30 Put The Big Rocks In First

Your days can be packed and still feel oddly empty, and that’s the warning sign we start with. When everything is “urgent,” the calendar fills up with small rocks like email, admin work, and constant interruptions, leaving no space for the work and relationships that make life feel meaningful. We use the simple “big rocks” jar metaphor to explain why this happens and how to fix it with intentional prioritization.

We talk about the most common pattern we see in busy professionals: starting the day reactively by opening the inbox and letting other people’s priorities set the agenda. That creates the illusion of productivity because tasks get checked off, but progress stalls. We also connect the idea to practical frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix and the 80/20 principle, where a small set of high-impact activities drives most results.

From there, we get concrete with time management: identify your true big rocks, write them down, and schedule them first with calendar blocking. That might mean protected deep work, exercise, key client work, family time, recovery, or even vacations planned far in advance. The key is treating those blocks as non-negotiable appointments and letting everything else fit around them, not the other way around.

If you want less stress, more focus, and a stronger sense of accomplishment, try our “top three big rocks” challenge for the next week. Subscribe, share this with a friend who feels buried, and leave a review, then tell us: what big rock are you putting on your calendar first?

Blinn Bates - BlinnBates.com

Woods & Bates, P.C. - WoodsandBates.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Welcome back. Do your days feel full but not meaningful? If they do, there's a good chance your schedule is going to be packed with small rocks instead of the big rocks. Today I want to talk to you about big rocks, what they are. This is one of the most powerful prioritization concepts that I think is out there, and it's to put the big rocks in first. If we aren't intentionally prioritizing what matters to us, our life's going to fill up with the small rocks or the things that don't matter at all. So there's a visual that goes

Busy Days That Feel Empty

SPEAKER_00 1:00

along with this, but if you can imagine for a second a big jar and the jar is empty, and that jar is going to represent your time and your capacity. And we have things that we want to put in that jar. There's a stack of larger rocks, there's smaller, increasingly smaller rocks down to sand and then water. So if we're putting in the water and the sand and the smaller rocks first, we're

The Big Rocks Jar Metaphor

SPEAKER_00 1:28

not going to have any room for the larger rocks. And our larger rocks in this example represent our highest priorities, important goals like our health, family, strategic work, things like that. Our small rocks or our sand or water even. Those are our email interruptions every day, administrative tasks, social media doom scrolling, busy work, these low value obligations. If we're throwing all of these small rocks in first, our big rocks aren't going to fit. But if we put all the big rocks in first, everything else is going to fit around them. So our calendars work the same way. Most busy professionals start the day reactively. They open their email and they start seeing what's important to other people. They handle those easy tasks first, and we're spending our energy doing that on these urgent things that are not necessarily important. So we talked before about how to get the email under control, how to prioritize with things like the Eisenhower matrix. We're planning

Reactive Work And Email Take Over

SPEAKER_00 2:35

our days, planning our weeks, and we're trying to limit interruptions. Ultimately, the result of all that is if we're not doing it, our important work gets pushed to later and later never comes. So these seemingly urgent tasks that are not important scream at us while our important tasks are whispering at us, and so we're not dealing with those when we ought to be. So to do this right, we have to think about what is going to be most important to us. So we have to sit down and actually think what's what are my priorities? Are they key client relationships, spending time with my family, friends, exercise, my health, you know, planning for growing the business, business development, deep work, just recovery, reflection, things like that. Are those, what are my priorities? Not everything is going to be equal. As we

Choosing Priorities With The 80/20 Rule

SPEAKER_00 3:29

have also talked about, our big rocks in this case are going to make up the 20% in the 80-20 principle. So 20% of our activities or our big rocks, those are the things that are going to create the biggest results. So once we've identified our top priorities, we want to write those down. These are the things that absolutely should happen this week. What things deserve my best energy? And then we're going to schedule those. So we're going to put them on the calendar. Maybe we're going to block several hours at a time for deep work, or we're going to put our exercise on the calendar. I'm going to go to the gym at nine o'clock every day. Maybe there's family events that are important to us. We want to get those on the calendar. Maybe we have upcoming deadlines and things like that. So we want to plot some time

Block Your Big Rocks On Calendar

SPEAKER_00 4:18

to do the work to hit those deadlines. One of my favorite ones is vacations. We want to look at the calendar even further out. And we want to say, okay, I want to go on vacation this week or this two weeks. And we put that on the calendar and block that off ahead of time. And then we know that matters. It's going to deserve our calendar space. It's now saved for when we want it. Then we protect those. So we're going to put boundaries around our calendar. These things are non-negotiable. I don't need to be interrupted. I don't need to be looking at email. I don't want meetings scheduled over them. I want those appointments to be treated like any other appointment on my calendar. And then we're going to let everything else fill in the gap. So everything that's left on the calendar, that's where you're getting your email processed, you're getting your administrative tasks, you're getting your busy work

Protect Deep Work With Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 5:12

done, and not the other way around. So we're not going to give our best hours to our least important work. We're going to give it to our most important work. A lot of people confuse activity with progress. We can be really, really busy all day, and it can still be an unproductive day. If we're crossing off these little unimportant tasks, it's creating the illusion that we're accomplishing things when in reality we're just procrastinating the things that have actually matter. These big important things in our lives typically ref require

Activity Versus Real Progress

SPEAKER_00 5:45

more focus. They require more energy. And we have to be intentional about putting those on the calendar and making sure that they come first. So this week I would challenge you to identify your top three big rocks, schedule those, block those on your calendar, and then fill in the blanks with all of the other things that are not that important. Take a look at what your productivity feels like after a week or two of that, what your stress level feels like, and how you feel about your sense of accomplishment that you've accomplished some of these things that you know are important. Our lives are always going to fill with something. The question is,

The Three Big Rocks Challenge

SPEAKER_00 6:23

are we going to fill it with our big rocks, our meaningful priorities, or are we going to fill it with our little rocks and sand, which are the endless distractions in life? We have to choose that intentionally. When we're choosing intentionally, we're prioritizing what matters most, we're protecting those big rocks. That's how you're going to maximize your time and elevate your life.