Load Your Day Like You Fill a Jar With Rocks

What is the Jar-Rock-Pebbles-Sand all about?

The Jar-Rock-Pebbles-Sand tale is a powerful visual representation that speaks volumes about the importance of prioritizing our daily tasks and activities. I.Liv. brings the concept to our daily life! In addition to helping us define and visualize our PRIORITIES, we use the size of the rocks and pebbles to help us QUANTIFY our daily intentions.

Let’s step through each key element of this powerful analogy:

The Jar represents our day. As the jar is fundamentally limited in capacity to hold contents, our days our fundamentally limited with time. We cannot do *all* the things. If that is our goal (consciously or subconsciously) we are setting ourselves up for failure, by design.

The Rocks are equivalent to the most important priorities in our day and/or major things (in consideration of size) that we want/need to accomplish in the day.  As the jar capacity is limited to the number of overall items in your jar, these go into the jar first.

• Ex: Time with your family, maintaining proper health, top work priorities that drive value, personal replenishment activities.

Pebbles represent the things that matter and/or things that we want/need to accomplish in the day.

• Ex. Regular job tasks to get done, household tasks, hobbies, and friendships.

Sand represents the remaining filler in life and minutiae of things we want to get done. We can also consider here things that will just happen without too much purposeful intention needed from us. As we know there is always room for sand to fit into the jar; in I.Liv. we don’t include sand in our plans. It will be OK!

• Ex: This could be small things such as watching television, browsing through your favorite social media site, or running errands. These things don’t mean much to your life as a whole, and are likely only done to waste time or get small tasks accomplished.

• Ex. Sand can also include important routine things that you know will be done (ex. drop of kids to school)

Let’s consider how one might best fill the jar with rocks, pebbles and sand.

• If we start loading the jar with big rocks, even when the jar seems full, we can make room for the smaller pebbles to slide in. Once no more pebbles fit, we can still pour in the sand to fill the smallest spaces available.  
• If we started by filling the jar with sand, there would be no way to add the rocks and pebbles after. 

The metaphor compares the rocks, pebbles and sand with the things that we let into our life. If a person spends all their time on small and insignificant things first (sand), there is no room for the things that really matter (rocks and pebbles). The analogy teaches us to prioritize the important things first – there will always be room for the little things!  

How do we use the Jar-Rock-Pebbles concept in I.Liv.?

The concept and benefits of daily personal prioritization are easy to understand, yet incredibly difficult to master and practice consistently. Let’s work to use the Jar-Rock-Pebbles-Sand analogy – and I.Liv. tooling that brings it to life – to help us put this to practice daily and reap the immense benefits!