Welcome to Ever Better Today: the daily podcast for creating your optimal business, career, or overall life in ten minutes or less. I’m Lisa Conners Vogt, Executive and Leadership Coach and founder of Ever Better Coaching and Consulting. To learn more about me or my work, check out everbetteru.com. Let’s jump in! 

Hi there! It's Coach Lisa, and you're listening to Ever Better Today: Episode Three. Today I'm sharing my thoughts on setting your daily priority along with tips for applying this to your life, all in ten minutes or less. 

Yesterday's episode was about creating your lifelong priorities. That was Ever Better Today: Episode Two. I was describing how to ensure that you are setting your priorities for how you want to live your life on a long-term level. Some people might refer to this as their North Star, which would be a combination of four or five different priorities that they're always thinking about as they go about their life. I won't go into any more detail on that because you can listen to the episode yourself! Maybe you already listened to it. 

But today, I want to talk about setting your daily priority in alignment with those lifelong priorities. 

Now, notice that I didn't say, “setting your daily priorities,” and that was on purpose! Here's the thing: everyone has a list of priorities or tasks that is going to be very long. It might include something about your home, maybe some doctor's visits that you need to make, or maybe some appointments that you need to set up. 

If you have kids or pets, it's going to be about taking care of them. Maybe it's visiting your extended family. Maybe there's something about your house that you need to take care of. Or, maybe you need to renew your lease for your apartment. 

If you want to create an exercise program, perhaps you need to join a gym or buy some new sneakers. Maybe you're going to buy a Peloton so that you can start some spin classes at home. It could be a million different things, but you can't do all of those things in one given day. 

So, I'm suggesting to you that you set your daily priority. This is the thing that when you get to the end of the day and look back, you're not saying, “Oh, I didn't get anything done today,” because you will have accomplished that one priority… that one thing that's most important to you to achieve a big goal. 

And, it's in alignment with your lifelong priorities. Let me give you an example: maybe you need to figure out where you stand with your IRAs and your retirement accounts. I'm saying retirement “accounts,” because oftentimes people have changed jobs and have more than one IRA. Often they lose track of what they have. 

If you've had multiple jobs, you might have three or four different retirement accounts with different financial institutions, different logins, different amounts, different investment vehicles…  and you couldn't tell me what your investments were or how much you're currently investing from your paycheck into your IRA. This is a very, very common issue. It's something actually I struggled with several years ago, and my financial advisor helped me with it. 

So maybe one of your goals is to organize all that this year: I’m going to organize my IRAs and actually figure out how much money I should be putting in from my paycheck so that I achieve a certain financial goal by the end of the year (or in five or ten years). Okay? 

So, your daily priority might be just to get a handle on your current retirement accounts. If that's something that's been weighing on your mind and you're sort of just putting it off and pretending that you don't have time for it and not making it a priority, it's just going to eat up your time and your brainpower. 

Where you stand might be uncomfortable for you, but at least you'll know where you stand. Let's face it, a lot of people put off these sorts of financial considerations because they think that they're not where they should be or know that they've got work to do on this. But hey! I think it's better to figure that out sooner rather than later so that you can do something about it. 

If you set your daily priority and actually do it (or at least you get a good start on it), at the end of the day you can feel good that you've made some progress. That might align with a lifelong priority of making good financial decisions. 

Here's an exercise to think about when you're considering what to choose as your daily priority. Now, this is an exercise that I learned about years ago and it appears in many different books. Chances are if you've done a time management program, you've seen this before. It's used so much because it actually works! 

Imagine that we're in a room together and there's a jar, a large mason jar. On the table is a big rock that fits within the mason jar, just one big rock. And then there are pebbles; they are definitely smaller than the big rock. And then there's a bucket of sand, and you want to fit all of these items into that jar. How do you go about achieving that? 

You could do it this way: put all the pebbles in, fill in the sand, and then try to fit that big rock on top. What do you think's going to happen? 

Well, you might not have room for the big rock, and you’re just kind of wedging it in on top of the jar. Maybe it won't fit because those pebbles in the sand are settled in a way that took up a lot of space. 

So here's the trick: take the big rock, and put that in the jar first (in this example, the big rock does fit inside the jar). So, put that big rock in the jar first (the big rock represents your daily priority which is in alignment with your lifelong priorities). The jar represents your day. After you put the big rock into the jar, you've accomplished the big rock and can fill it in with the pebbles. Then, the sand goes around the top. 

So really, the point here is that you've accomplished that big rock, that big thing for the day, and then it's not like you do nothing else… well, maybe you do. Maybe you just go home and sit on the couch and order food. In fact, that would be something that you're accomplishing!

You can fill in with the pebbles and the sand, and these represent those items in your life that are not nearly as important as that big rock item. Now, your priorities might shift on a day-to-day basis; you might have a day where the pebbles of yesterday become the big rock today, and that's great! 

That's how we lead a life that's really interesting and are accomplishing a lot in the course of a day, in the course of a week, and in the course of our lifetimes. 

That's my tip for you today! Set your daily priority and make sure that it’s consistent with your lifelong priorities. And when you do that on a daily basis, you'll be amazed at what you accomplish!

I hope this episode helps you to optimize one thing or to elevate one thought in your life, because small changes add up to major shifts. So keep listening, and let me know what's changing for you. In order to do that, you can send me an email at lisa@everbetteru.com or check out my website at everbetteru.com and click the link to send me a note. 

I'd love to hear from you and learn about how the ideas I just shared apply to your life or business! And if you know someone that might benefit from this information, do them a favor and share the podcast. 

That's it for today. Join me tomorrow for another episode of Ever Better Today!