Which Good Deeds Should You Prioritize First?

As-Salamu Alaykum: So, the topic of this blog post is “Which Good Deeds Should You Prioritize First?” Actually, I truly understand this. “Who is better in terms of deed” is actually understanding if you can distinguish between good and better and worse and worst.

Good Deeds Should You Prioritize First

In other words, you’re constantly going to have to make choices in life. So, you have limited time. Death is looming. I have limited time, and you have limited time. We can do so many good things in our lives. Imagine that you and I have to prioritize what good thing I can do that is of maximum benefit to me and the people around me and that I can present before Allah Almighty because I have limited time.

I’ll give you the analogy because analogies help us understand stuff easily. So, you’ve got 20 minutes left, and you have 30 questions to solve. Some questions are worth three points, some are worth 15 points, some are worth 25 points, etcetera. Which should you spend your time solving first?

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Simply put, the question that is worth the most points is one you should probably tackle first before your time runs out. So, even if your time ran before you got to the extra credit or the one or two pointers that you made the most of your time,

لِيَبْلُوَكُمْ أَيُّكُمْ أَحْسَنُ عَمَلًۭا

actually embedded in it. “Who is better in terms of deed?” It actually suggests you constantly have to make prioritizations in your deeds. What are the things I have to tackle right now? What’s the best thing I can do? That’s on the positive side. But this actually has a view on the negative side too.

لِيَبْلُوَكُمْ أَيُّكُمْ أَحْسَنُ عَمَلًۭا

Also means to remove ugliness from our deeds. There are problems that I have. There are things I should do better about myself. None of us are perfect. We all have flaws, but there are some flaws that are mission-critical. We need to get rid of those, and some things, you know, can take some time.

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It’s nice if you got rid of them, but they’re not mission-critical. If, for example, someone’s not praying, they’re not praying. And on top of that, they’re not reciting the Quran every day. They are missing out on two things.

Which of them should they take care of first? You’ve got a bigger problem. This is deducting major points from your akhirah. Why don’t you get rid of this problem first, prioritize it, and then take care of the others? Because you have limited time.

So understanding the value of good and bad and understanding what big bad things I have to get rid of, what major flaws I have to work on, and what major good deeds I should be engrossed in right now, as opposed to things that can wait, at the end of the day, even in worldly life, you and I have a list of things we want to accomplish in the next 24 hours.

And we never get through them. You know what happens most of the time: you have two kinds of people. You have people who don’t; they don’t have a good sense of time management. So, they’ll just do whatever comes to their mind, and then they, at the end of the day, go. I had to do this, this, and this, and I forget it.

Few Words

And then there are those who look at that list and say, All right, what do I need to do today? And if you didn’t do it today, there’d be a problem. And they check and mark those, and they take care of those things first, and then, if there’s time left over,.

Yeah, this is smart time management, right? It’s actually in the words…

ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ ٱلْمَوْتَ وَٱلْحَيَوٰةَ لِيَبْلُوَكُمْ أَيُّكُمْ أَحْسَنُ عَمَلًۭا

is the entire philosophy of time management in the Quran.