After reading Kai Nagata’s blog on why he quit his CTV reporting job, I got to thinking about people who make radical changes in the direction their life is going. For those of us older than Kai, it’s called mid-life crisis and I think it’s a healthy phase to go through. It’s a time of re-evaluating where we are going and where we’d like to go.
One thing Kai wrote that struck me, especially coming from a 24-year old, was “…on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life.” Hmmm. It’s true. Our lives are short. We should reflect on how we are spending our time on earth. We learn to manage our time at work. Why not take it to a larger scale and learn to manage our time on earth?
Like many others, I participated in a time management training session at work. We were taught to identify our high priorities on the job and focus our energies there (see Quadrants 1, 2 in the table below). Smaller, distracting tasks (Quadrant 3) should just fill in the time around those larger priorities. Activities in Quadrant 4 are the time-wasters and should be avoided altogether.
Why not apply those same principles to our lives? If we did, what would we be doing? What to us are the most important activities in life? What are the things we would regret not doing when we die? “I wish I had had the courage to live a life true to myself” is a common regret of people on their deathbeds. If we can learn to identify what are our Quadrant 1’s in life and make sure we work on those things, our lives will be filled with activities that lead us towards fulfillment, not regret.
Our time management instructor used the illustration of the large rocks and small rocks in a jar to explain how you to change your priorities in order to spend time on what’s important. The jar is your time. Important activities (Quadrant 1’s and 2’s) are big rocks. If you fill up your jar with sand and small rocks first (the unimportant activities), and wait to put in the big rocks into the jar later, you won’t be able to fit the big rocks into the jar. What’s important for you to accomplish won’t happen.
But, if you fill up your jar with big rocks first and then let the little rocks and the sand (unimportant activities) fill in the time around those big, important rocks, you will be able to accomplish the things that are really important because they will come first. You will also get all the little things done because they will fill in around the big items.
If we apply that same concept to our lives, we should be filling our time on earth and focusing on those things that are important for us to achieve in life. And we should let the smaller, distracting activities fill in around those priorities.
I had to think this through for myself. What are the most important things I want to accomplish in life?
I came up with these for my own Quadrant 1’s:
- Take care of my loved ones
- Live in a happy, loving, sharing relationship
- Learn as much as I can
- Travel as much as I can
- Help others see their potential and run with it
- Share knowledge, joy
It’s not really a bucket list, although that’s a great exercise as well. It’s about prioritizing time. We only go around once: we should manage that time well and work on what’s truly significant to us.
So…what are your big rocks? What would you like to spend your time on earth doing?
