Prioritizing: a Negotiation with Yourself

Dr. Jean Kutner, Professor and Division Head for General Internal Medicine, in CU Denver's School of Medicine recently served as our faculty expert for ORDE's seminar on Charting Your Research Path. Dr. Kutner shared her insight around how to prioritize and manage work load.

She suggested that work/life balance was the wrong way to think, but instead we should realize that it is "all life." She was quick to say that it didn't mean you should let your work consume your life. Instead, it is important to be clear on our goals and priorities and to choose our work and responsibilities based on this.

Dr. Kutner published an article on Balancing Competing Professional Commitments in the SGIM forum in September, 2011 that highlights the importance of recognizing that when we take on a new professional commitment, one of three things will happen:

• We choose to resign from another professional commitment
• We reallocate our personal time (vacation, evenings, time with family) to meet the new responsibilities
• Our level of focus and quality of work committed to the new responsibility and/or other commitments is poorer

Certainly, this is logical, but still many smart people, and especially our high-achieving faculty have difficulty putting it into practice.

Dr. Kutner passed along an interesting Harvard Business Review blog entry by Erica Ariel Fox that looks at how we negotiate with ourselves when we are setting priorities and taking on tasks. Entitled, The Most Important Negotiation in Your Life, Fox's entry talks about how each of us have four different internal forces at play in our decisions. She labels them, the dreamer, the thinker, the lover, and the warrior, and posits that any time we're making decisions or setting priorities, these forces are negotiating with each other.

Your dreamer side is focused on the big picture and prioritizing your long term aspirations. Your thinker side is more focused on the most reasonable choices and information right in front of you. Your lover side is looking at relationships and how you can build/strengthen important relationships. And, your warrior side is action oriented and driven.

Likely, one or two of these sides resonate more strongly for you, but what happens is oftentimes, we let our warrior or our lover make all of our decisions without considering the other perspectives. For instance, if our lover tends to be our strongest side, we may be prone to taking on more commitments just to please people who are important to us, but not listening to our thinker who's telling us we don't have the time to do a good job or our dreamer who is pleading for us not to sacrifice our long term goals.

Making decisions by first considering these perspectives is a way to make balanced decisions and set priorities that are rooted in reality, yet moving us in the right direction.