Although it has been said that time is money, that’s not quite the truth.  One can be short on money, and still find ways to make more.  But, if you are short on time, you can’t get any more than is already allocated to you.

Pickle Jar Theory - How will you fill yours?

You might go to sleep at night and realize that you have not done anything worthwhile during that day.  You might decide to be more productive tomorrow, and still find you wasted time all day long.  Nothing has changed.

Pickle Jar Experiment

Here is a way to picture time management: Imagine an experiment where a pickle jar defines your daily time allocation. In your world are stones, pebbles, and sand.  You can fill your container however you wish.  But, if you fill the pickle jar with sand, you will not have room for any stones or pebbles.  If you do, the pickle jar will be full with no room for anything more.

Think of the stones as the most important tasks in your schedule - odd-shaped, difficult to work with, and inflexible, as frequently they are.  Consider your current goals - these stones would be projects or tasks you need to complete in order to meet these goals.  The pebbles are less important tasks.  While they are related to the goals, they are not as urgent. The sand is the minutiae that fill out the day.  They are not important to your overall goals and objectives.  In fact, the sand often gets in the way, hindering us from completing our goals and feeling truly fulfilled.  These tasks might include preparing and eating meals, paying bills, or checking our email.

The Pickle Jar Theory

This is the Pickle Jar Theory of prioritization.  Just like the experiment with the pickle jar, if you fill your pickle jar with sand, you wind up filling your day with tasks that are unimportant.  And, if that happens, you won’t have room for the more important things.  But, if you fill the jar with stones, you will have plenty of room between those rocks to add some pebbles.  If you add some pebbles in the extra space, you will have room for sand on top.  And, if you were to shake things up a bit, the sand, rocks, and pebbles would settle, and you would find you have even more room for sand.

Vow now to take better advantage of your time management from this moment on. Before you go to sleep tonight, think of several action items that you can do tomorrow. Write these on a list. They will be your priorities - your stones. Think of a few more fairly important activities. These are secondary tasks, and they will be the pebbles that you fit in when you can. Finally, the sand will fit in the pickle jar at the end.

Set some priorities. What is most important to you? Is it family? Is it earning money? Is it health-related? Decide what your goals will be, and allow these elements to devour most of your time. They should be your top priority. Put them in the container first. Next, decide what you want to do if you have additional time. Ideas might include volunteering, being involved in the community, or spending time with friends. These are the pebbles, which will be enjoyed after the top priorities have been accomplished. Finally, you can add the other details to your schedule. These would be the nice things to do. They might even be urgent, just not important. These incidental activities might include a trip to the break room to get a coffee. They are important, but not instrumental in accomplishing the main priorities.

Each person is given 24 hours in each day, which is the fixed amount of room in the pickle jar. First, add the important stones, based on the priorities that you have set. You might ask yourself, “If I were to go on vacation next week, what is the one thing I have to do before I leave? Then, if I have more time, what else should I do?” Repeat this process until you identify your top priorities.  You don’t have to prioritize everything in your life, just enough to set your next target.  When you have more time or when things come up, you can figure out where they settle using prioritization techniques such as Pareto prioritization, Maslow time management or the Eisenhower matrix.

Add your stones to the pickle jar carefully, you can’t fit many in at one time. Time management is tricky. Unless you prioritize your efforts so the stones get in the pickle jar first, you will not have room for them. These are important in life, whether they are obstacles or priorities to accomplish. Pay attention to these priorities and let the sand fill in the cracks.

Pareto Principle Time Management

Are you living up to your productivity potential? Most people don’t even know what they need to get done today, let alone have a list of those tasks.  Knowing the things that you need to accomplish is your first step to being productive.  If you haven’t heard of it, Pareto principle time management is a tool that many high producers use to focus on the things in life that give them the biggest benefit for their work.  It is also known by other names like the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Law.

Knowing what Vilfredo Pareto did will help you understand where this principle came from. Vilfredo, an Italian economist, noticed that all of the wealth in his country was not distributed equally among the people.  He began to notice that only 20% of the people owned a whopping 80% of the wealth.  That left the remaining 80% of the poorer population owning only 20% of the wealth.  Pareto, who was really into gardening, also analyzed that that 20% of his peapods yielded 80% of the harvest.

This 80/20 rule of distribution of wealth has since been identified as a natural distribution of nearly everything.  In business, for example, if you owned or operated a store, 20% of the items that you sell should, in theory, generate for 80% of your sales.  Those items would pay the bulk of your bills, overhead and wages.  20% of the customers provide 80% of our income.  20% of the customers ALSO make 80% of the customer service complaints.  20% of the people who are insured file 80% of the insurance claims.   This universally uneven distribution is known as Pareto Distribution.  It’s not always 80/20, sometimes it’s 75/25 or 90/10, but the concepts

Pareto Principle Time Management

20% of the tasks we perform take up 80% of our time.  20% of the tasks we perform give us 80% of the value of our time.  The basics of the Pareto Principle Time Management are that you should find and focus on the smaller percentage of projects that yield the highest results for your life.  Focus harder and longer on these tasks and your productivity will flourish.  You will get of you want done and accomplish your goals faster.

I think the 80/20 rule is the best kept and must underutilized secret to success.  Richard Koch in his time management book, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less, describes the Pareto Principle as “the principle of greatest outcome for time and effort expended.”  It’s a popular notion that, hard work is what accomplishes results. However, when we focus our actions on the 20% that matters most, we get the results we’re looking for.  Doing a lot of work is not really a suitable substitute for doing the right things.  Application of the Pareto Law when managing your time, allows you to work smarter, rather than harder. Spending your time and effort on the 20% that is the most valuable delivers 80% of the results.

Applying the Pareto Law through Pareto Analysis

By taking a look at all of your outstanding tasks and figuring out which ones give you the biggest bang for the buck, you can weed out those which give the least value for the amount of time they take.  This process is called Pareto Analysis.

Oddly enough, the tasks that you will notice give you the best results, are often the ones which are the shortest to complete and the easiest. This is because you can perform them with minimal effort or thinking. Those tasks which require you to concentrate or focus intently are often the ones that take the longest and result in the lowest productivity level.  The prioritization results from this Pareto analysis can be used as the prioritization step for the POSEC method of time management.

This principle is very simple and yet there is much more to it that can’t be explained here in such a short piece. Many people, especially successful ones, use these principles and chart out their their daily lives. They use them for personal applications as well as business and financial ones. There will always be times that a person needs to buckle down and do the hard work of a long and tedious task, but making sure that you generally focus on the ones that get you’re the best result for your effort, will, in the long run, be the most productive.

Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy

Since the dawn of time, mankind has used time in innumerably diverse fashions; but the original objectives of timekeeping remained consistent across geographies and cultures. To understand how time management is linked to a human being’s five basic needs, Abraham Maslow’s needs hierarchy provides an interesting explanation.  How does the Human Needs Hierarchy relate to time management?

Maslow's Hierarchy

A system of living known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was laid out by Abraham Maslow in an article that was published in 1943. The hierarchy of needs developed by Maslow can now be effectively used to develop time management in one’s life. The theory laid out five distinct levels of needs which, fulfilled in an order of priority, can help with an improved self-esteem and joy. A pyramid of needs is laid out by the theory, which starts with the very basic requirements; for example, food and shelter. The practitioner is expected to work their way up the pyramid to a culmination point called self-actualization. If you can fulfill everything that is within your capability, you have attained self-actualization.

Time Management and Maslow

The system provides an interesting checkpoint to look back at your life. What levels of needs have you already attained? Which ones still needs to be earned to reach a higher level of needs hierarchy? The knowledge which comes out of this checkpoint provides an interesting insight into where should one concentrate their time and energy on. What should be his priority with respect to time management?

An assumption that Maslow’s theory makes is that your needs keeps you motivated. Those needs are then divided in five different levels of a pyramid. The flat bottom end of the pyramid represents the most basic of those needs. The level of needs represented by the bottom of the pyramid needs to be attained first. The objective can then move to the next level in the pyramid once the level below is attained. The pyramid tapers into a culminating point where an individual realizes self-actualization.

Motivation is Key for Successful Time Management

A thought provoking connection becomes apparent when Maslow’s theory is linked to time management. The theory provides effective insight which is helpful to make one realize their priorities. When applying the Eisenhower method, the means to determine what is “important” can be weighed based on ones needs.  For example, when one’s basic needs are met can he start concentrating on more complex needs? If you can realize which level of need you are at, it becomes easier to identify where the individual’s time and energy need to be expended - obviously on needs at a higher level!

The ability to identify the level of need that requires most attention results in a state of self-awareness which can be in turn used to harness all your concentrated attention on one objective - the next level of need. It offers a level of introspection which is critical to identify what needs to be done, when. Your objectives then become singular and less disparate, scattered, and ineffective. To be able to attain eventual success and a higher level of inner peace, you need to know where you are now; don’t you?

POSEC time management’s basic tenet is that for one to be capable of handling things that they may face, one needs to first bring to attention their daily personal responsibilities. This involves proper time management among the other things.  The acronym POSEC stands for Prioritizing by Organizing, Streamlining, Economizing and Contributing.

The POSEC method enables you to dissect your goals and tasks into small projects. It enables you to prioritize things because accomplishing your individual tasks well will make the rest of your goals easier to attain. While for some people the POSEC method may work quite well, for others it may not.

The POSEC method of time management offers guidelines for helping the individual put their goals in order of importance. As a result, proper execution would cause upward movement on Maslow’s “Needs Hierarchy.”

The following steps constitute the POSEC method of time management:

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How do we best manage our time? Even religious scholars don’t agree on how time exists, whether in a straight path, a circular manner or perhaps it even ceases altogether at some points. It might seem like a futile effort to manage one’s time effectively. The concept of time management can seem overwhelming indeed. It has been said intelligence is the ability to exist independently or even to continue independently as time passes.

Using time efficiently in our day to day lives can help us make more money, gain independence from money pressures, and eventually help us realize a philosophical comprehension of time. The most likely reason that we do not attain our lifelong goals is the monetary restriction imposed upon us due to life’s twists and turns. If we assume independence from any white collar worker’s typical day in the office, we can embrace an additional easiness of time management. When given more time, we become silent.  Silence’s effectiveness leads way to developing greater strength, truth and power. These traits lead the way to a happier life.

Take a look at your day to day activities for personal and financial success through effective time management:
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Many companies view time management training as something that they will spend their money on, only if they absolutely have to. Usually when pruning the company or department budget, training is often the first area to take the hit. And yet can you really afford not to?

Here’s what Dr. Donald Wetmore an American Time Management Specialist says:

Training is not a cost it’s an investment

‘It really doesn’t matter what we pay for an investment. What’s relevant is what we get in return. One of the best ways to jeopardize an company’s future in today’s world and increase the probability of troubled times it to look at training as a cost and pay the price of not training or provide substandard training that operates only as a Band-Aid for the training requirements.

A person being paid $50,000 per year who is wasting just one hour per day is costs $6,250 per year. If, by getting some time management training, that person can learn how to recapture just one hour per day, that translates into a payback of $6,250 per year!  For a group of 25 people, the savings on that is $156,250 per year! That doesn’t even include other benefits like improved profitability, reduced turnover, greater motivation, enhanced teamwork, greater creativity etc.)  Over 5 years, the accumulated payback is $781,250. What would you invest in to achieve that return and payback?

Not so many years ago, time management training wasn’t an option for most companies. Today, it is mandatory. If we don’t constantly improve, within five years most of us will become obsolete. Why? Because our competitors are helping their people to become more effective through training.

If we look closely at companies who are doing well in the long run, they almost always have a well thought out training program in place.  They prioritize training within their organization, realizing that the price for not training is the real expense of training.

The most important training or knowledge enhancement you can offer to your employees is in the personal development area. Effective time management is a life skill which affects us all. Depending on how skilful we are at managing our time it can have a major impact on the whole of our life. Our skill levels in this area can greatly benefit us or cause us to be constantly stressed out.

Training is a life-long endeavor. It has to be ongoing. Life changes constantly and so do our needs and those of our people, the #1 asset in every business. Time Management training is crucial for it’s when we learn to use our time effectively that we get so much more done in our lives.

Lorraine Pirihi is Australia’s Personal Productivity Specialist and Leading Life Coach. Her business The Office Organizer specializes in showing small business owners and managers, how to get organized at work so they can have a life! Lorraine is also a dynamic speaker and has produced many products including “How to Survive and Thrive at Work!”