Rocks — defining the important things in life and business

Are you spending time on things that will help you reach your goals? Or, do you fall victim to a self-induced trap of responding to unnecessary e-mails, meetings, etc… that, on reflection, don’t help you reach your goals? (I was in a meeting last week where I was read to — yes, actually read to — 2 pages!)

As some of the readers know, I’m a member of a group called Vistage, “the world’s largest CEO organization”. We had a speaker who used a metaphor of a container and various items that could fill it — rocks, gravel, sand.

If you look at the container, your rocks would be the biggest items in the container, then gravel, then sand. One would only have a few rocks, more gravel, and lots of sand.

The metaphorical part is this: the rocks are big and important items (goals), gravel is important, but less so. Finally, sand takes up space, but it is not big enough to justify CEO thinking.

After the speaker finished, we thought about what he said. Our group has used the example to guide our actions — and still does.

When I take action now, I ask myself, “How does this help me reach my major goals (rocks)?”

Its very easy to get sucked in by responding to e-mails, reading blogs, listening to staff talk about things which have nothing to do with work, and so on. The “crackberry” is a perfect example of a device that will help you concentrate on sand and not rocks.

How do you spend your time?