An immediate way to apply your why and see results is to use it to guide where you focus your time, effort and attention. 

When you connect what's important to you with the areas where you add value through your skills, capabilities and experiences you'll find the things that will bring you most impact and be most productive. 

You'll probably also find that you throw yourself into them with more energy and motivation, leading to even greater impact. 

Downloads

• The Eisenhower Matrix

Lesson Activity

As a first step, go through your to-do list and use your why to prioritise the tasks that appear there. For each task, ask yourself:

• how well does it align with the things that are important to you?
• is it something that makes the best use of your abilities, or is it something you want to get better at?  

If your answer is "yes" to both of these questions then the task is one of your priorities - the more closely it aligns, the higher its priority - and you can increase the priority of a task by adapting it to align more closely. 

For those where you answer "no" to one or both of the questions you may want to: 

• de-commit from the task 
• delegate to someone else 
• adapt it to align more closely with the things that are important to you
• or accept that it is a lower priority. 

Whenever you take on a new task, use this to guide what you say yes to, and if you find you have to say no, you can explain using your why. 

Make a commitment to use this approach to prioritise your time over the next week and test it out. Notice how it changes your focus of attention - the impact it has on your productivity, and don't forget, that if things don't feel quite right, it's ok to adapt and evolve your why. 

The video mentions the Eisenhower Matrix (Urgency vs Importance) which can be a fantastic tool for mapping out and prioritising your tasks visually.