“What matters to me right now?”
A simple question to help you rethink your next actions.
In the midst of a busy day, or when you’re feeling overwhelmed with a bunch of things being thrown at you all at once, pause for a moment.
Take a few deep breaths.
Then, ask yourself: “What matters to me right now?”
Wait until you have a clear answer before moving on to the next thing on your list.
In the list of unhelpful advice, I noted that “just prioritize” belongs near the top. Prioritization is hard! It’s like saying “avoid distractions,” when we live in a world of distractions.
It also puts a burden on caregivers, as well as anyone else with constraints and limitations that aren’t always of their own choosing. Sometimes, our priorities are chosen for us, whether we like it or not.
Nevertheless—we do need some means of prioritization, or at least we’ll be better off if we can find one that works for us.
Operating by triage, where we gravitate toward crisis or firefighting, is a great way to wreck your nervous system.
Operating by dartboard method, where we simply do whatever we feel like in the moment, won’t help us achieve much in the way of goals.
So then, if we want to feel more in control and less overwhelmed—we must find a different operating model.
As noted, this year is all about mental health and purposeful productivity. I don’t want to do more just for the sake of doing more—that wasn’t good for me. But I do want to do more of what matters to me.
If you like that idea for yourself, the first step is to understand what matters.
Just like paying active attention, simply taking inventory of what’s truly important can work wonders.
It can serve as a jumpstart for changing up your work (switching gears to do something different), or it can merely be an observation point you take note of.
“What matters to me right now?”
The simple question is helpful because it’s different from how we tend to respond when we’re feeling overwhelmed. A state of stimulation usually results in questions like these:
“What’s next on my list?”
“What else needs to be done?”
“What am I forgetting?”
Nothing wrong with thinking like that, at least sometimes. But it can also reflect the mindset of rushing, of busywork, and of work that has no end.
On the other hand, asking “What matters to me?” may result in an answer that has nothing to do with your list of tasks or project planning.
It may also result in an answer that has nothing to do with what other people want from you.
When that happens, your answer is leading you in a different direction. Pay attention when this occurs. Maybe you need a break, a different task, or a complete change of direction.
Maybe you’ll do something different tomorrow, or the next time you make a decision about how you spend your time.
Or, of course, you may not do any of those things. After reflecting on the question, if your answer is “Exactly what I’m doing right now!”—that’s great. Keep doing that.
What matters to you right now?
This reminds me of the story of the jar — putting the large stones of what truly matters in your jar first, and all the smaller stones of what’s less important after. Otherwise the jar gets full of the small pebbles, and the big stones of what truly matters won’t fit if you don’t put them in first.
I’m also aware that to TRULY organize one’s life around the big stones is a RADICAL act. Society has so many messages about what’s important, but what’s truly important to us is often weird, off the beaten path, and not at all in accordance with what society values.
So when I ask the question, “What really matters to me?“ my biggest problem is being able to listen to the answer and actualize it, against MASSIVE social brainwashing about what I SHOULD value.
Therefore, for me, it’s been incredibly valuable to do huge amounts of inner work to liberate myself from socially-injected beliefs. I think no matter what someone’s race, gender, neurodiversity, disability, age — we’re all constrained by social beliefs about how we SHOULD show up in the world. Undoing those beliefs is a great first step in creating a platform for the deep inner freedom that allows us to say “screw all that crap!“ and go do what we really want to do.
As a woman, I’ve undone the inner social pressure to believe I need to have children, or get married, or wear makeup, or shave my legs… and every time I let go of a socially-mandated activity I buy time to do what I want to do — which is more IFS on myself! I’m not saying that I think any of those activities are “wrong,“ they’re just wrong for me! What I’m saying is that when we let go of the things we think we should do, we buy time to do the things we really want to do, so taking out the small rocks can help us make space for the big stones of our deepest dreams and desires.
I often wonder how you manage to put out a post that suits me right at the moment, but then I realize that I'm in an anxiety-driven time in my life right now. You could say anything and it would fit! However, thank you for these last two months of posts. I'm learning, I'm pushing myself to think differently. I have a bad job at the moment and am a part time caregiver for 93 year old mother. Thinking about what matters to me is a hard one, but my stress level is begging for an answer!