What Most People Get Wrong About Time Management
When I was in high school, I read a famous parable in which a professor fills a large clear jar with rocks until no more rocks can fit into the jar. He asks the students if the jar is full. And they say yes. Then he proceeds to pour tiny pebbles into the jar which fill in all the cracks between the rocks. He again asks the students if the jar is full. Again, they say yes. He then pours sand into the jar which fills all the space between the pebbles. And then the jar is finally full.
The point of the professor’s exercise is that the jar represents your life. The rocks, pebbles, and sand represent how you spend your life. Rocks are the big, important things in your life. Pebbles are the less important things. And the sand represents the filler activities.
A typical day for a typical worker is mostly filled with sand. The average worker spends five hours per day returning emails1, 4.3 hours in meetings 2, 2.5 hours on social media3, and unlocks their phone 150 times4. Days like this involve a lot of multitasking and switch tasking between small, unimportant tasks. Such days are not only stressful and unfulfilling, but they are also unproductive.
Stress arises when there is conflict or tension. The day above is stressful because we are spending our time on activities that don’t align with our priorities. Work itself is typically not the cause of stress. Not getting to important things is stressful, and working on things that aren’t consistent with our values or priorities is stressful.
Early in my life, in my quest to be more productive, I tried nearly every time management technique. I batched my emails and learned how to create and rank my to-do list. But these techniques really just helped me jam as much as I could of anything into that jar: sand, pebbles, and occasionally some rocks. As my career and life progressed, I realized I couldn’t keep stuffing things into my jar—I could fill ten jars with all the things I needed to do—and I only have one. I was exhausted, stressed, and burned out.
The Big Rocks
In 2009, I started working with an executive coach, and I have talked to a coach nearly every week since then. Through the coaching process, I began to create time and space to ask myself what was important and what really mattered. And with the help of my coach, I began to schedule time for those priorities, often by literally pulling out my calendar during our coaching calls and scheduling time for each of the priorities that come to light.
Rather than focusing on time management “techniques,” I ask myself the deeper questions of: “What matters most to me?” “What can I and only I do that if done well will have the greatest impact on Alpine?” “What are my true goals for students at Stanford?” “How can I spend the most quality time with my kids?”
These questions are not always easy to answer. And the process of answering them requires us to make space and step back. We have to spend an hour not cleaning out our inboxes or sitting in meetings. We have to be comfortable using this hour to think.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “If I have six hours to chop down a tree, I will spend five of those hours sharpening my axe.” Lincoln had it right. Sharpening your axe—figuring out what is important—will save you decades.
Spending time with my coach getting clear on my priorities and then scheduling time to tackle them turned out to be exactly the process the professor with the jar suggested several decades earlier. With the help of my coach and my calendar, I started filling my jar with my big rocks (see appendix for examples). Those big rocks crowded out the pebbles and the sand. Because I had the confidence that I had made time for the big rocks, I was more present in my day and I stopped stressing about not having time for the pebbles and the sand.
Summary
It is easy to get lost in the fog of war. We put our heads down and try to fight our way out of our inboxes or to-do lists. But if we really want to change our lives, we need to make space to define the rocks in our jars. We need to schedule the rocks on our calendars, and we need to be ruthless about letting the pebbles and sand go undone.
Below I describe my own example of filling my jar with my rocks. I am sharing this not because this is the “right” approach, but rather to illustrate the process.
You will realize that much of the stress in your life comes from conflict or tension. One of the greatest areas of conflict arises when what we are working on is not consistent with what is most important to us. Determining your own schedule/priorities/rocks will likely take some thought, reflection, and experimentation. And it will also take the discipline of saying “no” to lots of sand and pebbles that you’ve likely been saying yes to historically.
The activities in your daily life will align with the things that are most important and meaningful. And you’ll give yourself the gift of spending time on the things that really matter.
What better way to spend your life?
Appendix: Graham’s rocks
I am a partner at private equity firm Alpine Investors, a Lecturer in Management at Stanford GSB, and I author a blog and social media videos. I work out every day and endeavor to be a good friend, husband, and father of three teenagers.
One mindset I developed early is that the number of tasks I could tackle on any one of the areas in my life is essentially infinite. In other words, my jar will never hold all the sand and pebbles of my life, but just maybe it can hold most of the biggest rocks. I invest time in determining what these rocks are and then I proactively block the rocks on my calendar and let everything else work around them.
Personal Health: Sleep and exercise are two of my most important and consistent personal health priorities. They are the foundation upon which the rest of my life is built. My first rock is to block my calendar before 9 a.m. from now through eternity. I rarely schedule morning meetings or early flights. I can count on one hand the number of days per year I set an alarm to wake up or the number of days per year I miss a workout. I also block 90 minutes every week for physical therapy on my knee.
Family: I block 6-8 p.m. every night for family dinner. I block out many of my kids’ sporting and school events, their school vacations, and our family vacations together.
Alpine: Every week, I block 9 a.m.-noon on Mondays for our partner meeting. Every quarter, I block two days for offsites with my partners, 90 minutes twice a quarter for an offsite with the services team (which I co-lead), and a full day for an offsite with the entire Alpine team. Every year, I block a three-day offsite with the entire firm, another three-day offsite with the leadership teams of all Alpine portfolio companies, and another two-day offsite with Alpine’s investors.
Teaching: I block all the Stanford classes I teach and block two hours of prep time for each of those classes. I also block about 90 minutes every day I teach for lunches and coffee chats with students. I block several days in the seasons I am not teaching to write cases and create new content.
Self Reflection: I block one to two hours most mornings to think, write, and create my goals, and I block one hour per week for executive coaching sessions.
Many of the calendar blocks I described above are scheduled almost a year in advance. Going into the year, I know that the most important things in my life are going to happen.
One very important part of this program is to give yourself permission to NOT do most things and to not feel guilty about that. I say “no” to most requests of my time.
To read more about my take on time management, check out my past blog posts: Why Focus is a Superpower and Setting Goals: Demystified.
Adobe Email Usage Study 2019 (https://www.slideshare.net/adobe/2019-adobe-email-usage-study)
Reclaim.ai Productivity Trends Report: One-on-One Meeting Statistics 2021 (https://reclaim.ai/blog/productivity-report-one-on-one-meetings)
Statistica Daily time spent on social networking by internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2022 (in minutes)(https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/#statisticContainer)
Mary Meeker Internet Trends Report 2019 (https://www.bondcap.com/reports/it19)