Big Rocks

The FranklinCovey's Big Rocks video is a concept about priorities in habit no. 4: “put first things first”, which is  part of Stephen Covey’s book "The 7 habits of highly effective people". In the video a lady was asked to put all the big rocks on the table in a bowl the guy already filled with many small tiny rocks. Her job was to fit them all in, but she struggled with that. The tiny stones represented all the things that fill our lives and gradually accumulate. The bowl representing our life is filled with these little rocks. The big rocks that the lady tries to fit in the bowl ('our life') while the tiny rocks are there, represent things such as: Planning & empowerment; Relationships & family; Employment; Big opportunity; Major projects; Service/community/church. She kept moving the tiny rocks around to be able to squeeze in some of the big rocks and found that she couldn't fit all the rocks. Some rocks remained outside and she had to give up rocks that represented for example, 'vacation'; 'block of time for self'; 'important & urgent things'. However, the presenter told her maybe she can try a different approach ('a different paradigm') and start from the beginning with a new empty bowl.

The lady then

puts the big rocks first at the bottom of the new bowl, starting with the most important things to her, then she dumped all the small rocks on top and they filled the spaces in between the big rocks and on top of them and everything fit in the bowl ( her life).

The purpose of this video is to show people how having a paradigm shift can help them prioritize the things in their lives and make them able to focus on the big things and not having to give up these important things, while also being able to manage the little things that are not as important, but do occupy time. The big rocks are the most important priorities in your life, so by putting them first in the bowl, this means you put them in your schedule first and then the less important things, represented by the tiny rocks can find a way to fit themselves in your schedule. In other words, it's not about getting things done, but its about getting the right things done. This is what paradigm shift means, to basically to choose your priorities in life and decide on what is important for you and schedule those first, not the other way round. 

The concept of this paradigm shift is an important technique in time management and makes us become efficient, without having to give up meaningful things in our lives that are the most important things we sometimes take for granted and then regret later when we realize it. I can connect this in my life, as being a student athlete makes me sometimes overwhelmed and my schedule and my life is usually packed with many things, such as school assignments and studying, training, socializing with friends, spending time with family, and many other little things that are not important and could be regarded as time wasters. I also tend to get distracted easily by these little "unimportant" things and another habit that I have is that I sometimes tend to procrastinate. 

This video reminded me when my mother in an attempt to help me organize my time and keep me focused on the important things told me about Steven Covey's time management matrix, where things are put into 4 quadrants, as shown in the picture.

Usually the things that consume most of the time and waste a lot of time are the Urgent/Not Important things, they are distractions such as phone calls (tiny rocks), they can be delegated. For effectiveness, we should be focused more on the Not urgent/ Important (big big rocks) as these are mainly the things that matter and should be your priority like spending quality time with family, praying or planning. The Urgent/Important need to be done immediately, as they could be things such as crises, emergencies or deadlines.Things that are Not urgent/Not important (tiny rocks) such as wasting time scrolling on instagram, should be at the bottom of the priority list and, they should be limited and done later.