Transcript
Hi everyone! Welcome back to the workshop series on 92,000 Hours. Throughout this series we’ve been diving deep into the work of understanding ourselves. In our first three seasons we interviewed incredible experts about important topics. In this season, we are still interviewing incredible experts on important topics – because you are the expert and the topic is your life.

We started this work with an exploration of trust to help you better understand how trust – or lack of it – shows up in both your personal and professional life. We then spent some time on vulnerability and acknowledged that in order to be courageous we first must understand what has made us vulnerable, why, and the boundaries that are appropriate for us individually. We then reviewed our identities – understanding those that were given to us, those we chose, and those that are core. We also discussed the identities that are visible and those that are not, and questioned our own actions in making judgments about others when we may not really know who they are. Our fear workshop was one of our most popular. Diving deep into the existential questions about what we are afraid of – especially at work, why those fears exist, and how our mental models about ourselves and our own capabilities may be shaping those fears was something that really resonated with our listeners.

After a long break, we were back with values. And I do hope you take the time to complete the values workshop, because identifying your core values is central to what we are about to focus on now – priorities.

So . . before we launch into talking about priorities, let’s take a minute to remember why we even started this podcast in the first place. We called the podcast 92,000 Hours because that is the average number of hours that individuals in the United States will spend at work in their lifetime. It is more time than we do ANYTHING else besides sleep. We spend more time at work than at school, than with our partners, our children, even time than we spend surfing the web.

At Connection Collaborative we are highly aware of the importance of time. We all only have 24 hours in a day, and we know we should be intentional about how we spend our time. But how do we do that? We’ve got some ideas for you.

As I approached this episode I did some research and found that the Bureau of Labor Statistics produces an annual American Time Use Survey. And it is enlightening. It tells us a LOT about how Americans are spending their time on an average day.

Did you know that in 2022 - of working individuals in America, 34% of them did some or all of their work from home – and that of those with a bachelors degree or higher – 54% of them did some or all of their work from home? Times have changed in recent years, haven’t they?

The survey also noted that on an average day 85% of women and 70% of men spent some time doing household activities such as housework, cooking, lawn care, etc. And we may or may not be surprised to hear that when they did do those household activities, women spent 2.7 hours on average, while men spent 2.2. And in households with children under 6, women spent 1.1 hours on average each day physically feeding or bathing those children, while men spent 31 minutes. (as a mother I just had to put that in there).

Finally, virtually everyone in America age 15 and over spends time in leisure activity each day. This leisure activity could be defined as watching tv, playing sports, socializing, exercising, even reading. On average, people aged 25 to 54 spent 4.2 hours each day in these leisure activities (the least amount of time compared to other age groups) and for all groups – watching TV is how we spend the majority of our time – nearly 3 hours every day!

So what does this tell us? Well, it highlights that we are busy. We are working, we are caring for each other, we are doing the daily things that have to be done, and when we have leisure time, we may just be zoning out in front of the TV.

And it also tells me that we need to dig in to ensure that we are using our precious time intentionally. We can do that through understanding who we are, what we want, and how we prioritize. Many of you may have seen the “big rock” exercise that Steven Covey made popular 40 years ago. It’s a visual lesson in which you use a bucket as a metaphor for your life and your time and it uses large rocks and small rocks to represent the things in your life that are important. Over the years I have literally done this exercise with my students with buckets and rocks, and in the past we have written about it on our blog. You can find the article at www.connectioncollaborative.com/blog/priorities. It is such an important exercise. It is so effective in its simplicity, and also its impact.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the object lesson itself. As Steven Covey put it, in our lives we get buffeted around all the time, often on a daily basis. Think of how often your thoughts are interrupted by the ping of your email. Folks my age can remember when email was not even available to us at home, just at the workplace. Our parents didn’t even have it at the workplace! Now, we not only have computers and laptops at home, but our phones and even our watches grab our attention with flashing lights and vibrations. We are constantly moving and reading and responding and it fills up so much of our time. This constant reaction mode - and all of the small things that take our time, represent small pebbles (a lot of them) that we pour into our bucket. And they can truly fill a bucket. If we fill our bucket with pebbles first, there is no room for the big rocks. And those big rocks represent the things that truly matter to you – the values that you identified in our last workshop. These could be your family, your health, your passions. It is the important but not urgent things. The only way we can fill our bucket, our lives with the things that really matter to us is to take the time to prioritize them. To put those big rocks in first. The small things will fill in. And if a small thing doesn’t get into the bucket, it will be okay. It is when those big rocks don’t get into the bucket that we have real regrets.

When we worked with students we would bring out the bucket, and big rocks, and medium rocks, and gravel, and sand, and water. And we would have our students call out what each of the rocks represented (my health, my family, my sister, my girlfriend) or for medium rocks – my homework, my weekend trivia game with my friends, my love of movies. The small rocks, gravel and water represented all of the other things – doing the dishes, vacuuming, general hygiene like showers, and brushing our teeth, putting gas in the car, heck - buying a car, getting insurance, going to the grocery store, doing the laundry. There are so many banal every day things we must do. But they are unimportant. They will get done appropriately after you’ve set aside time for your big rocks. These small pebbles will fill in around the other contours of your life.

What the students would realize was that some of their big rocks – their love for their family and expressing that love – simply wasn’t getting done. They would play that video game rather than call their mom. But they knew, inherently, that their relationship with their parent was far more important than their video game. And taking that 5 minutes to do something about it would fill their bucket with the thing that mattered the most to them, still giving them time for the video game to fill in around the contour of that phone call. I encourage you as you are listening to this to think about how you might prioritize the things or people you value first, rather than telling yourself you’ll get to it later.

One of my favorite episodes of this podcast focused on priorities and was with my dear friend Lee Payne. He is a master of priorities, and he described it this way:

Lee Payne: I think it's a great object lesson to help us all understand that there's a million things every day that we all do, most of which we don't think about because they're more routine than anything else. Right? And that's the mundane. It's the taking care of the dishes and taking out the garbage and running the kids to their activities and whatever it is. I wouldn't categorize those as the big rocks, right? There's all things that we all have to do every day, regardless of whether we want to do them or not. It's just how the world goes round.

Annalisa Holcombe: You really have to brush your teeth.

Lee Payne: Right. I really need a cup of coffee every morning to start my day. That's not an option. So as you get deeper into the object lesson, and with the big rocks. The point is course is if we're not careful back to what I call dedicated thought about this, you, if you're not careful, you can fill up your life, metaphorically, the jar with the rocks in it, with all the small stuff.

Lee Payne: You can have a solid 16, 18 hour day, every day where you're doing nothing other than the small stuff and maybe a couple medium sized rocks. And really what we're talking about is flipping that upside down and saying, "Instead of filling up your bucket, your life with all these pebbles and all these granules of sand and everything else, put the big rocks in there first, and again spend some quality to time really thinking about what those are for you.

Lee Payne: I would argue probably not more than three or four. Then whatever capacity you have left, then you can look at your medium rocks. You're going to have to have some of those pebbles and some of those granules of sand because those are washing the clothes every week. So you got clean clothes. That's getting gas in the car, so you can get to work in that. So it's not an argument of you can just forget about those things you can, but you can place emphasis on what actually matters and then fill in the gaps with the things that are less important.

Annalisa Holcombe: I think those gaps, those less important things can so creep up to getting bigger and you have to step back and do it again and remind yourself. Because as you were talking, I was thinking, "Oh, I know this, and I'm not doing it right, as well as I want to right now."

Lee Payne: Maybe it's because I've implemented this in my life for a long time that I don't find that I often have to remind myself of things. I know what's important to me and without really thinking about it, that's what happens. So little examples are generally, I'm the one that takes my kids to school in the morning, and we have a little routine. As they're getting out of the car, I say, "So how's your day going to go today?"

Lee Payne: I train them essentially when they're very young, and the answer is, it's going to go good. I'm going to have a good day. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to have fun, and I love you. Then I tell them that I love them and they go on with their day. We've done it for so many years now that we all laugh about it and it's a cheesy little thing that we do in the school parking lot. But it's one of those memories that we'll all have forever.

Lee Payne: It has an important message, which is stay focused on these things. There's going to be some ebb and flow in your day, but at the end of it, if you can accomplish these three things and you know that I love you and you love me, that's a good place to be.

Lee’s lessons in prioritization ring true. I encourage you to go back and listen to the entire episode. Within it he talks about how we may think we have separate buckets for work, or home, or community . . . but we don’t. We have one bucket that is our life. In order to fill that bucket well, with the things that truly matter to us, we must prioritize. He put that to such good use when I first met him. I still think about it today. I had asked him to volunteer on something, and he told me no. And I couldn’t believe it. I was so used to cajoling people into doing what I needed them to do that I was taken aback. But the way he provided his answer, with such honest boundaries and intentionality, made it clear that it had nothing to do with me or my project and everything to do with his life priorities. At the time he had simply said, I’ve realized I have time to prioritize three areas of my life: my family, my career, and my community. This year I have already accepted the community involvement priority, and I can’t take on more or one of my other priorities will suffer. So please come back next year and I’ll be happy to talk about it then.

It was such a clear, concise, true statement. None of us want our “big rocks” to suffer. We want to live our lives well and be effective in how we show up – particularly in the areas that matter the most to us. And it is really hard to say no. But identifying your big rocks will put you on that path.

In our accompanying worksheet on the blog we have outlined the big rock exercise so you can do it yourself. And we’ve linked to a few other great aids. If you haven’t read the book Essentialism yet, I recommend you do. The author, Greg McKeown, has a podcast, a video series, and more. The theory is that only a few things really matter, and you should put your best and highest self toward those things. The work is in defining those things (like we do in our values workshop) and then learning to say no to other things (as we’ve talked about here in our priorities workshop).

Most of what we’ve talked about today will absolutely make sense and probably resonate. And it may not even be new to you. But the trick is to actually do it, and live it, every day. And that is hard. It will take work. You will probably gradually fall back into old ways of saying yes and getting distracted and as Greg McKeown says, “majoring in minor things”. So the work – the real work – of our priorities workshop – is to revisit this podcast and the worksheet regularly. Probably every few months. To remind yourself of what really matters to you.

Thanks for joining us today. I’d love to hear from you! What are you prioritizing? What are YOUR big rocks? And if you’re enjoying this podcast, give us a like or a review on your favorite streaming app. We think we have good ideas here, and we’d love to spread the word.

Next time we will talk about direction. How do you set your own direction and know that you are walking your OWN path? This one will be good. I hope you’ll join us.