life that they care about the most and what order they fall in, would they have an answer?

I’d guess that most people wouldn’t. 

(Including myself until very recently)

Why is that?

If it’s true that these are the most important things in our life. . .why can’t we name them off the top of our heads? How can we expect to prioritise and focus on them if we don’t even know what they are?

Let’s try another quick thought experiment. . .

If you were to observe anyone else’s life from the outside, you would be able to make an educated guess as to what they care about most based on their behaviour and how they spend their time. 

But if you were to approach that person and ask them what they actually care about most. . .I bet their answers will be quite different to the guess you made. 

Ok. 

If you’re with me so far, let’s try to make this all a bit more useful, practical and scientific. 

I think I’ve made some fair points, but I still honestly get nervous writing emails about self-improvement topics because it all just feels quite hollow unless there’s actually some kind of realistic and practical approach I can give you to act on the insight. 

The insight of this email is this:

There’s always going to be a gap between what we actually care about most and what we seem to care about most based on our behaviour—but I think one of the best goals we can have in life is to close that gap. 

In order to make this practical and something we can actually do something about, how can we quantify where we currently are so that we can track our progress to where we want to be?

I’ll use the rest of this email to share the system that I’m currently using. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s a good start and I will continue to refine it over time. 

What’s the system?

Firstly, it comes back to the first point I made—we need to actually sit down and write out our priorities. 

I don’t think there needs to be a certain number of items you need to list—just whatever feels good. 

(My list currently includes things like spending meaningful time each day doing challenging work, maintaining good relationships with the people I care about most, hitting business goals, and a few other things.)

Once you have that list, that alone is a great start. 

Now you can start filtering decisions through that list. Should you go out with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, or stay in to work on your business? 

Well, if you’ve written down that keeping a healthy social life is number 2 priority and your business is number 5. . .that surely should have an impact on your decision. 

Of course, this list shouldn’t dictate all your decisions (that would be silly). For example, if you were going out so often that you didn’t have time to work on your business you’d probably still be making a bad decision—but it’s another useful thing to consult when weighing up multiple good options. 

But how do we quantify how closely our actions align with that list?

What I've done is try to break down each item on my list into some meaningful habit or action that I can take each day. 

For example, for the ‘spending meaningful time doing something challenging’ priority, I turned that into the specific and measurable habit of spending 3 hours doing focused work. I just open a timer on my phone, and as long as I’m only doing one thing, I keep that timer running. If I get distracted or stop, I stop the timer. My goal is, even if it’s not consecutively, to have that timer hit 3 hours by the end of the day. 

I try to break down each priority into something like this. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s just some kind of habit that I can do to make sure I spend time each day on what’s important to me. 

The next step is tracking my success rate. 

To do that I have a spreadsheet, where each new row is a new day, and the columns along the top map onto those 10 actionable habits. 

At the end of each new day, I go through those 10 habits and record either a Y or N in the spreadsheet cell based on whether I did that habit. 

I then calculate, of the 10 habits, what percentage I successfully completed. 

Here’s the formula if you’re curious: =COUNTIF(B1:K1, "Y") / (COUNTA(B1:K1) - COUNTIF(B1:K1, "N/A"))

(For the curious, the formula works by dividing the number of “Y” (yes) responses by the total number of tracked habits, excluding any marked as “N/A” (not applicable). But with only 10 items you could also just do it manually by counting up the total number of Ys recorded and dividing that number by 10.)

That percentage tells me roughly how well I did at prioritising my priorities that day. 

The first 30 days that I recorded this, the average was 47.62%. This I guess could be said to mean that I stuck to my priorities just under half the time. 

Now, over the most recent 30 days the average has been 53.64%. That suggests I manage to stick to my priorities just over half the time. 

That’s not a lot of progress for the 5 months that I’ve been tracking this—but it’s enough to give me confidence that the process is working.

Will I ever hit 100%? 

I’m not sure, but I’m confident that by measuring and tracking my progress: 

• I hold myself more accountable to change

• I get into a positive feedback loop by seeing the progress made

• I get reminded each day of my priorities, which helps them become second nature

I’ll keep you updated in future newsletters on my progress, and reach out if you have any questions about this!

What are your priorities? Take a few minutes to list them out and then see how intentional you can be about them going forward. 

Appreciate your support!

Until next week, 

Benji and Jacob

P.S. Like I said, I don’t particularly like writing about self-improvement without actually having something practical and scientific to pair with it, which is why I used my own data.

I would much rather not use myself as an example, but I think it helps you see that I’m not just writing these emails to check a box and push out some self-improvement cliches that I’m not actually trying to scientifically implement in my own life.

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