We Can’t Keep Picking Fruit and Expect Our Dreams to Grow

There is a lecture I give to freshman students about time management.

More specifically, there is a part about prioritisation where I often bring up the expression “focus on the low-hanging fruit.”

I first heard the expression from a friend almost a year ago. I was telling him about some plans I wanted to pursue in the future, and I remember him looking at me gently and saying, “It’s impressive to be wild, but maybe you should focus on the low-hanging fruit.”

At the time, the expression made sense to me. In fact, I even added it to my list of reminders. It became one of those practical phrases I could easily pass on to students. and to myself when and if I’m about to go wild with a new exploration.

But this time, as I prepared the lecture for a new cohort, I realised I could no longer say it with the same conviction.

I began to see prioritisation as more complicated than simply reaching for the nearest fruit.

Sometimes we have dreams we want to chase, but they have not yet materialised into anything visible or fruitful. We are still at the seed-planting stage.

Meanwhile, our jobs, lectures, emails, responsibilities, deadlines, meetings, and commutes keep becoming urgent because they come with external pressure. Someone is waiting. A deadline exists. A consequence is visible.

In a way, these urgent tasks are often the fruit of earlier choices, systems, or commitments. They are already hanging there, demanding to be picked.

But a dream has no boss, no deadline, and no official reminder. No one will email us saying, “Please build the life you actually want by Thursday.”

So if we follow the expression too literally, the current life wins by default. The visible fruits keep demanding our attention, while the seeds of the life we want remain unattended.

This is where I realised that prioritisation is more complicated than a neat classroom concept.

I am not arguing that we should ignore what is already hanging in front of us, whether it is an email to send, a meeting to attend, or an errand to run. These things matter, of course. But if we are not careful, we can spend years responding only to what is visible, requested, and due.

That is the trap.

The tasks already attached to our current life come with reminders. They appear in our inbox, calendars, messages, and conversations. They know how to ask for our attention.

Dreams usually do not.

They arrive as vague desires, repeated thoughts, small irritations, private hopes, and ideas we keep postponing because they do not yet look practical. They are easy to dismiss precisely because they are still undeveloped.

Next to a deadline, a dream looks weak. Next to an email from a manager, it looks optional. Next to a calendar full of meetings, it looks almost irresponsible.

That is why I now think we cannot prioritise only based on urgency or ease. We also have to prioritise based on direction.

So maybe the question I should ask my students from now on is not only, “What is the low-hanging fruit?”

Maybe the better question is, “Which tree are you trying to grow?”

Because if no one puts that on the calendar for us, maybe we should.