🔋 Priority Pivots
You've seen Friends, right?
Somehow I hadn't, at least not in full, until a couple years ago (good lookin' out, Em). Watching it rounded out some iconic memes and scenes I knew from the cultural zeitgeist but could never really explain.
Including:
It turns out that the context in some situations is pretty self explanatory. Here, Ross is determined to move an unwieldy couch up a flight of stairs. He's too cheap to pay for movers. We've all been there.
What I respect about Ross in that moment is his exceptional clarity on what needs to happen: pivot. Friends devotees know of what I speak. For the uninitiated, you can hear it for yourself here.
Pivoting Your Priorities
Prioritization is a part science, part art. You can research and understand it, but you don't really feel its complexity until you're faced with competing paths and you have to pick one over the other.
But sometimes, we don't even realize we're at that point. We get so focused on a task, or we get so distracted by something unrelated, that it's only after the fact that see that our priorities have, in effect, shifted.
We'd do well to channel an inner Ross. If priorities have shifted, are about to shift, or decidedly need to shift, why not exclaim pivoooot and, well, fully pivot? A lot of life can get lost in that wasteland between decisive action. Better to acknowledge a decision needs to be / has already been made and reprioritize accordingly.
Pivots Applied
A week and a half ago, I spoke with someone I trust about a topic at the very core of what we do at Warrior-Scholar Project. We believe in higher ed, and we believe that it's important to say so right now.
A single conversation led to a substantial reallocation of my time, where I worked on what would eventually be this WSP blog post: Standing With Student Veterans in a Changing Higher Education Landscape. I had to deprioritize a few work tasks and set aside personal time to get this drafted, edited, and approved in a timely fashion.
In Eisenhower Matrix speak, a box two item (important but not yet urgent), became a box one item (important and now urgent). And because time is a zero sum game, I necessarily gave up other options of time allocation by spending time on this particularly important and urgent item.
It would do me no good to deny that a pivot had in fact occurred. Rather, the unmistakably better course of action would to be channel my inner Ross and confidently declare, at the outset: pivot.
Be Intentional
As I've written before, intentionality is everything.
Productivity methods, no matter which you turn to, revolve around intentionality. It’s applying a system, a tool, or a practice to a thing that could be made better. More efficient. But if applied without intention, none of that will help a bit. You have to intentionally select the method. And then intentionally apply and assess it.
Applied here, my suggestion is to pivot with intention and awareness.
Don't beat yourself up when you need to adjust, because guess what:
Until next week,
Rye
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