36. Prioritize What Matters: Use the Big Rocks Method to Reclaim Your Time

Feeling stretched too thin? In this episode of The Nurse’s Breakroom with Jenny Lytle, RN, we dive into a powerful time management and prioritization tool: the Big Rocks Method. Jenny reflects on her personal time audit and shares how tracking your time and identifying your true priorities can be a game-changer in reducing overwhelm and increasing intentionality.

Whether you're a nurse, solopreneur, caregiver, or all of the above, this quick but powerful episode will help you reclaim your time, clarify your focus, and take meaningful steps toward living a life that aligns with your values.

💡 Takeaways + Action Steps

• Track it to change it: Consider doing a 1-week time audit, noting your activities in 30-minute increments.
• Big Rocks First: Identify your top 3 life priorities—your “big rocks”—and make time for them before the sand (small stuff) fills your schedule.
• Assess & Align: Ask yourself: Does how I spend my time reflect what’s most important to me?
• Choose one change: What’s one small shift you can make to prioritize better?
• Watch for self-sabotage: What might get in your way—and how will you overcome it?

✨ Remember: Self-care isn't selfish. It's essential.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or like there’s never enough time, I’ve got something just for you! Head to https://selfcareisntselfish.com to grab your FREE copy of my book, Self-Care Isn’t Selfish: The Compassionate Nurse’s Step-by-Step Guide to Personalized Stress Relief. It’s packed with simple, effective strategies to help you prioritize your needs—without guilt—so you can feel energized, focused, and ready to take on the day. Go to https://selfcareisntselfish.com 

Looking for connection with people who get the stress and self-care struggles of nurses and caregivers? Check out https://thenursesbreakroom.com

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennylytlern/

More ways to connect here: https://linktr.ee/jennylytle

Chapters

• 0:58 Welcome & Time Audit Recap
• 1:45 Introducing the Big Rocks Exercise
• 3:50 Identifying Your Real Priorities
• 6:01 Aligning Time With Priorities
• 7:23 Self-Reflection and Episode Closing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:29

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Nurse's Breakroom with Jenny Lytle RN. Last week we talked about looking at our time and seeing where it goes and then figuring out are there changes that need to be made? With that, maybe and I talked about my own awakening, I guess, when I really took the time to mark down what I had going on and I realized that there was a reason that I wasn't able to gain a lot of traction in some of the big projects that I was looking at it's because I really didn't have many pockets of time, and there are definitely areas where I am looking at ways to be more efficient and maybe steps that don't need to be taken or things that I could potentially delegate. But as a solopreneur and a woman working full-time in regular nursing as well, and as a wife and a mom and a friend and a nana all of those things it's a matter of looking a little deeper, and so this week we are taking a look at something that you quite possibly have heard of before, but we're looking at prioritizing and doing this with a big rocks, littles exercise.

Speaker 1: 1:51

So in this story there's a teacher who is addressing the class and he fills this jug with big rocks and asks the class if it's full, and they say yes, and so then he adds pebbles to the jug and he asks again if it's full, and again the class says yes. And then he adds sand to the jug. Then they say okay, yeah, it's full. The sand and the pebbles represent the small daily tasks, the little things that we fill our lives with, and if we don't put our big rocks in first, then all we're going to have is the sand and the pebbles. But if we start with our big rocks, then there's room for what's important in life. We create that, and then the sand and the pebbles they just fill in the spaces in between. You can and you can go on. They just fill in the spaces in between. You can go on YouTube and see some different illustrations of this if you're more of a visual person, but just taking the time to do this exercise helps to see where your real priorities are, what are your big rocks, and then thinking about the little things that often can crowd out our time, like last week I talked about.

Speaker 1: 3:20

I did a time audit where for a week, I put down what I was doing every half hour, and that was very helpful for me. That was very eye-opening. For now you can just think about what do you spend most of your time on, and if you don't know, doing a time audit might not be a bad idea. But with that, just make a list of whatever comes to mind and then what's the one big thing that zaps your time at the present? And it's something that's unwelcome, not something that is a necessary part of life or a wanted part of your life, but just one of those things that kind of creeps in and thinking about what needs to change with that.

Speaker 1: 4:05

And so I challenge you to take a little bit of time to think about what's truly important to you in your life, what are your top three priorities right now and what one thing is most important in your life right now, and those are things that can change. For us and our families, families, friends, relationships. Those things are often most important, but they aren't often the things that we spend the most time on because of work and things like that. So our number one priority doesn't necessarily mean it's getting our number one time or that it can get our biggest amount of time, and that's okay too, but just knowing that okay. So if these things are my highest priorities, then I need to start with making sure that I am making time for those things, that I'm scheduling that out first, whatever that looks like.

Speaker 1: 5:08

And so think about what are your big rocks in life right now, what's most important to you, and then think about your pebbles, the lower level priorities or activities, and then think about the sand and what is the sand in your life.

Speaker 1: 5:32

So, when you've done this, think about how does where you're currently spending your time line up with your big rocks, your real priorities, and what does that tell you, what kind of things need to change and what could you do differently, and what's the easiest change you could make to prioritize your time better?

Speaker 1: 5:53

Are you willing to change anything to prioritize your time better? Are you willing to change anything to prioritize your time better and, if so, what? What could get in the way If you were going to sabotage yourself? How would you do it and what will you commit to? What will you change or do differently? Take a look at all of this that you've worked through and thought about and identify three actions that you can take to focus on your big rocks in life, and then think about what's the biggest thing you learned about yourself from doing this, and sometimes just taking time to think about things that we often just do on autopilot is a great first step. So until next time, remember self-care isn't selfish. It's essential if we want to continue to care for others and live our best lives. Have a great week.