It all starts with big rocks

One of the first productivity books I ever read was Stephen Covey's "7 habits of highly effective people". I still think it's a classic. Whilst some of Covey's advice doesn't stand up to the age of 24-7-365 connectivity, his story about the teacher showing his students how to prioritize their time by showing them rocks in a jar is something I still think about most days.

If you don't know it, the teacher fills up a jar with big rocks. He then shows them that it can be further filled with pebbles that trickle in around the big rocks. And again with sand and water. The lesson, of course, isn't that we can cram more into every single day, but that unless we start with the big rocks, there's no room for them.

Sometimes big rocks are the long, chunky tasks that need a clear mind, a cleared desk and plenty of focus and determination. Sometimes big rocks are the heavy emotional items that we might avoid (the difficult phone call we have to make, or the hard decision that affects others). With some of those, the actual work is done in less than five minutes, but it's a big rock because of the effort it takes just to carry it with us until it's done.

Most days, I'll start out by asking myself what my 2 big rocks are (usually one for the morning and one for the afternoon - altho if I'm on an 5am start mission of a day, which I do every now and again, I'll schedule one big rock before 9am, then another for the 'proper' morning and a third for the afternoon).

But never more than that. It's always tempting to set up my day with eight big rocks to do - to make a promise to somehow work extra hard and get all of the things done. Perhaps you fall for this way of thinking too, Emilie?

If you have eight priorities, you have no priorities. The point of Covey's story is to force us into the hardest work of all - quality thinking about what matters most to us, and the best ways to use the most precious resource we have (Covey would have said this was our time, I'd say in 2020 it's actually our attention).

It's also a great question to think about as part of your weekly review or weekly planning process (and if you don't have one of those, we need to talk. Email me!). A secondary question is also "how can I help myself avoid the resistance that I'll feel to these big rock tasks?". Procrastination generally happens because we haven't added tactics to our strategy.

So here's a simple question for you to kick off the week...

What are your big rocks for Monday (maximum of 2, remember)?

And how can you support or trick yourself into the action needed, so you avoid resistance and procrastination?