A busy day does not always mean a person has spent their time on what matters most to them. Meetings, messages, requests and everyday responsibilities can gradually take over a calendar, often without any single decision being made to let that happen. By the end of the day, there may be little room left for work, relationships or personal goals that were important at the start.
Melinda French Gates has reflected on this tension between managing your own priorities and responding to the priorities of other people. Her words focus on a simple part of everyday life: deciding what deserves a place in your schedule before someone else decides it for you. “If you don’t set your own agenda, somebody else will. If I didn’t fill my schedule with things I felt were important, other people would fill my schedule with things they felt were important. Melinda French Gates is pointing to the difference between having a schedule and having control over the priorities within that schedule. Everyone has demands placed on their time. A manager may need a meeting, a colleague may ask for help, a family member may need attention or an unexpected problem may need to be dealt with. These things can all be legitimate. The difficulty comes when they leave no room for the things that the individual considers important. It might be an important work project, time with family, reading, learning, exercise, a creative activity or simply time away from work. The particular choice is personal. Gates’ point is that if these things are never given space, there is a good chance that somebody else’s needs will occupy that space instead.
Setting your own agenda means identifying those priorities before the calendar becomes crowded.
Because there appears to be room in the diary, a person accepts a meeting. Then another meeting is added. A colleague needs assistance. Several emails require responses. A deadline changes. By the time the original plan is revisited, much of the available time has disappeared. The problem is not necessarily that other people’s requests are unreasonable. They may be perfectly valid. The issue is that responding to every request as it appears can turn someone else’s priorities into the organising principle of your own schedule. That is why the second sentence of the quote is important. Gates connects priorities with the act of putting them into the calendar. Something can matter greatly in theory and still receive very little time in practice. A packed calendar can look productive from the outside. There are meetings to attend, tasks to complete and appointments to keep. Yet activity and priority are not always the same thing. A person can spend an entire day dealing with other people’s requests and still finish without addressing the work they had identified as most important. This is especially easy when smaller tasks are easier to complete than demanding ones. Answering an email takes a few minutes. Attending a meeting has a fixed start and finish. A major project may require several uninterrupted hours and sustained concentration. Without deliberate planning, the shorter and more immediate demands can consume the time needed for the larger piece of work. Gates’ observation offers a way of looking at that problem without suggesting that every minute needs to be optimised. It is easier to protect an important priority when you have already identified it. Put important things into your schedule. A goal that never receives time can remain an intention indefinitely. Do not treat every request as equally urgent. Someone else’s deadline does not automatically determine the importance of everything else on your calendar. Leave some space. A completely packed schedule can make unexpected responsibilities harder to handle. Make room for responsibilities as well as personal priorities. Setting an agenda does not mean ignoring other people. It means making sure your own important commitments are considered too. Review where your time actually goes. The way a week was spent can sometimes reveal different priorities from the ones a person believed they had. The idea has particular relevance in a time when people can be reached almost constantly. Work emails, messaging applications, shared calendars and notifications mean that requests can arrive throughout the day. Many people no longer need to be sitting at a desk to be interrupted by work. A message on a phone can alter the direction of an evening just as easily as a meeting can alter a morning. That does not make communication the problem. The difficulty is deciding which incoming demands deserve immediate attention. Someone working on an important report, for example, may need uninterrupted time to make progress. A student may need to protect study hours rather than relying on whatever time remains after other activities. A parent may decide that certain periods are reserved for family rather than allowing work to expand into every available gap. The same principle can apply outside work. Personal interests, rest and relationships can disappear from a schedule when they are always treated as things to fit in later. It does not necessarily require a complicated productivity system. For one person, it might mean deciding the three things that genuinely need attention that day. For another, it could involve blocking out a few hours each week for a long-term project. Someone else may need to become more selective about meetings or commitments. A calendar can be used simply as a record of what other people have requested, or it can also reflect the person’s own choices. Gates’ quote is concerned with the second approach. That distinction becomes clearer when a week is viewed as a whole. An individual request may seem insignificant, but repeated small commitments can eventually leave no room for something that requires sustained attention. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.
Know what matters before the requests arrive.