Attend To The Most Important Things First

Attend to the deepest, best and most important things first — otherwise you will find that you "do not have" time.

The quotation marks are the argument. Time is not what runs out; ordering is what fails. Everyone has the same day, and the day fills with whatever was placed in it earliest, in whatever order it arrived. Put the small and the urgent in first and the day is honestly full — and the thing that mattered is now impossible, which feels like scarcity and is actually sequence (Spending Time · Units of Time, Honesty about time).

So the instruction is about order rather than about effort, and the order is deliberate: first, not eventually. Whatever is deepest goes in before the day has a chance to fill (The Daily Way, Morning page). In a season, the Quest's hardest real move goes in before the maintenance (Critical Path, Aim Before You Act). In a week, what actually advances the aim is promised before the rest is agreed to (Keep Promises Visible, The Turn).

It needs a companion, and the book supplies it: to attend to the most important things you must first know which those are, which is the work of the two chapters before it (A Few, The 20%). Without that, first-things-first simply promotes whatever currently feels weightiest, and feeling is a poor sorter — the urgent always feels more important than the important, which is precisely why the important has to be placed first rather than chosen in the moment (Discernment, Design To The Goal).

The chapter carries the counsel through reading, which is where the cost is easiest to see. Read the best books first, otherwise you will find you do not have time, and beside it: there are too many mediocre books that exist only to entertain, so read those accepted without doubt as good. The application is general. Whatever is entered first is what the finite thing gets spent on, and everything else is what did not fit (Out of the Antilibrary, a Library, Spending Attention).

Also called: first things first · the deepest things first Stands on: A Few · The 20% · Discernment · The Goal Opens onto: Spending Attention · Spending Time · Units of Time · Out of the Antilibrary, a Library · Critical Path · The Daily Way · Aim Before You Act · Keep Promises Visible · Honesty about time · Memento Mori In play: the daily practice, and the table when a week's promises are made Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/The Wisdom of the Way/7. Attend To The Most Important Things First.md (unmarked, four lines; two carried sayings on reading) · the same book's chapters 2, 3, 8 and 14 · lionsberg.wiki: The Wisdom of the Way Open: The corpus has no page for the most important thing of a day; the one page in the Field bearing those initials carries a software licence and not this sense. · The chapter offers no method for ordering when two things are genuinely first, which is the ordinary case.