Several years ago, I had a memorable conversation with a favorite client of mine. We were sitting around a cafeteria lunch table during an Intensive Day with her and her team and having a personal chat about what her “Big Rocks” were at the time.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Stephen Covey’s concept of “Big Rocks,” essentially it’s the basic principle that if you put the most important projects, activities, or relationships into your schedule first, then you can let everything else get filtered in around those priorities. Taking this approach ensures that what’s actually important to you doesn’t get ignored, neglected, or shafted in the constant demands on our time and attention by so many other things.
I remember asking my client if she knew what her “Big Rocks” were right now. She proceeded to name off not just 2 or 3, not even 5 or 6. She gave me a list of 17. Holy moly… I can still remember how I felt in that moment and the “Ah-ha” experience that came afterward. What she was naming weren’t “Big Rocks,” it was a list of all the major (and minor) projects currently on her plate. Including some in which someone else on her staff was actually taking point and her only role was to supervise and advise. What we needed to help her figure out was how to focus and get really clear on what was truly most important to her right now.
As we’re coming to the end of 2016 and looking forward to wrapping up the year, this is a good piece of thinking for many of us to do. First, there’s only so much time left in the year, and now might be the time for “laser focus,” if you want to end the year with strength. Or, alternatively, as you look forward to imagine the projects and outcomes you want to achieve in 2017, you might benefit from spending some time getting clear on your new Big Rocks for the next season.
Thus, the question… how do I choose my big rocks?
Why Do We Struggle to Choose?
Here’s the challenge that all of us face… we all have so many things we care about. We want to feel like we’re taking care of all these important parts of our lives, but there simply isn’t enough time or energy in the day. So, we end up feeling spread thin and going crazy.
I believe that part of the problem is that we try to show up, full throttle and full time, for everything in our lives. The reality is that both our time and our energy are limited. It’s simply impossible to give 100% to everything, all the time.
Imagine you’re sitting in a sound booth behind an audio mixing board. You control the volume for each of the instruments that make up the beautiful music of your life. If you simply push the volume levers of everything up to the top, what you get is a cacophony of noise, not powerful, elegant, well-balanced music. Maybe you love country, pop, classical, or jazz… it doesn’t matter the style there are times for crescendos and gentle moments. There are highlighted solos and silent rests.
Perhaps a visual metaphor would appeal more. If you throw the same amount of every color onto the canvas of your life, what will you get? A brown mush. While I love brown, it’s the shifts and changes in the spectrum of color in which every hue claims its own space that creates a stunning painting and great art.
So, what does this mean when it comes to the priorities in your life? It means that we need to get comfortable with continuously shifting our priorities. It’s about creating pulses to our lives in which we focus energy in certain places and allow other activities to hang out in the background for a while. In other words, your life has pulses and seasons in which one area takes prominence and others are on the “back burner.”
If we embrace that pulse as normal, and if we prepare ourselves to consistently shift gears rather than spreading ourselves thin… how might life feel different? Less exhaustion, less feeling constantly spread thin, less confusion about what’s most important right now.
Embrace the Pulse & Choose Your Priority Right Now
When we accept that we can’t do everything and be everywhere constantly, then the obvious next question becomes… how do we choose the priority right now?
While we could talk about general categories: family, health, career, finances, etc when we think in such generalities it becomes far too difficult to weigh our priorities, so we need to get clear about the specific outcomes that we currently desire to create in our lives. Others would call these “SMART Goals,” but I’ve gone on record several times in the past with my opinion that SMART goals, for most entrepreneurs, are problematic (particularly in terms of setting times & deadlines.)
As Bill Gates once said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” What does this mean for choosing your current Big Rocks? We need to think much more specifically, smaller, and close term on what can be achieved right now that would bring us in line to accomplish greater things in time. It’s all about breaking big, audacious goals into smaller more immediate outcomes and projects.
So, if you want to identify your current Big Rocks, then remember my story at the beginning? Start by creating a list of all your currently important outcomes or projects. This list becomes a menu of choices for you. The challenge becomes to then focus on just 1-2 for right now. That doesn’t mean that the other projects get completely ignored. It just means that they are in “maintenance mode” for the immediate term.
I have been exploring this concept deeply with my clients and my own research. Since we can’t effectively do 6-10 things at once, we need to focus. Therefore, here’s what I suggest: Think of the next 5-6 weeks as one pulse. It’s one focused period of time in which you can aim to get something powerful done in one area of your life (or at most two.)
With a greater level of focused intensity you can more easily make decisions and create powerful changes in your life. Think of it… what if you dedicated the next 5 weeks to developing your new website, to writing your book manuscript, to improving your personal sense of joy? How much progress do you think you could make if one project were your primary focus?
You may not finish the project in that time, but at the end of the pulse you can pause, regroup, and decide how you will dedicate your next pulse of focus. Will you keep that project in the foreground or determine how to shift it to low gear in order to maintain slower progress in the background while putting something new front and center.
Next Actions
If you decided that for the next 5 weeks you would focus on one priority, what would that priority be? It’s your life. It’s your decision. And, when you start your next pulse… you can choose something else!
So, give yourself a place to focus and see what you can get done.
