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.
