# Real Priorities

Source: https://www.theminimalists.com/priorities/
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2024-06-12
Author: The Minimalists

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Take a look at your day-to-day life. Through the hustle and bustle of your daily grind, what banal, tedious, mundane tasks eat up most of your time? Checking email? Monkeying around on Facebook? Watching television? Filling out reports?

Whatever your answer, these activities are your *true* priorities.

We often claim our priorities are grandly important activities like spending time with [family](https://theminimalists.com/family), [exercising](https://theminimalists.com/18min), or carving out enough alone time to work on that big [passion project](https://theminimalists.com/masterpiece) we’ve been putting off. Unless you’re actually putting these pursuits first, unless you make these undertakings part of your everyday routine, they are not your actual priorities.

Your priorities are what you do each day, the small tasks that move forward the second and minute hands on the clock: these circadian endeavors are your *musts*. Everything else is simply a *[should](https://theminimalists.com/deciding)*.

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