Everybody knows the story about the jar and the difference between filling it with rocks, pebbles and sand and how that relates to the way you spend your time.
In an extraordinary podcast that I listened to this week, start to finish – seven episodes recommended by my friend Ross called S-Town, it was calculated that your useable life is about 4,500 days (for a guy that lives until he is 68) and so the question is how you fill it and what you fill it with.
The funny thing is that everybody who reads this blog will have a choice to fill it however they like so if they don’t like the way they’re filling it they just have to make the choice to fill it in a different way.
We got on to talking about this at the business course this week with the delegates there, and there is a lot of talking on that course and I hope the delegates feel it’s valuable. Think they do because it is extraordinary CPD and ideas that come out.
It was discussed on the basis of zoning appointment books and it still staggers me how little people zone their books. When you start to zone your appointment books based on the competency and expertise of the clinicians in your practice (and the DCPs that have appointment books too) you can start to select the rocks and the pebbles and the sand to fill them with but here’s the kicker, here’s the really interesting part… One person’s sand is another person’s rocks and that’s probably the essence of team building.
You would think that giving away the stuff you now find easy or unstimulating or mundane would be to insult someone else or to treat them in a way that is disrespectful but to someone less experience than you the chance to practice on cases or problems like that is utterly invaluable. Until they move up and having practised enough their rocks become pebbles and slowly become sand and then they are given the opportunity to pass the sand to someone else while they coach them how to do it.
There are two things about the rocks, pebbles and sand to think about – the pursuit of filling your days with rocks can be exhausting and a day looking after yourself is not a wasted day out of your 4,500.
Also the end to the story the way it was presented to me was a Professor entered a classroom with a vase and a bag, filled the vase with rocks, then the pebbles to fill the smaller spaces and then the sand until the vase was entirely full. He then took two cups of coffee and poured them into the vase without spilling any of the sand or the rocks or pebbles, explaining to the class that while it’s important to make your days full and worthwhile, there’s always time for two cups of coffee with a friend.
Blog Post Number - 1268
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