Putting First Things First

As I started using the FranklinCovey Planning System, there were a few things that I struggled with. One was, how do I even formulate my own Personal Mission Statement. What constitute a Personal Mission Statement? Secondly, it was the 3 Habit of putting first thing first.

The whole concept is really seductive. You plan your week according to your highest priorities. Based on your personal compass (another tool that I struggled with), we would identify our Big Rocks. These Big Rocks will have a "Sharpen the Saw" dimension and also the various roles (or responsibilities) that you play. For the "Sharpen the Saw" dimension, you'll see your live as one indivisible whole; working on the physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. You'd identify the Big Rocks in those 4 areas, like physical: running 3 times a week or getting at least 6 hours of sleep; social/emotional: being aware of the triggers that cause disempowering emotions; mental: reading "systems thinking", and spiritual: review and reflect on personal mission statement and values daily.

Once you've done that's move on to the different roles in your life. Your responsibility as a spouse, friend, consultant, project manager, etc. In each of these roles, identify the Big Rocks, or the one thing if you did this week that will have the maximum impact in those areas of your life. Then, you'd schedule those Big Rocks in your weekly planning so that they don't get 'lost'.

The idea is, if you have a bucket, and you need to fill the bucket with Big Rocks, small stones, pebbles, and water; you would put in the Big Rocks first, so that the bucket would not overflow.

Now, the challenge I faced was, yeah, you have all these big rocks, but I have meetings to attend, reports to write, proposal to present, emails to reply to; how do I fill those big rocks? Of course the thinking was, just fill in those Big Rocks first, and schedule the rest of your tasks around it. But the issue is, these reports, proposals are all urgent AND important! How do I get the Big Rocks (i.e. the important but not urgent stuffs) in with such a tight schedule?

Oh, this doesn't work as well as it say or claim it would. So how do we get this to work? Simple actually! Currently we might be overwhelmed with issues, meetings, reports, and emails. The simple idea is to allocate 20% or 30% of your time for big rocks. Over time, mind you this won't be easy or fast, you will find ourselves working within the quadrant 2 or on the things that are important but not urgent. These are the things that you put first.