This is simply looking at the choices and problems which confront us and determining, urgent from important, necessary from optional. Many times we devote improper attention to optional urgents trivial tasks while neglecting the necessary and important. On the simple end — the phone rings, I’ve got to answer it right now, someone texts, etc… As we learned to take a pause, not react, we properly prioritize, triage and work with issues as their priority dictates. We learn to measure activities against our overall goals, prioritizing them from lower to higher order. A good segway, into Unconventional Problem Solving, is sometimes when prioritizing the grandest of goals and the largest of things — you need to remove them and start from scratch. Some things loom so large that one cannot see anything else. A good example of this is when individuals are asked to prioritize their lives in quadrants. Relationships, family, friends, work, usually fill the four squares, but it really doesn’t answer anything. Ironically the way to move past this and get real results from the exercise is removing those four and starting again.

Related: Boundaries, Problem-Solving