Setting priorities is primarily about what you exclude from your field of activity, not what you include. Including tasks in your daily routine is easy because there are so many demands on our time and so many things that we can become interested in. Of course if we don’t concentrate our attention on one particular theme or idea, our efforts will be too disparate to have any meaningful impact.
In order for our actions to add up to something, we need to be relentless in what we choose not to do so that all of our time can be allocated in a single direction. Because it can be so hard to let go of those things that aren’t really adding value, it makes sense to start by identifying our top priority (we’ll come back to the excluding part later). Although we all have different preferences and interests, we all have the same ultimate goal: the experience of happiness and the avoidance of suffering.
Since our goal is to be happy, our top priority is going to be that habit or tendency that that is the precursor to happiness and satisfaction. That activity is present moment awareness. When the mind is truly in the present moment, suffering is impossible because, by definition, in the present there is no lamentation of the past and no worry about the future. The trick is to keep the mind in the present moment long enough for this truth to become apparent.
So now that we’ve identified our top priority, we can get back to the excluding part. This flows quite naturally. We need to discourage the mind from wasting time on any unecessary thoughts about the past or the future. In brief, these will be obsessing over past events which we cannot change and future events over which we have no control. They are fairly easy to identify if we observe what the mind is doing. What takes effort is engaging in the training. But, when you do, the rewards will be obvious.