Personal essays
My third “word” for 2024
The jar
There’s a classic video of a fictional professor in a Philosophy 101 class who wants to give his students A Valuable Lesson for a Happier Life.
The video is a dramatization of a story by Steven Covey who wrote a lot about getting the most out of your life.
The professor places a plastic jar on the desk and fills it with golf balls.
He asks the class, “is it full” and they answer “yes”.
He reaches into his brief case and pulls out a bag of gravel. He pours that into the full jar and the gravel slips and slides around the golf balls and settles into the spaces in between.
He asks the class, “is it full” and they again answer “yes”.
He then pours some sand into the full jar and shakes the jar a bit until the sand fills up the spaces that even the gravel left.
He asks the class, “is it full”. You’d think by now they’d have gotten the point but they again answer “yes”.
He places two bottles of beer on the desk. This gets their attention. He pours some of the beer into the jar until it is indeed full.
There’s no beer in the original story. The original story is rocks, pebbles, and sand.
In the story is the rocks are the most important things in your life - the really big things like your family, friends, amd passions. The pebbles are important but not at that level. The pebbles are the important things in your day like your job, your home, and so on. The sand is the small stuff. It’s scrolling your phone, watching tv, and other things you don’t need to be doing.
The point of the story is that if you put the sand in first you won’t have room for the pebbles or the rocks.
You fill up your life with the small things and the big things never get done.
Because you’re occupied with the small things, you don’t notice day to day. It’s only when you look back.
The Third Word
This year my three words have had a theme. They often do.
I’ve been thinking about scheduling my time and making priorities the same way we scheduled ads when I was in radio.
The first word was designed to make sure I do notice day to day.
It was reconcile.
The idea was that at the end of each day or the beginning of the next day, I would look back and see what it was I accomplished and how that compared to what I had planned to do.
The second word was designed to make sure I’m not setting myself up for failure.
It was avails.
It’s a term of art in radio ad scheduling (which is called traffic).
Avails are the number of available slots in a day for specific tasks or specific times. If I don’t have any availability, I either need to make room by moving or canceling another task or I have to decline or defer this task. I don’t have any avails.
My third word is ROS.
It is again a term of art and is pronounced R.O.S. and stands for “Run of Schedule”. It’s the first time I’ve used an acronym for a word of the year and it feels like a bit of a cheat except in radio it is one word like scuba (self-contained underwater breathing aparatus).
Scuba feels like a word to most of us. ROS feels like one word to me. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
Rocks and Pebbles
There are things that are important or not but we’ve committed to being there at a specific time. In some ways those are the golf balls or rocks we need to work around.
In the planning or reconcile stage we should look at these scheduled commitments and decide whether or not they should be in our calendar. While preparing for the day ahead, these calendar items are mostly immovable and so we look at the space around them for the pebbles.
The pebbles aren’t less important as they are in Covey’s story but they are more flexible. We can look at our to-do list and see that on our way to meet someone for coffee we can stop at the library and pick up the books that are being held. We can stop on our way back at the grocery store for those items we need to make dinner.
So even though these items are on our to-do list and not scheduled at a certain time, while I’m preparing my day, I can enter them into my calendar at a set time and help make sure they get done.
Sand
The jar still isn’t full.
I don’t want to schedule these things in, but I want them to be captured somehow so that I do them when I have time.
These are the Run of Schedule items. These are the lower priority “if there’s time” items.
This is the moment when I check my email, pay my bills, catch up on that podcast I’ve been meaning to listen to.
This list is there so that if I have time to fill I have something to fill it with. Absent these I’ll doom scroll social media or watch a television show that I’ve already seen.
What happens if these R.O.S. items don’t get done today?
Some of them will become important.
When that bill comes closer to the day the payment is due, the grain of sand becomes a pebble and I schedule it and do it.
Some of them will become less important.
That podcast about a certain news event is now a week old and I don’t really care anymore.
Some of them reveal their importance by my doing or not doing them.
Some of them will just expire.
That sale on clementines ended yesterday. There’s no reason to stop by the store and buy them now.
I’ve been thinking about writing a to-do app that uses these concepts from radio traffic departments. An app that is built around reconcile, avails, and R.O.S..
It’s been in my ROS for a while now. Years. Perhaps someday it will grow into a pebble.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 201. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe