An Exercise for Deciding What Matters Most

In five years, my life will look very different than it does today. In ten years, I may not even recognize it.

I am about to be 44 years old. My oldest son is driving, and I only have three summers left with him before he leaves for college. My two younger sons are in middle school. I’ve spent more years building M&R than I have left running the day-to-day (16). My parents and in-laws are very active, but aging.

I have become hyper-aware of what matters most to me, and I am fighting to make decisions that allow me to give all my attention to those things. Twenty years into our marriage, with 3 sons, we are still building a foundation and every week matters.

I recently had a few days in a row that didn’t go as planned. I was consumed by things that mattered very little and I felt empty, frustrated, and distant.

On one of those nights, I stepped out for a run and started thinking about the week. I had allowed someone else to control how I felt and what I focused on. When I got home, I listed what truly mattered, and I became determined to spend as much time as possible on those things and to fight off the rest:

1. Spiritual discipline demonstrated by daily prayer, Scripture reading, and spoken gratitude  
2. A healthy marriage full of dating, dreaming, listening, and serving
3. A deep, authentic relationship with each of my sons that includes quality time based around their interests
4. Deep investment in the operations and team at M&R
5. Financial peace through living below my means with an aggressive focus on the future
6. Time with a group of men I can adventure with and receive accountability
7. Regular exercise and a clean diet
8. Push myself beyond my comfort zone and try new things that I may fail at
9. Mental stimulation through reading, watching documentaries, and discovering new music

As I was building my list, I realized the days I am happiest are the ones I am focused on what matters most to me and every bad day I have is because I’ve allowed outside circumstances and other people to distract me from those things. This list is crucial to my joy, and my joy is crucial to being a good husband, father, friend, and leader.

4 Steps to Help You Decide What Matters Most

My list is a cheat code. When I’m having a bad day, I turn to the list and evaluate how much of my day was spent on these 9 things.

If you haven’t taken the time to evaluate and record what matters most to you, I recommend going somewhere quiet for a couple hours and get started. Here are a few things that helped me build my list:

1. Consider the advice of others. Get to know people who are older and wiser than you and ask one simple question – what do you wish you had known when you were my age?
2. Discover your natural wiring. What do you inherently know about yourself? What are your tendencies? What guardrails do you need to put in place to keep you focused on the right things?
3. Spend time visualizing. Picture a day when you don’t have FOMO or concerns for the opinion of others and feel most like yourself. What does that day look like? What do you do? What do you not do? If you are a parent, picture an afternoon, years in the future, sitting around a dinner table with your grown kids and spouse, sharing memories. What do you want your kids to remember? What do you want them to share at the table? Build your list around those priorities.
4. List out what brings you true, lasting joy. Dig deep here. These are not the temporary, dopamine hit of joy from scrolling social, but the lasting kind. What fulfills you at the heart-level?

After you’ve worked through these steps, you should have a working list of what’s most important and brings you the most joy. Now, clean up the list and make them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) and place them somewhere you’ll see often.

How Do We Focus Our Time on What’s Most Important?

Hopefully you’re starting to picture what this life can look and feel like. But, if you’re like me, you will get off track when life gets sideways. Here are a few ways I redirect my attention when that happens:

1. Reference the list and ask if your current thought or action is on there
2. Ask why you’re focused on it? Is it concern for the opinion of others, is it an issue of self-confidence, or some other misguided issue.
3. Pause your current activity and spend time doing one of the items on your list
4. Talk it out via prayer, self-talk, journaling, or with someone close to you who understands your priorities
5. Embrace discipline and know that this will always be challenging

What’s At Stake When We Focus on the Wrong Things?

So, what’s at stake if we don’t pursue a life focused on what matters most?

Everything.

Everything is at stake.

Each phase of our life is shorter than we imagine. Our time with our spouse before we have kids is short. Our time with our kids in their various phases and interests is short … let me park here for a second: you can only rock them for a little while, you can only watch them learn to speak and butcher the English language for a little while, you can only coach them baseball for a little while, you can only take family vacations for a little while, you can only give them dating advice for a little while, you can only model a sacrificial marriage for a little while …

Each phase of our life is shorter than we imagine. Our time investing in our career. Our time adventuring. Our time building a relational foundation. Our time with good health.

Think about your life in 5-year phases and focus on making the most of that phase. You may even evaluate your list every 5 years as well.

Each phase passes so quickly and if we don’t set goals and focus on what matters most, they will pass, and we will be stuck wishing we’d spent our time better.

If I live to be the average age of an American male, I have 1,612 weeks remaining. These weeks must be lived with intention.

For me, I simply remember one thing: If I don’t set and monitor my weeks by what I believe to be most important, I’ll find myself around a dinner table 10-15 years from now, and will have missed the joy and the fruit from living a life that mattered and it will be too late to build that foundation.