A teacher of mine once taught me the following simple lesson about managing time. From a bag she removed a large empty glass jar and placed it on the table in front of the class. Next she removed a bag full of colorful wooden blocks of different shapes and sizes. Last of all, she pulled a small metal bucket of sand from her bag and placed it in on the table.
Our teacher emptied the bucket of sand into the large empty glass jar so that the jar was about half-full of sand. "Now," she said, "I want you to come put these red, blue, and yellow wood blocks into the jar. We need to fit all of them in the jar." For the next few minutes, the five of us took turns trying to fit all of the blocks into the jar, but it just couldn't be done. There wasn't enough room. After we'd all had a chance to try, our teacher announced that our time was up and sent us back to our seats. "Do you want to know how to make it all fit," she whispered to us? "Yes," we responded enthusiastically, "Show us!"
The teacher proceeded to remove all of the blocks from the jar and placed them on the table. Next, she poured the sand back into the bucket it came from. Teacher then placed the blocks back into the empty jar. With no sand in the jar, the blocks fit, but came all the way to the brim of the jar. Next, the teacher poured all of the sand from the bucket into the jar of blocks. The sand filled in the empty spaces between the blocks, and the sand and blocks all fit in the jar perfectly. "Ooooh," we exclaimed.
"This is like life," our teacher said. "The blocks represent the most important things in our lives like our families and school." The sand is everything else, like playing with our friends and watching cartoons. When we put the sand in the jar first, we can't fit all of the important things in. But when we do the most important things first, we can still fit all of the other "fun" things in too."
Though simple, that lesson was powerful to me and I have not forgotten it.
Thanks to Universal Accounting
