One of my Skype contacts has an awesome profile message:

“I don’t have time” = “It’s not a priority.” When something is a true priority, we MAKE the time.

That’s so true. The context in which I’m writing today, though, is that priorities are relative even to each other. I split my week into different activity groups, or whatever you want to call them. I have a plan for when I’m going to work on a certain type of task. This allows flexibility but with enough structure to get something done. And I’m realizing that most of priorities are only relative to each other within these timeframes. In other words, I don’t have to figure how important cleaning up my email is on a client work day because I wouldn’t do any in-depth email cleanup on that day. But within a block of time set aside for business administration? That’s when I even need to think about the priority of email cleanup.

So this makes planning the week easier since I don’t have to figure out the relative priority of everything. I just need to decide under which set of activities each task belongs, and then I can prioritize it against a much more meaningful set of other tasks.

And if stuff is an emergency, then, as the quote above implies, I’ll make time.