How to Stop Saying There’s Not Enough Time
Why do some of us struggle with time, while others make it look so easy? We all have the same 24 hours in every day.
I like to keep things simple, so a good visual goes a long way for me.
Imagine you have a large glass jar. Next to it, you have a few large rocks, a small pile of marble sized pebbles, and a pile of sand. If you put in the sand or pebbles first, what happens? You can’t fit the big rocks in. But if you add the big rocks first, followed by the medium sized pebbles, and only then the sand, it all fits. (I got this from Tim Ferris, serial experimenter, podcaster, author, etc)
It’s a crystal clear reminder that the important things — the big rocks — come first. So why is it so easy to do the opposite? To get so focused and exasperated from dealing with the minutia that we repeat unhelpful mantras like:
“I’ll make time for that {important thing} tomorrow, or next week when it’s not so crazy, or next month after the Holidays, once this project is done, when I retire…”
The big rocks are the things that matter. In my personal life, that’s my kids, Nicole, the couple of handfuls of friends and family that I love and connect with, and my health. A positive state of health and wellbeing is the cornerstone for success in anything and everything. We can measure that health by our physical, emotional and social states.
If you are looking for the big rocks, start with your own personal state of the union.
Not sure how to put this into action? First, check your ‘personal state’ — your physical, emotional and social health. How does your body feel and are you moving enough and with some variety? Is your mind racing with schedules, worry, doubt, resentment and if so, what are you doing to quiet that fire? How are your relationships and are you nurturing the good ones or forcing the bad ones?
When your personal state is in the positive, the stories you tell yourself and others create a powerfully positive narrative. The opposite is true for when your story has shifted to the dark side. This internal and external narrative is the best barometer of what your state is at any given point. Use it to check yourself and to right yourself. It can be as simple as noticing when you are thinking and spewing negativity and deciding to stop.
The big rock visual works in business too. For me, the one thing I don’t want sitting outside my jar is customer service. We are a customer service company that happens to help people with pain, fitness, and performance. You can’t help people — in the way we seek to — without building relationships with them.
We measure our success by the personal state of our clients and by clearing the path for them to move better and feel better, so they have the freedom to do whatever they like. When you sift away the sand the the pebbles, it really is that simple.
In my consulting practice with people and organizations, we find the big rocks by asking questions to identify two things: what they really want (not always obvious), and what has gotten in the way of that. Once you recognize barriers, you have an opportunity to remove them. Often the gold is not found by adding more, but by taking away.
Here’s a recent example. When consulting for a non-profit in Boston, the issue at hand was an 80% participant drop out rate. The point of the organization is to make it easy for a specific group of people to get much needed, highly specialized, life saving services around PTSD.
I organized the research around my personal and professional experiences, asked a lot of layered questions, worked closely with the team on the front lines, and went to Boston to present my two cents. They were putting the sand and medium sized pebbles in the jar first and there was no room for the big rocks.
I did a customer on-boarding analysis, taking screenshots of my online registration process as if I were someone in their target audience attempting to sign up for the program directly from their website. This is a non-profit closely associated with a BIG hospital system. Someone made the call that all communications with even potential participants (the people they seek to serve) had to be ’secure’.
I presented the leadership with screenshots, of the 13 frustrating steps I had to go through in order to receive my first ‘welcome’ email from them. After all my trouble, the ‘welcome email’ was decidedly underwhelming. They had absolutely no idea this was happening to potential participants. The unintended consequence from that one decision to require ’secure’ communications was devastating to their mission.
I felt like Ralphie in the The Christmas Story when he worked his butt off to get his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring, excitedly wrote down his first secret code, found the only place in the house he could get some privacy, and broke the code… only to reveal a crummy commercial: Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
Back in Boston, there were three big problems with insisting on this ’secure’ policy so early on in the engagement process:
- The people they are seeking to serve, by the nature of their circumstances, are easily frustrated and skeptical.
- There was nothing confidential being shared, so a 13 step process to ensure the security of the impersonal ‘welcome email’ was overkill.
- People in real need were dropping out before they even began.
Time, after all, is our only real commodity. They were wasting their own time by creating these inefficient and elaborate systems. Even worse, they were wasting precious time and patience of those they set out to support.
When things aren’t working — in life, work, relationships — it’s worth taking the time to dump out your jar and choose the biggest rocks first.
