Tool box: Prioritizing Time, Size Relative to Importance Levels

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From the course by Rice University

Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

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Rice University

Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

91 ratings

Course 1 of 3 in the Specialization Leadership Development for Engineers

Part of being an effective leader is learning how to play to your strengths and overcome characteristics that don't lend to good leadership practices. During the course, you will examine your own strengths and learn ways to use them in a leadership role. Learn to manage stress and solve problems creatively. Throughout the course, you will also build a tool kit of useful techniques that you can begin using right away in your engineering career. This course is designed for engineers who are interested in and have the desire to advance into leadership and management roles. You don't need any leadership experience to do well in this course. We ask you to reflect on your personal experiences pretty often,, so some work experience will help you in that aspect, but we hope that most of what you learn here will be applicable to many areas of your life.

From the lesson

Engineering Profession

Discuss the challenges that engineers will face in the future and continue developing your toolbox with strategies for managing your time and how to prioritize.

Tool Box: Time Management5:10

Tool box: Prioritizing Time, Size Relative to Importance Levels4:05

Dave's Journal - Reflections on the Pace of Change1:59

Meet the Instructors

David Van Kleeck
Professor in the Practice of Engineering Leadership
Rice Center for Engineering Leadership

Earlier in this lesson I described the four quadrant approach to

prioritizing the activities in your life.

Over 30 years ago, I came across another way of doing that.

I came across a description of a professor doing a demonstration in his class that

is now over the years become called the Big Rocks Approach to time prioritization.

In his experiment, he described the time available for

a person as being analogous to a jar.

In that jar, we have to put those things in our life,

whether they are very important, medium importance, or low importance.

He described putting big rocks into the jar.

I'm modeling those with golf balls here.

And these would be the important things, your family, your friends, maybe your job.

[SOUND] At this point the professor asked, is the jar full?

And many of the student in class responded, why of course?

He then pulled out a bag of pebbles and proceeded to fill the jar again.

[SOUND] And the professor

asked again,

is the jar full?

Students are beginning to catch on at this point and

realize that, There was a lesson in mind.

But there were still some students who thought that the jar wasn't full.

So the professor pulled out some sand and proceeded to fill the jar once more.

And again, he asked his students, is the jar full?

Now the students weren't quite sure what to say, but clearly,

they were beginning to catch on.

Professor said, of course it's not full yet.

Whereupon he took out a glass of water and proceeded to fill the jar.

At that point, he agreed that the jar was full, but I know that you,

as scientists and engineers, would still recognize that at the molecular level,

there's still mostly space inside this jar.

His point was, though, that in order to make all of these things,

the important things, the medium importance things, and

the low importance things, in order to make them all fit in the time available,

they had to be placed in the jar in the correct order.

I'll demonstrate now what happens when you don't put them in in the right order.

Now that we've seen what it looks like to put the big rocks in first, let's see

what happens if we start filling our lives with the less important stuff first.

What if I fill the jar with the sand first?

And then I add the pebbles, the medium important stuff in our lives.

And then try to put in as many of the big things as I can.

And what we see is that very quickly, there's no longer space for

the big, important things in our lives.

The lesson here is that unless you put the big rocks in first, you won't have space

for all of the things that you would like to accomplish in your lives.

So whether you use the four quadrant approach or

the big rocks approach, it's up to you.

However, one of those two techniques ought to help guide you in

determining what things are most important in your life.

Good luck as you make your prioritization decisions.

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