Rocks Pebbles Sand And Water

Rocks Pebbles Sand And Water is a story about the important things in life – about priorities.  At the time of writing this article, it’s the 2nd January 2017 when people begin to think about those dare we say it “New Year Resolutions”  Those things that we say we will do and within a few weeks are forgotten.  In business we think more in line with setting goals although goals are for life not just for business…

Looking back on the past year, our “weakness” if you can call it that, was a lack of focus on our primary and most important projects and becoming distracted sometimes on the numerous smaller and less significant ones as well as ones that didn’t serve us or our business! We’re human just like everyone 🙂

There’s a very good chance if you’re reading this you made the same mistake.

Many entrepreneurs do… and it’s easy to do especially first time entrepreneurs

What you and we need to do better, is decide what are the most important things we have to accomplish in our businesses in the next 90 days, and then focus on getting them done.

The 90 days is significant!

These are what you call your ‘Rocks‘

Watch this short 2 minute video before reading on, so what we share next will make sense:

Prioritizing Rocks Pebbles And Sand

The big class container you saw represents your time.  Lets call it the next 90 days.

Next to it, you have some big rocks pebbles sand and water.

If you put in the water and sand first, they’ll fall right to the bottom.  Then if you add in the pebbles, they’ll sit immersed in the water, on top of the sand.

Then if you try to put in the big rocks, they’ll sit on top of everything else, and they won’t all fit.  But …

If you do it another way, it’s possible to get everything to fit in the jar just nicely.

First put in the big rocks.

Then the pebbles are poured in, and they all fall between the gaps in the rocks to the bottom.  Then the sand is poured, and finally the water.

Everything fits.

Here’s the lesson.   Those rocks represent the big, important things you have to do each day.

It could be sending an email to your list.  Hosting a sales webinar.  Setting up a joint venture deal.  Planning the outline of a new product.  Making sales calls. … Basically the important things that move your business forwards and usually the things we least want to do because we may even be afraid to do them!

The pebbles, sand, and water represent the lesser important ‘busy’ work.

A pebble might be taking a phone call with a colleague in your industry, and chatting about how things are going in your business’s.  You might get some value out of this call.  But more likely, you’ll burn up 30 minutes of time and it won’t impact your business.

The sand could be you responding to a few urgent but unimportant emails.

The water is you checking Facebook, Skype, Snapchat, Twitter … or getting sucked into watching time wasting videos on YouTube … don’t despair we’re sharing this because we’ve all done it!

The water activities are incredibly tempting.  They don’t require much deep thought, and are entertaining.

But they do nothing to move your business forwards.  Yes we’ve done these too!

Our big goal is to focus more on the rocks and leave the pebbles, sand and water to the end of the day IF we have time.

By the way – we didn’t come up with this analogy – it’s in this book by Verne Harsh, which you should buy. It’s called ‘Scaling Up‘

If you’ve got a business that’s doing multiple 6 figures annually and you want to scale to multiple 7 figures, you’ll get a lot out of it.

And if you have a new business and / or you’re not yet making a lot of sales, you’ll still get some useful insights out of it.

YOUR job as is ours is identifying YOUR rocks

Any opportunities / distractions that come up during those 90 days, will have to go on the waiting list for the next 90 days.  Completing the current Rocks will be the number one priority.

Our advice to you is to start operating your business this way.

Decide on what the most important things are to accomplish in the next 90 days, and block out everything else.  What few important projects will result in the greatest amount of sales?

If you focus on these things, you’ll be able to complete the year having accomplished a few super important projects that catapulted your business forwards, rather than half-completed 100 different things that were not really that important in the first place.

Thanks for joining us today

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