Determine Your Daily Priorities: Lifestyle Practice

Make a List Each Morning and Complete at Your “Must-Do”

Simple Instructions:

• At the start of each day, make a three-part to-do list – one thing you must do, two things you’d like to get done, and three things it would be nice to get done.
• Do at least the “must do” by the end of the day.

Do you have mixed feelings about to-do lists? You’re not alone! Michael and Andy stopped total strangers on the street to talk to them about this challenge. Watch and you may relate to this man’s experience:

Why Is This Practice Important?

Life is often an undifferentiated mess of truly important things and immediate problems that show up moment-by-moment. For a host of reasons, those fires pull our attention away from everything else. We resist doing what is important — our actual daily priorities — and we give false urgency to that which is not.

If you can create for yourself what you say is important and use it as your map, you’ll begin to see how easy it is to navigate the shark-filled waters of other people’s concerns and needs.

And once the big stuff starts to fall off your list, you’ll have no problem picking off the little things. With those large-looming actions removed from your plate, you’ll feel lighter and faster on your feet. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to get things done when you take the important things head on.

Michael Stanwyck

Michael Stanwyck is the co-founder of The Whole Life Challenge, an idea that developed during his seven years as a coach and gym manager at CrossFit Los Angeles.

He graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy as well as a degree from the Southern California School of Culinary Arts, and feels food is one of the most important parts of a life - it can nourish, heal, and bring people together.

Michael believes health and well-being are as much a state of mind as they are a state of the body, and when it comes to fitness, food, and life in general, he thinks slow is much better than fast (most of the time). Stopping regularly to examine things is the surest way to put down roots and grow.

He knows he will never be done with his own work, and believes the best thing you can do for your well-being starts with loving and working from what you’ve got right now.