What to do and what not to do and why thy should know thyself

This is the note I would like to use to launch a series of consecutive ideas, each distilled into one punchline per note — the kind of wisdom I would have loved to have drilled into me at the youngest possible age. It could have spared me a tremendous amount of time on tasks I shouldn’t have undertaken in the first place, but we will get to that.

After leaving a corporation and embarking on a career as a teacher, I live by a maxim: don’t do tasks for people you do not consider worthy of your time and energy. Channel your effort into what truly matters¹.

Nowadays, every time somebody drops an “important” task in front of me, I tend to tell them that I haven’t allocated time for it — whatever it may be — in my calendar, hence it might get done eventually, but not today and certainly not tomorrow.

I decline the majority of incoming tasks not because I am toxic or a bully², but because I firmly believe that if I don’t safeguard my schedule, it will be commandeered by somebody else. And this very premise prompted me to reflect on how I select the tasks I eventually take on. Do I gravitate toward more urgent tasks first, or do I consistently prioritise the more important ones?

Another question I intend to address in this series of notes is: how does one stay focused on the goals and meaningful tasks that bring “Big” dreams to fruition?

I have invoked the word “important” so many times that I feel compelled to examine this notion of importance at length, because in the world I inhabit, nothing is important simply because somebody decreed it so. Everything acquires importance for entirely different reasons.

BIO