5 Ways to Start Focusing on What Matters

Are you feeling dissatisfied with life, but you can’t figure out why?  If you have those feelings, realize that you are not alone.  Most of us experience feelings of dissatisfaction at one time or another.  Typically, we feel dissatisfied with life when we stop focusing on what matters to us. 

It is easy to get distracted and spend your time focusing on things that don’t truly matter to you.  For example, if you are married or have children, your time easily can be consumed with other people’s problems or dramas.  Or you may give too much mental energy to your job. 

When we spend a lot of time doing things that don’t matter to us, we begin to feel like our time is being wasted.  And that is frustrating!

Below are ways to re-focus your life on what truly matters to you.  Try these approaches and see how much happier you can be!

First, Decide What Matters to You

In order to live a life that reflects what is most important to you, you first have to decide what actually matters to you.  What activities make you happy?  Which activities do you find to be intellectually or spiritually rewarding?  If you were to envision your perfect week, what would you be doing?

For example, I find going to church to be an activity that matters to me.  Attending a Sunday morning service and listening to traditional hymns and a sermon is an important part of my spiritual life.

Sadly, for many years, I didn’t go to church.  And as a result, my life just didn’t feel right.  I tried to fill the “church gap” by reading spiritually uplifting books and listening to sacred music.  But it just wasn’t the same.

Fortunately, when I married my second husband, he was happy to make regular church attendance a part of our life together.  And now, I am so much happier because I have filled my spiritual need to attend a Sunday service.  In short, I figured out – the hard way – that going to church matters to me.

Now, there are lots of people for whom church is unimportant.  What matters to you likely will be very different from what matters to me.  So, you can’t look to other people to figure out what matters to you.  That is a deeply personal decision.

Instead, you need to figure out what is truly important to you by doing some soul searching.  Or, perhaps, as in my case, by engaging in trial and error until you figure it out.  Then, you can focus your time on what truly matters to you.

Stop Letting Others Hijack Your Time

No one can spend their lives doing exactly what they want all the time.  That isn’t how life works.  If you want to have a good marriage and family life, some of your time may be devoted to helping your spouse and children.  And if you want to be able to pay your bills, certainly some of your time will be spent working at a job.

But outside of those obligations, your free time should be devoted to doing those things that matter to you.  So, don’t let other people hijack your very important free time.

For instance, if you are married, it is easy to fall into the trap of doing activities that you hate and that your spouse enjoys in order to be a “good spouse.”  I can assure you that is a recipe for aggravation.

Fortunately, I am blessed to have a husband who never asks me to do anything I don’t enjoy.  We only do activities together that we both like.  And if I want to do something that would bore my husband to tears, I do it on my own.  And vice versa! 

My husband and I are both busy people.  So, we treat each other’s time with respect, and we give each other the freedom to focus on what matters most to each of us.

Set Boundaries with Your Kids

The same holds true for kids.  You can’t let your kids hijack your time.  Now, of course, being a parent is a 24/7 job in many ways.  Our children need our daily help and encouragement.  But even as a parent, you have to set limits on what you will and will not do for your children. 

For example, when my daughter was growing up, I set limits on the number of activities she could do.  I had a limit of two extra-curricular activities per week that I would drive her to, and that was it!  Between holding down a full-time job and housework, I had to limit my chauffeuring so that I could have time to do those things that mattered to me. 

If you want to focus your time on what matters most to you, then you can’t let other people hijack your time.  Instead, you have to set your boundaries with others so that your life can be spent doing what is most meaningful and important to you.

Start Focusing on What Matters by Scheduling Your Free Time

Most of us are very good at scheduling our work time.  But inexplicably, we like to have our free time remain unstructured.

The problem with having unscheduled free time is that it quickly becomes a way for other people to waste our time.  “Oh, you aren’t busy.  Can you pick something up for me from the store?”  “Hey!  I didn’t realize that you had the day off.  Can you do (fill in the blank) for me?”  If you don’t schedule your free time, trust me, other people will consume your free time with a bunch of nonsense tasks that they could easily do themselves.

The other problem with unscheduled free time is that it easily can become “zone out” time.  If you don’t have your time planned out, before you know it, you’ve spent two hours of your free time watching television or surfing the Internet. 

When we schedule our free time, we make a commitment to spend our time doing those things that matter most to us.  And when part of each day is focused on what matters to you, suddenly life becomes much more meaningful. 

Realize that Life Is Finite

Someday you will die.  As will I.  We each have been given one life, and it is finite.  That isn’t something fun to think about, is it?  And yet, that is the very reason why it is so important that we spend each day doing things that truly matter to us. 

And that is why we get depressed or frustrated at times.  It is because deep down we know that we are only on this earth for a limited period of time.  And if we spend our time doing things that we just don’t care about, we’ve wasted that time.  That time is gone.  We can’t get it back.

Those are sobering thoughts.  But if the finiteness of life doesn’t inspire you to focus on doing what matters to you, I don’t know what will.

So, make sure to spend your days doing those things that matter to you.  Don’t let other people hijack your time with their needs and dramas.  Treat your free time, whether it be your evenings or your weekends, as the precious commodity that it is.  Don’t give that time away to activities that aren’t important to you. 

By focusing on what matters, at the end of your life, you will be able to say, “Mine was a life that was well lived.” (To read about creating a meaningful life, click here.)