Most books on productivity focus on prioritization from the perspective of work. Sometimes they mention life issues, but it’s usually not the focus. As a result, I think too many of us overvalue work and undervalue the things that truly matter in life. Prioritization between work and life requires asking different questions and layering life before work.

If we take a biased sample of some of the most prominent productivity books, you’ll notice something peculiar:

The people writing them tend not to have families, or are on their fourth marriage. This is not a judgment about their choices or lives, but simply an observation that their life experiences likely prioritize certain activities over others. And to be clear, I’ve found the above books—and many others—extremely useful in both my work and personal life.

But there has always seemed to be a tension between work and personal life. Which is ironic, because all the books mentioned above emphasize making time for and thinking about what is essential and most important—yet what’s “most important” is almost always work-related.

Perhaps the biggest exception to this genre is Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—which is perhaps not surprising, given that he had too many kids to count. His book, in contrast to many others, emphasizes good over merely effective. Parenting examples feature prominently. This is something Scott Young of Ultralearning also noted.

One of the points Stephen Covey makes is to imagine your funeral. What would you want people to say about you? What kinds of relationships do you wish you had? This helps clarify what truly matters.

I’d argue that if most of us ran this exercise yearly, we’d be doing very different things with our lives than we are today.

In a somewhat similar vein is Jeff Bezos’s Regret Minimization Framework: the idea being—will you regret this? Ironically, Bezos ultimately left his supportive spouse and the mother of his children for someone who does not appear to have been as supportive to him in the early years.

I wonder if reading Stephen Covey’s book would have given him additional guidance—beyond just doing what you might regret. Because what you might regret can be strongly influenced by the stage of life you’re in. Covey’s insight is that you need to work with the end in mind.

Personally, I’m finding the following questions—a synthesis of the above books and several others—to be helpful in a tactical, day-to-day way:

  • If the world ended tomorrow, what would I regret not doing?
    • This should be tied to your moral framework and thought of in both the short and long term.
  • If I could only do one thing, what would it be?
    • I like to look at this across my portfolio: family, health, finances, work, etc.
  • Which project or task would solve many others?
    • This is a leverage question. You can eliminate a whole slew of things with this.
    • Ironically, this question can help you get rid of work too, if it’s not aligned with your personal values and goals. Why are you even in this job?

In sum, prioritizing life is hard—and we often take advice from good people who are part of the machine. And the machine wants you to work and put that first. But if you start with the end in mind, as Covey suggests, there is no better way to break out of the matrix.