How often do we hear the excuse of “I didn’t get time to finish it”? This blog with a series of five posts will introduce certain core principles of time management that are universal in nature. They will help you make a positive mind shift as you start seeing results in your day-to-day life.

The tips and recommendations you’ll read about are a combination of best practices shared by well-known personalities like Ankur Warikoo, and observations based on real-life experiences, all curated by your coach Manoj Radhakrishna – host at RareErth podcast and a seasoned banker. While you may feel like you already know some of it, we encourage you to keep an open mind and practise what you learn. Trust us when we say that you’ll begin to see a marked change in your life.

The Pickle Jar Theory

We start with an interesting visualisation exercise. Imagine you are given an empty glass jar. Your goal is to fill it with the pebbles, rocks, sand, and water that you’re provided with. How would you go about this? If you fill the jar first with water to its brim, and then try to put in the pebbles and small rocks, the water is bound to spill; and your goal is not achieved.

Now think about an alternate way to accomplish this activity. If you fill the jar with sand, pebbles and small rocks first, and later add in the water, your goal is achieved quite efficiently. All the ingredients fit in seamlessly. The jar metaphorically represents our daily lives and how we divide our time between various tasks. We are all given the same 24 hours a day, which is to say time is finite. The choices you make with regards to using that time is what makes the difference.

Rocks, Pebbles, Sand, and Water

The rocks represent important tasks, pebbles the tasks with average importance, sand the less significant tasks, and water the low-priority tasks. You could picture the sand as things like responding to emails/calls, and the water as a constant stream of social media notifications. There’s that urge to deal with the small things right away and wrap the other tasks around them, which is equivalent to the scenario of water spilling out of the jar.

If you instead learn to prioritise the big-ticket items, then the rest of the things can be effortlessly filled in your life. What the pickle jar theory teaches us is to keep the most important tasks at the top of our to-do list every day. That gives us an opportunity to meet deadlines and feel more satisfied at the end of the day. Remember to be practical and honest with yourself while estimating the time required for each task; else the entire exercise can seem pointless.

3 Core Ideas of Time Management

Each person is different, their daily demands are different, and there can never be a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to managing time effectively. However, there are three core ideas that you might resonate with, and which if applied diligently will help optimise your timetable. They are #1 – time is allocation, #2 – time is energy, and #3 – time is money.

We’ll dive deeper into each of these principles in the upcoming posts. The benefits are many – accomplish more within the time constraints, increase the quality of output, and relieve the stress brought on by tight deadlines. Keep reading, and more importantly try out what you learn in each post. That’s the best way to pick up this all-important life skill of effective time management.