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Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The sand is everything else, the small stuff. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - things that if everything else were lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. "Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognise that this is your life. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks, rocks about 2" in diameter. Stephen Coveys bucket A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. Very often if you commit specific times for the important activities you will also fiind time to fit in the less important ones. Examples would be clearing your desk and doing the filing, creating a daily to-do list (and a discipline to use it) or investing in new software.Ĭovey uses a metaphor of filling a bucket with rocks, pebbles and sand to represent activities of declining importance.
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The real skill is to commit time to processes that enable you to do things more quickly or more easily, or ensure that they get done automatically. Sometimes this just means doing things earlier. Stephen Coveys approach to time management is to create time to focus on important things before they become urgent. Inevitably, there is a tendency to focus on things that are urgent and often the urgent things are also important. Urgent activities demand immediate attention, and are often associated with the achievement of someone else's goals. Important activities have an outcome that leads to the achievement of your goals, whether these are professional or personal. It differentiates between activities that are important and those that are urgent.
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Copyright 2014 Brefi Group Limited Find out more at our comprehensive web site Coveys Four Quadrants for time management The Covey time management grid is an effective method of organising your priorities.
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