What aren't you going to do today?

I've been thinking a lot about saying "no" to things.  This is really hard to do when one has a lot of interests and "discretionary" time. Yet, no matter how much time one has it can easily be filled with things that may appear urgent at the time, but aren't really all that important in the long run.

The challenge of being focused on those things of importance was highlighted in an article "Two list you should look at every morning", in a Harvard Business Review blog. The columnist, Peter Bregman recommends we make the following two lists to review every morning:
List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead)

What are you trying to achieve? What makes you happy? What's important to you? Design your time around those things. Because time is your one limited resource and no matter how hard you try you can't work 25/8.
List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions)
To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn't make you happy? What's not important to you? What gets in the way?

Perhaps you might join me in taking a bit of time out to review those things of importance AND those many opportunities which you are willing to ignore.