For my 10th year, I choose PRIORITIZE as my One Little Word (OLW).
(Thank you, Kim, for your 12/26 post which inspired me.)
Here are the words I chose over the years:
2015 – Responsiveness
2016 – Transparency
2017 – Routine
2018 – Active
2019 – Confident
2020 – Here / Hear
2021 – Structure
2022 – Healthy
2023 – Approximate
2024 – Prioritize
I’ve been a paid public school teacher all my life and this comes with a built-in pension that I never really spent too much time thinking about. It turns out that today, 1-1-24, I am eligible to retire and draw monthly income from this pension. I can also wait to retire when I am 65 or anytime in-between, or anytime after. It feels good to have financial options. With this in mind, it seems like a good year to reflect on what I want my priorities to be.
Family priorities. Career priorities. Learning priorities. Travel priorities. These four categories come immediately to my mind. Just as I have finanical options, I have options as to how I spend my time and how to extend my efforts. By keeping the mantra all year long of “Should this be a priority?” front and center, I feel confident that I can choose my path. My 2024 OLW is PRIORITIZE.
The dictionary entry:
prioritize verb /prɑɪˈɔr·əˌtɑɪz, -ˈɑr-/ to arrange in order of importance so that you can deal with the most important things before the others: You have to prioritize in this job because you can’t do everything.
Reading this definition helps me. I truly want to arrange in order of importance all the tasks I could do. I can keep teaching, or not. I can keep helping my family or I can make it so I can help them even more. I can choose ways to learn more. Read more. Write more. I can make plans to travel more. I have 366 days this year and I get to choose. I want to make sure each choice is an order of importance to me.
I will prioritize!
Writing Stories by Sally 
Sally, thank you so much for the kind words. Prioritize is a word that inspires me to be more focused in my intentions and give thinking to my sense of order. I love this choice! Happy New Year, and many blessings in the coming year!
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Love this, Sally! Happy new year filled with options to prioritize! Hope you have a happy and healthy year ahead!
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Sally, Prioritize is such an important word and relevant in each stage of life. I think you’ll know when the time is right to retire. You’re aware of all the options and thinking clearly about them.
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What a great word for this time on your life! I taught for 7 years in Howard County- finding out how and when I can access that retirement is on my list of things I need to find out, since one day I would like to retire:)
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Congratulations on making it to the point in your life and career where you can prioritize what comes next!
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Happy new year, Sally! I suspect you have always been good at prioritizing but that this word choice is responding to an upcoming period of change. You share your freedoms of choice. If we are lucky, our choices increase with age. We are less buffeted by all the absolute “have to’s” of those child- raising and mortgage paying years. But choices present challenges. You can really examine underlying priorities, perhaps neglected priorities. And many of them , such as helping your family, you already do but would like to be able to do more. I will be excited to see what comes of this year of examining old and new priorities.
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What a great word! This is such a focused thinking process and one that should serve you well as you move through the year prioritizing your choices!
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How wonderful to have choices and the reflective nature to make them thoughtfully! This word seems like a great fit for where you are in your life. I find that the impact of a teaching schedule on travel choices has become more and more chafing as I age–unfortunately, I don’t yet have the choices you do (I came late to teaching!). Still, the awareness of choice and priority is so important, and I have plenty of choices to make, thoughtfully or not. Thanks for that reminder.
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