A life of no regrets

Photo by vitamina poleznova

Time management is so easy to talk about and so hard to do well. There are lots of tools around to help with this. Pebbles in a jar and the Eisenhower Box are two that I use a lot, to help people recognise that they need to make sure they make time for whats important to them and then get clear on what action they need to be taking versus delegating to other people.

The key starting point for time management is to get very clear on your priorities. Our lives are the sum of what we prioritise and sometimes we inadvertently focus on life’s squeaky wheels. Bronnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying is a sobering reminder that life marches on and its up to us to use the time we have as well as we can. According to the book, these are the top 5:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Pebbles in a Jar

With that in mind, using the Pebbles in a Jar approach, we would look at your life (the jar) and what needs to fit into it. If you fillet  with sand and pebbles, the rock cannot be squeezed in.

1. To start with, you need to plan for the big things, what you want more of in your life and what you want to be able to look back on fondly and proudly. These are the ‘stones’ and they need to be attended to and be treated with reverence. Based on Ware’s research, they could be less work/money/status related than they often are and much more related to people and self care, like family, children, friends and health.
2. Next you need to think of the ‘pebbles’, which are the second biggest items. This is where the success factors might live: good job, nice house, etc. The right approach is to fit them around the ‘stones’ and not the other way around!
   
3. And finally we get to the ‘sand’. These are the little tasks that take up and fill your time. The things that don’t really add much meaning to our lives but can take up the most time, like watching TV or scrolling social media. They are also the things that, were they to disappear over night, we'd hardly notice.

The Eisenhower box

-	URGENT​	NOT URGENT
IMPORTANT	Do it now	Do it later​
NOT IMPORTANT	Delegate it	Eliminate it

​Once we know what is truly important, we can apply an approach like the Eisenhower Box, invented by the 34th president of the USA. He’s famous for saying “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” And his matrix helped him separate the important from the unimportant and the urgent from the not urgent. As you can see, if its not important and its not urgent, you just get rid of it!

Want to live a life with no regrets? You’ll need to make sure you are prioritising whats most important to you and just let go of the unimportant things. Simple but not always so easy!