Navigate your Neurodivergence to Unlock Peak Performance
Chapter 4: Reduce stress & increase resilience

Prioritize regularly

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Prioritize regularly to have the most impact.

New information, new projects, new actions, and new insights arise each day causing you to re-prioritize, so you can use your time and resources for the most impact.

You don’t have to shift priorities dramatically, but it is helpful to ask these three questions regularly throughout the day: 1) How much time do I have? 2) Which resources do I have available to me? 3) What will have the most impact?

Exercise:

To reduce stress, work on the actions that will have the most impact on your priorities.

If a customer escalation has come up and has the potential to lead to losing the customer, it’s likely that you’ll want to stop working on the presentation for next week and see how you can solve the customer’s problem.

If your manager asks you to write a summary of a key project to send to the senior leadership team, you’ll likely want to stop working on the budget spreadsheet due in 3 days.

Assess your time, resources, and impact regularly to re-prioritize your daily work.

For the bigger picture, you may need to prioritize regularly as well. Maybe you’re working towards a promotion, saving money for a hiking vacation, and swimming to lose weight, but then your son breaks his leg, requiring surgery, recovery, and physical therapy. Your priorities may shift to still work on the promotion, but save for vacation that requires little walking, and now you walk while your son is at physical therapy.

Priorities shift all of the time. Take the time to reflect on what they are at any given time, so you know where to focus your time and energy.

Action: For today, do a quick reflection on:

  • What are your organization’s priorities?

  • What are your manager’s priorities?

  • What are your work priorities?

  • What are your personal priorities?

Reflect and refine your priorities list.

Clarity reduces stress. Having a clear picture of ALL of your priorities will help you to constantly prioritize by evaluating your time, your resources, and what impact you can have.