What Are Your Priorities?

The Washington Post has a very interesting, albeit buggy, little doodad: the POTUS tracker.  It is a calendar that creates a graphical representation of how President Obama’s schedule.  The idea is to generate a picture of what issues, groups and individuals are getting the President’s time and attention, to give the viewer a clearer impression of the “real priorities” of the Administration.  Rather than look at the agenda and identify importance according to the nature of the issue, this method works in reverse, assigning importance based on allocation of time.  You can sort it by month, issue, type of event and who was in attendance (that is, if your browser doesn’t crash first).

Access to this type of tool can fundamentally change how we see politics.  It enables us to look past the talking points and see who is the real recipient of the Most Important Thing: time.  Time is my most precious; it is exponentially more so for the President.  This snapshot of how he spends his time yields clues as to which people and what issues are “hot button” enough to be a true priority.  This kind of information is power.

We can learn a lot from looking at our own lives this way.

Take a step back from who you think you should be and what you think you should be caring about, and take a look at the choices you make.  It can be a pretty enlightening experience.  For instance, I majored in political science with an emphasis on global politics.  Yet every day I find myself reading the science, technology, and business sections of the newspaper.  I loved my major, but what if I had noticed that sooner?

I spent a lot of time when I first moved to DC being hard on myself for not going out more.  Museums, art, theater, music, it’s all right there waiting for you.  But I would find myself at home on Friday night, curled up on the couch with the dogs watching a movie, completely and perfectly happy.  I lived in an underground hole so they could have a yard.  Money was spent on vet bills and good food for them, not weekend trips to New York to visit friends and go to the theater.  Looking at it in reverse, no matter how important those other things seemed, my priorities were clear.  And they were so far from what I expected them to be, based on the picture I had in my head of who I was.

The fact is, sometimes we don’t have a very clear understanding of our own priorities.  We think we know what our priorities are.  We often say, “I will make that a priority,” as though we have some master list somewhere.  We’ll shift whatever it is to above washing our cat – no one likes to wash cats – but below setting the DVR to record the NBC fall lineup.  But often what we think our priorities are, or what we think our priorities should be, is not reflected in the way we spend our time.  If information is power, then an honest assessment of how we spend our time and our lives is an invaluable tool in seeking sustainable, true-to-ourselves happiness.

So suspend judgment for just a moment and take a look.  Don’t criticize yourself for what you should be doing or thinking or feeling.  Instead, what can you learn from what you  are doing and thinking and feeling.

What are your “priorities?”  How are you spending your time?  And are you happy?

(Also, go to the POTUS Tracker and click on health care.  Then choose almost any other issue and move the slider from January to September.  You can see how much the health care debate has eclipsed almost everything else, foreign policy be one of several exceptions.  This is particularly unfortunate given the current level of irrational discourse going on about health care right now.)