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The Trick to Prioritizing Your Life That Most of Us Overlook

Jeff Valdivia
4 min readOct 22, 2019

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Hint: it doesn’t involve adding more to your life

Photo by Murray Campbell on Unsplash

It took me almost 34 years to realize how important it is to prioritize the things I do with my time.

You’d think this would be obvious, right? I mean, don’t we want to do the things that matter most to us?

Well, we’re complicated. We have conflicting wants and desires.

Imagine it’s Friday night after a long work week. You’re standing in your room looking down at your gym bag. Your mind is debating whether to work out. Part of you wants to. Another part of you just wants to relax. What do you choose?

We face these kinds of decisions all the time. For me, I found I made choices I regretted far too often.

My mind could make watching Netflix sound so alluring, especially after a long workday. But what I noticed over time is that my brain exaggerated — Netflix was seldom as satisfying as I thought it would be. On the other hand, I rarely regretted going to the gym.

What helps to make these decisions easier, is to prioritize. Because without giving purposeful thought to what you’d prefer to do, you’ll make decisions based on the whims of your mind, and you’ll likely regret them.

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Jeff Valdivia
Jeff Valdivia

Written by Jeff Valdivia

Following my curiosity and hoping it will lead me to wisdom. I write about psychology, meditation, self-development, and spirituality.

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