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Putting the Big Rocks in First

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The following illustration is fairly well known. But it represents one of the fundamental concepts of effectively managing yourself. So for those who haven’t heard it, here it is as told in Stephen Covey’s First Things First:

One of our associates shared this experience:

I attended a seminar once where the instructor was lecturing on time. At one point, he said, “Okay, it’s time for a quiz.” He reached under the table and pulled out a wide-mouth gallon jar. He set it on the table next to a platter with some fist-sized rocks on it. “How many of these rocks do you think we can get in the jar?” he asked.

After we made our guess, he said, “Okay. Let’s find out.” He set one rock in the jar . . . then another . . . then another. I don’t remember how many he got in, but he got the jar full. Then he asked, “Is that jar full?”

Everybody looked at the rocks and said, “Yes.”

Then he said, “Ahhh.” He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar and the gravel went in all the little spaces left by the big rocks. Then he greinned and said once more, “Is the jar full?”

By this time we were on to him. “Probably not,” we said.

“Good!” he replied. And he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went in all the little spaces left by the rocks and the gravel. Once more he looked at us and said,”Is the jar full?”

“No!” we all roared.

He said, “Good!” and he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in. He got something like a quart of water in that jar. Then he said, “Well, what’s the point?”

Somebody said, “Well, there are gaps, and if you really work at it, you can always fit more into your life.”

“No,” he said, “that’s not the point. The point is this: if you hadn’t put these big rocks in first, would you ever have gotten any of them in?”

The point is: You have to put the big rocks — your most important tasks — in first, or you won’t be able to do them at all. The point is not to do more in less time, but rather to focus on doing what is most important. Covey continues:

Wit the “more is better” paradigm, we’re always trying to fit more activities into the time we have. But what does it matter how much we do if what we’re doing isn’t what matters most?

Our Quadrant II goals [important, but not urgent] are like the “big rocks.” If we put other activities — the water, sand, and gravel — in first, and then try to fit the big rocks in, not only will they not fit, we’ll end up making a pretty big mess in the process.

But if we know what the big rocks are and put them in first, it’s amazing how many of them we can put in — and how much of the sand, gravel, and water fits in between the spaces. Regardless of what else actually does fit in, the key point is tha thte big rocks — our Quadrant II goals — are in first.

What Do Great Managers Need?

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Great managers.

It is wrong to think that great management is important for front-line employees, but that managers themselves can have bad managers and get along just fine.

Maybe this is an overstatement, but I think it would be better to have no manager at all than a bad manager. Actually, that’s probably true.

Regardless, great managers perform better when their manager is also a great manager, providing just a bit of outside perspective to help them make sure that they are doing what they do best every day, that the expectations of their role are clear, and that they are on track to being as effective as they can be.

Here’s how Rodd Wagner and James Harter put it in the book 12: The Elements of Great Managing:

We are often asked what makes great managers perform so well.

Some of it is pure talent — a natural ability to discern an employee’s mindset, a persistent optimism, or a strategic acumen difficult to duplicate. Some of it is a deeply held personal mission to change the world for the better.

Much of it also requires that a front-line supervisor have the same experience with the 12 Elements as those he directs. One of the most fundamental needs of a great manager is . . . a great manager.

As obvious as that statement may be, there is an undercurrent running through many organizations that assumes recognition and praise, a mentor, clear expectations, and the rest of the 12 are required only for the front lines. The best managers, so this line of thinking goes, are more self-aware and self-contained, impervious to such forces, and able to maintain a steady course without much regard for the circumstances.

The evidence is just the opposite. The engagement of managers ebbs and flows just as much as it does for anyone else. Moreover, the engagement level of a manager correlates strongly with the attitudes of her team. No one is an island.

. . . The anecdotes and, more important, analyses of manager performance point out that one of the best things a senior executive can do to motivate the entire population in a company is to first look out for the enterprise’s supervisors. Before a person can deliver what he should as a manager, he must first receive what he needs as an employee.

What Causes Burnout?

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It’s not working long hours. It’s working on the wrong things — whether for long hour or, over time, normal hours. Here’s what Marcus Buckingham writes in Go Put Your Strengths to Work:

Burnout doesn’t happen when you are working long hours on invigorating activities. Long hours may tire you out, but they rarely burn you out. But fill your weeks with the wrong kinds of activities, activities that weaken you, and even regular activities will start to burn.

This means that burnout doesn’t even necessarily mean that you are in the wrong job. You can be in the right job, doing the wrong things.

So, what’s the solution? Work within your strengths, and cut out the activities that call upon your weaknesses — that is, the activities that weaken you:

Pick a week; capture, clarify, and confirm which activities strengthen and which weaken; then start the week-by-week process of pushing your time toward the former and away from the latter.

Priority Inbox

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From the Google blog:

People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.

You can learn more about how this works and how to get started using it in the full post.

Why Companies Should be Generous in Their Pay

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This is explained very well in the Gallup book 12: The Elements of Great Managing, by Rodd Wagner and James Harter. The book is “based on Gallup’s ten million workplace interviews–the largerst worldwide study of employee engagement.”

They make the point — rightly, I believe — that “most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture.” For this reason, companies that pay with a generosity of spirit are likely to perform better financially than those that don’t. The reason is that when employees feel that they are being treated well with their pay (rather than the minimum the company could get by with paying them), they tend to match the gesture with more effort. It also tends to result in higher engagement (because of the thought behind their pay — not because of being driven by money), which also results in greater performance for the organization.

Here is what they have to say in their own words:

Most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture

One truth reemerges in various permutations throughout this book. It is that human behavior usually doesn’t conform to the logical or mathematical assumptions behind many personnel strategies. This certainly holds true of the tug-of-war over an employee’s salary.

The traditional view assumes that a company should pay as little as possible to secure someone’s services, whether that amount is just a little more than a competitor would pay or the lowest amount for which the worker will settle in his salary negotiations.

The often-overlooked flip-side of that strategy holds that the employee will do the minimum required to make his salary and his bonus. The company wants maximum work for minimum pay, while the employee wants just the reverse. Between these competing forces, the wage is settled, giving both sides a tolerable, antagonistic compromise.

But a funny thing happens in experiments where one person offers a wage and another person decides what level of effort to give in return. If the “employer” offers an above-market wage, the “employee” usually matches it with more effort, even when the worker can get away with doing less. “This suggests that on average people are willing to put forward extra effort above what is implied by purely pecuniary considerations,” wrote researchers Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter. With conscientious, engaged employees, generosity of pay begets generosity of effort.

While money itself does not buy engagement, it appears an employee’s perception that the company is aggressively looking out for his financial interest leads to productive reciprocation. More than just the money, the thought counts.

The research points to a choice that executives must make. Do they want a workforce that thinks, “I have to fight for every extra dollar they begrudgingly pay me,” or one that feels, “If I look out for my company, they will look out for me”?

Simple questions reveal where a company stands. If a talented employee does something extraordinary or repeatedly distinguishes herself, will it be her manager or the employee herself who initiates discussion of a raise? Does the company spend more to attract outside stars than to cultivate internal ones? Does the company realize its talent is underpaid only after a competitor woos them away?

In matters of pay, as with the 12 Elements, what employees enthusiastically do for the company depends heavily on what the company eagerly does for them.

A Snapshot in to How Books take Shape

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I mentioned briefly the other day that I’m starting work on a book. I’ll give more details on what the book is about and so forth shortly.

I thought it might be fun not only to talk about the book itself (float ideas, post some early drafts parts of chapters, and so forth), but also talk a bit about my process as well. After all, it seems very fitting, when writing a book on productivity, to peel back the curtains a bit on the productivity process involved in creating that very book.

So, even though it is a bit out of order to talk about the process before what the book is actually a bit, here’s the first snapshot for you.

[Read more…]

Your Weaknesses Are Not What You are Bad At

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Listen carefully: Your weaknesses are not what you are bad at, and your strengths are not what you are good at.

Your weaknesses are the things that make you feel weak, and your strengths are the things that make you feel strong.

This means there is incredible hope for growth. For when we say “your greatest opportunity for growth is in your area of your strengths, not your weaknesses,” we do not mean: “if you are bad at something, you don’t have much hope of ever getting better at it.”

There might be something that you are initially bad at but which you could become excellent at. For if it is something that makes you feel strong, then it’s not a weakness and you won’t be stuck. You just need to work on it — and work hard — and you will experience tremendous growth.

Having a right definition of strengths and weaknesses keeps us from a fatalistic mindset. It says: “It doesn’t matter what you are bad at. If there is something you want to accomplish, identify what makes you feel strong and seek to accomplish it along that path. If you currently aren’t good at something but doing it makes you feel strong, great news: you will be able to experience tremendous growth in that area if you work hard at it. And if there are legitimate areas of weakness (things that weaken you) that weigh you down, you can navigate around them by identifying your strengths and leveraging them to pass by your weaknesses.”