The word is alarmingly fast-paced. And if your days involve a ton of work, you’ll be surprised to see how quickly time can fly. Many times, we try to pack in so much into a short time by doing smaller simpler tasks. This has the tendency to keep us heavily distracted with smaller activities.
No perfectionism, please!
As someone who is somewhat perfectionist in my approach to work, I tend to be extremely fixated on details. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The world needs people who pay laser focused attention to details. After all, it is a skill that is vital for maximizing efficiency in any endeavour.
On the other hand, without a balance to this extremity, it can become problematic, eating slowly into your productive time. For instance, I have often found myself in situations where I have struggled with finishing work and meeting deadlines because I got stuck on researching the appropriateness of one word. One minute, you’re entering a google search for the question, ‘What was the precise time and location of … incident?’, the next minute, you’re reading a 200 page material on the subject ‘for context and accuracy’. Next thing you know, it’s 8pm and you haven’t completed one single activity, even though you’ve been busy all day.
Big Rocks
Even if you don’t have this precise struggle, I believe we all need help to maximise our productivity, especially as it relates to work. So, for me, the first step to achieving this is simple: Do the hard work first. Very often, the hardest work is the most important anyway, whether it’s in terms of complexity, time consumption, or time constraints. Devote some of your time and energy to getting the most complex, most urgent, and most time consuming work out of the way before giving the rest of your resources to the rest of your obligations.
This is known as the ‘Big Rocks’ principle in management. It uses the analogy of filling a jar or bucket with big rocks, smaller pebbles, and sand. If you fill your container with sand, you have no space left for pebbles, much less rocks. But putting the rocks in first leaves room for pebbles and sand to fill in the spaces that will be left by the rocks.
This principle works pretty well whether you are trying to manage your time, finances, energy, or life in general. And it certainly does wonders for your work, boosting your productivity and reducing your stress. So, the next time you’re drawing up your schedule, remember to put the big rocks first and do the hard work first.