The big rocks, Part I

I keep starting posts but not having time to finish them. My goal is to write a little on the blog every day, even if it doesn't result in something actually being posted every day. I'll just keep plugging away and hopefully more things will get posted soon.

Years ago, back before we had kids or were even married, when my husband, Dr. J, and I lived in temperate Northern California, we thought we were busy. Once you have kids, you just shake your head and laugh because you thought you had no time before. Hahaha! Anyway, we both read a book by Stephen Covey et al. called First Things First. In it, Covey suggests identifying what is important in your life and identifying specific goals and activities related to these important things. The idea is that these important activities are often of a non-urgent nature, so they are always getting pushed aside by urgent-but-not-really-important things. For example, you would like to take your kid to the zoo, which is important because spending time with your kid is important to you, but since it's not urgent,* you keep putting it off so you can deal with other, non-important tasks that are urgent. You may even feel, as I would, that SOON, I will catch up on all these little tasks, and THEN I will have all the time in the world to spend some real quality time with my kid. Exercise could be another example. You feel it's important, but it CAN be put off for a day. But if you put it off for one day every day, it never happens.

The idea that you should identify what is important and do those things before all the little things on the list are done? That's golden. I have talked about that before on here and elsewhere, but not in a Covey way. 

So what you do instead, Mr. Covey says, is when you are scheduling your week, you put in these important-but-not-urgent activities into your schedule first, and then squeeze in the little things around them. Because once your schedule is full of little things, you can't fit in the big ones. His analogy is filling a jar with rocks and sand: if you put in the sand first, then the little rocks, the big ones don't fit, but if you put in the big rocks first, all the little stuff will fit in around them. Here's a YouTube video demonstrating this with actual rocks and sand. There are a million videos of it, but this one was short, if not very neatly done.

Gotta move on to another big rock. I'll continue this soon, I hope...

*unless you have this guilt-inducing song running through your head all the time, as I often do