Live Your Priorities

Guess what?  My daughter had a friend stay the night tonight.  And they're already asleep!  At 8:25!  I almost don't want to write it down so I don't jinx it.

Annnnyway.  This post was to be about priorities.

Today, as I was washing dishes, I couldn't stop thinking about whether my life was reflecting my priorities.  I had spent a wonderful morning with my daughter...walking our dogs, playing at the park, enjoying the early light of the sun coming up together.  But I kept thinking that most of my day today was spent cleaning, doing laundry, playing catch-up on everything that slides toward chaos during the work week.

I wrote a post way back when about living my priorities, and the question I asked myself and my readers was, "If someone tried to determine your priorities in life based solely on your actions, do you think they would be fairly accurate? If not, what are some barriers to living your priorities right now?"
  
Today I did a little exercise to help me think through this.  I wrote down how much time per week I devote to each area on my priority list.  Then, being the nerdy visual learner that I am, I made a pie chart (pretty easy using a google doc spreadsheet, by the way).  I'm not going to tell you the order I rank my priorities just yet.

So, here's what it looked like:

Can you guess the order of my priorities?  Based on the time I spend on each, it would seem to be that they're ordered this way:
Work
Child
Home
God
Husband
Extended family
Friends/World

But, no.  Actually, I rank my priorities in the order they're listed on the key to the pie chart.  Yikes, huh? You might never know that by my current actions, it seems.  Now, I expected that work would definitely fill the major chunk of my week, but I was surprised at how the other categories ranked.

So, I've got some work to do.    Good to know.

What keeps you from living your priorities right now?  For me, it's money.  We're working on getting out of debt, so it's important to us to maximize our income for the next few years.  Which means I work uber full time.  It makes intellectual sense, but it's still hard.