Putting Your Rocks in the Jar First

This week the NoLimits team have been working on their objectives. My assistant and I were going through our objectives to make sure we were in sync. I tend to be a big picture person and had drawn up my six big wins for the next year. My assistant who is more detail orientated, emailed me her objectives. There was a list of at least 30 objectives. I felt quite overwhelmed and tired just by reading them. Her objectives had become a shopping list of individual tasks.

My assistant and I sat down and chatted about our objectives and when explaining about differentiating between tasks and objectives, I shared with her the Stephen Covey, 'Rocks in the Jar' analogy. In his book 'First Things First' Stephen Covey describes the following story:

An instructor at a lecture reaches under his table and retrieves a large gallon jar. He reaches to the side of the jar where there are some fist sized rocks and he starts putting the rocks in the jar until he can't get any more in. He asks the audience if the jar is full. They reply "yes". So he reaches under the table and pulls out a bucket of gravel. As he fills the spaces with gravel, he asks his audience if the jar is full. By now the audience suspects that it isn't full so they say "most probably not". The instructor reaches under the table and pours sand into the jar until it appears full and asks the audience if the jar is now full. "No" the audience shouts. "Good" responds the instructor. So he reaches under the table and retrieves a jug of water, pouring at least a quarter of a gallon of water into the jar until it is full. He asks his audience what's the point. His audience responds that if you work really hard you can always fit extra in. The instructor's response is "No, that's not the point. If you hadn't put the rocks in the jar first, you wouldn't have got any of them in."

Similarly when setting objectives, it's good to establish the rocks first and ask 'what are going to be my key, big wins?' Otherwise we can get so caught up with the detailed small tasks that we can't see the wood for the trees. I asked my assistant to group the individual tasks into overall key objectives in order to have clear signposts of the key big wins over the next year. Once this was established, she can then address each key objective with the list of tasks necessary to achieve it.

Now that we know what our rocks are, we have a clear vision of the route ahead.