This article takes the classic big rocks, pebbles, and sand time management techniques to a new level by pairing each element with new productivity tools, including AI.
You will find strategies to break through stalled, complex, and ambitious big rock tasks and a practical toolkit to clear out the pile of pebble-level tasks that clutter your day.
Plus, you may be surprised to discover that trivial tasks matter more than they seem, and we’ll show you how to handle them efficiently.
Get ready to take control of your time and make space for what matters most.
What is the Big Rocks Time Management Principle?
The Big Rocks Principle: Prioritizing What Matters Most
Stephen Covey introduced his “Put First Things First” time management principle in his 1989 best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
This concept was later illustrated in an accompanying training video1, in which Covey used a compelling visual demonstration to show the importance of task prioritization. In the demonstration, Covey invited a participant from the audience to attempt to fill a jar with a combination of big and small rocks.
The small rocks symbolized trivial tasks, or as Covey described them, “all the little small things that tend to fill our life.” On the other hand, the big rocks represented the things that matter most.
In Covey’s demonstration, big rocks were planning and preparation, relationships and family, self-care, community service, major projects, and vacations.
In Covey’s video1, when the participant first attempted to fill the jar by starting with the small rocks and sand, she quickly ran out of space before fitting in the big rocks.
Covey demonstrated the correct approach by suggesting that big rocks be placed in the jar first. Then, the participant poured the small rocks, which effortlessly settled around the big rocks. To the audience’s surprise, everything fit perfectly.
This simple but powerful analogy underscores critical time management and prioritization lessons. If we don’t prioritize the things that matter most, they will never fit into our schedules. Instead, trivial tasks and distractions can easily consume our time, leaving no room for what truly matters.
Over time, Covey’s Put First Things First time management strategy evolved into a widely recognized framework, often expanded to include four elements: rocks, pebbles, and sand.
Each element represents different task priority levels in business and life, which are reviewed in detail later in this article.
Challenges to Implementing the Big Rocks Time Management
Fitting our big rocks, our most important tasks, into a busy schedule is not as easy as it seems from Stephen Covey’s video. Here are the most common challenges
- Mismatch with Energy Levels. Important tasks scheduled at the wrong time can suffer from low focus and productivity.
- Difficulty in Getting Started. Large, important tasks can feel overwhelming, leading to procrastination.
- Unexpected Interruptions. Meetings, emails, or urgent requests can derail planned work.
- Sudden Schedule Changes. Last-minute obligations can disrupt time blocks and collapse the entire plan.
- Task Switching Friction. Transitioning between deep work and other responsibilities requires effort, making it hard to stay efficient.
Now, let’s explore how we can apply modern productivity tools to overcome these challenges.
The Most Important Tasks Are the Hardest: Big Rocks Are Big Frogs
What are the Big Rocks, the Hardest and the Most Important Tasks?
Executive coach Alisa Cohn describes big rocks to Business Insider as “the hardest to conceptualize, as they are often abstract and wide in scope, like the mission of a company or its yearlong growth goals.”2
Similarly, Brian Tracy, a Canadian-American business consultant and author, defines a Frog task as “your biggest, most important task. It is the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.”3
These two definitions share a striking similarity: big rocks are big frogs. They are daunting, difficult to tackle, and often unclear in their execution. Starting them can feel overwhelming, and figuring out a clear path to success is rarely straightforward. Usually, they feel like uncharted paths, where progress comes through trial and error, learning from mistakes, facing frequent setbacks, and battling discouragement.
Whether it’s achieving a healthy body, improving relationships, building a business, writing a book, or earning a promotion, these challenges are expected and should be planned for. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself staring at a blank screen during your “big rock book writing” hours and struggle to generate ideas.
Big rocks are big challenges. Let’s explore key recommendations to improve our chances of success in handling them.
How to Leverage Your Productivity Prime Time
Brian Tracy, the author of Eat That Frog!, emphasizes the importance of tackling Frog tasks, your most challenging and essential work, first thing in the morning.3 For most people, productivity peaks in the early hours and gradually declines throughout the day.4
However, not everyone thrives in the morning. Some people are night owls, while others hit their stride in the afternoon. The key is to identify your productivity prime time, the period when your focus, energy, and efficiency are at their highest, and use it to tackle your big rock tasks for maximum impact.
The 5 AM Club: Unlocking the Power of Uninterrupted Time
Maximum productivity requires carving out time with minimal distractions.
For many, the early morning hours offer the perfect window of focus and energy. Most people are naturally morning larks, with their peak alertness occurring in the early hours of the day.4
Between 5 AM and 7 AM, morning larks can take advantage of two uninterrupted hours to exercise, meditate, write, create, or tackle big rock tasks.
However, you can still find your own uninterrupted time if you’re a night owl or an afternoon finch. After all, late-night writing sessions have long been a creative cliché for a reason.
The key is to identify when you work best and use that time to focus on your most important tasks.
Creativity Leads, Productivity Follows
Ideas must come first before execution. Productivity is most effective when it follows creativity and you have a vision of what you want to accomplish.
First, you must develop a big idea or a series of small ideas and then make them happen. Don’t try to get to work before you know what you want to work on.
Do your research. Seek out expanders—people who have successfully achieved your goal.
Discover where your Muse lives. Capture your ideas, refine them, and organize them into a pipeline of possibilities.
Sift through relevant information, break big concepts into small, and actionable steps.
How To Manage Pebbles, Also Known as “Business as Usual”
What is the Pebble Time Category?
Pebbles are entirely different from rocks. They consist of routine tasks with familiar workflows.
Pebbles are predictable, easy to complete, and require little creativity or deep thinking. Unlike big rocks, pebbles don’t push us beyond our comfort zone or demand significant effort.
Pebbles keep life and business running smoothly but don’t lead to major growth or transformation.
At work, pebbles include routine meetings and carrying out established business operations. At home, they may involve scheduling appointments, paying bills, and shopping. These tasks require energy and attention but are straightforward and don’t challenge us.
The problem with focusing only on pebbles is that we risk getting stuck in a hamster wheel, constantly busy but barely moving forward.
Pebbles don’t move us to a brighter future. Instead, they keep us stuck inside our comfort zone.
The key strategy with pebbles is to minimize them. By reducing, streamlining, or delegating where possible, we can free up valuable time and energy for rocks, those high-impact tasks that truly make a difference in our work and personal lives.
Let’s explore key recommendations to minimize time spent on pebbles and leave more time to handling rocks.
Do Less to Achieve More
Some people equate busyness with success and wear it as a badge of honour. Being constantly busy gives the illusion of being needed and appreciated, but the opposite is true.
Constant busyness often means we lack the resources to delegate tasks we don’t enjoy and have little control over our own time. It reflects a scarcity of freedom rather than success.
The first step toward achieving time freedom is to examine how we spend our week closely. A simple review of our tasks can reveal where we are unnecessarily overcommitted. To streamline our time, we should ask ourselves:
- Is this task essential?
- Can it be eliminated or simplified?
- Can I combine it with another task to save time?
- Can I delegate or ask for help?
- Can this task be automated?
By questioning our habits and making intentional choices, we can create more space for things that matter most, without glorifying being constantly busy.
Leave White Space in Your Calendar
The biggest mistake in productivity is cramming every minute of our calendars with tasks. Dr. Joel M. Rothaizer observed that overscheduled leaders suffer, and their businesses suffer as a result.5
This applies to all aspects of life. When constantly booked, we leave no room for flexibility, problem-solving, quality, reflection, well-being and balance.
White space in our schedules is essential for thinking, walking, transitioning between tasks, and handling the unexpected. Without it, even minor disruptions can cause significant stress.
My biggest struggle with a packed schedule is dealing with sudden changes. Just when everything feels like a well-oiled machine, something unexpected happens. Someone gets sick, an urgent issue arises, or something breaks down. With no buffer, the schedule collapses, leading to missed deadlines, reprioritization, and unnecessary stress.
Ways to Discover Gold Nuggets in the ‘Sand Time’ Category
What is the Sand Time Category?
The Sand Time category is best understood by imagining sand slipping effortlessly through our hands. These tasks are small, non-urgent, and require little thought or preparation.
Examples include doing hair and makeup before work, filing nails, organizing the basement closet, arranging spice jars, sorting through old recipes, making bed, watering plants and cleaning up incoming emails. Some of these trivial tasks have time limits, while others can be postponed indefinitely.
Surprisingly, these small actions can significantly impact lives.
Admiral William H. McRaven, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Make Your Bed, highlights the power of small tasks:
“If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made — and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”6
Entrepreneur Kat Norton shares a similar perspective on another seemingly minor task, cleaning inbox:
“The easiest hack to allow huge opportunities to come through to you is really simple. It has worked for me every single time I do it, no matter what I want to achieve, from business partnerships to press opportunities to dream clients. Clear your inbox. If you have outstanding items, emails, or tabs, your attention is being divided, and you are distracted and potentially even overwhelmed. When you are in that position, your nervous system is not ready for more to come through. If you want to optimize your life, optimize your inbox and watch what comes through.”7
While sand tasks are trivial, tackling them without delays can free up mental space, reduce stress, and set the stage for success in more meaningful areas of life. Let’s review time management strategies to optimize sand items.
How to Turn Digital Distractions into Creative Opportunities
Smartphone inventors Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie named their company Research in Motion with a clear vision: enabling people to do deskwork on the go. Their goal was to maximize productivity by allowing users to research and create from anywhere.
Precious minutes of “research in motion” can be spared while waiting in line, stuck in traffic, on public transportation, at the airport, or between gym sets.
However, Mike and Jim didn’t anticipate how smartphones would shift from productivity tools to digital distraction machines. Instead of using them to create, people spend an average of two to three hours daily mindlessly scrolling through social media and news feeds.8
This “sand time,” small pockets of time that could be used productively, is often wasted.
Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain, offers us a solution: “Shift as much of our time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.”
Forte advocates for an electronic note-taking system. Such a personal knowledge management system can help to capture, organize, and refine valuable insights and make them accessible for future use. Reclaiming smartphone time for knowledge management can turn hours of mindless consumption into useful and productive time.
Let Artificial Intelligence (AI) Handle Your Boring Tasks
CEO Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, acknowledges that he uses AI to handle mundane tasks. In a conversation with organizational psychologist Adam Grant on the ReThinking podcast, Altman shared that he relies on AI for routine activities like processing emails and summarizing documents.9
Indeed, AI is not here to replace exciting or meaningful work but to help us save time, reduce effort, and boost efficiency by tackling trivial, time-consuming tasks. AI can be indispensable in various everyday activities, such as:
- Sorting and managing emails to reduce inbox clutter
- Decluttering digital files and removing duplicates
- Automating to-do lists and setting smart reminders
- Scheduling appointments and organizing calendars
- Drafting documents and generating content ideas
- Transcribing meetings and summarizing important notes
- Creating personalized workout and meal plans
- Generating music playlists and entertainment suggestions
By handling these repetitive tasks, AI allows us to direct our attention to things that matter most. If used strategically, AI can enhance productivity and free up time for more fulfilling work and personal growth.
Key Takeaways
- The big rocks, pebbles, and sand analogy powerfully illustrates the importance of prioritization. If we don’t focus on what truly matters (big rocks), our time will be consumed by routine tasks (pebbles) and trivial matters (sand).
- Big rocks represent complex, long-term, and often ambiguous tasks that require strategic thinking. To tackle them effectively, leverage productivity prime time, uninterrupted deep work sessions, and dedicated time for creativity.
- Pebbles are predictable, straightforward tasks that demand little creativity or deep thought. Regularly assess these tasks for elimination, delegation, or simplification to optimize efficiency.
- Sand tasks are minor, everyday activities like tidying up or sorting emails. Though seemingly insignificant, addressing them can free up mental space, reduce stress, and create momentum for bigger tasks. Automation, AI tools and personal knowledge systems can help manage some of these tasks efficiently.
Footnotes
- In the video “Big Rocks,” Stephen Covey illustrates the importance of prioritizing significant tasks in our lives. Using the metaphor of filling a jar with big rocks, pebbles, and sand, Covey demonstrates that if we don’t place the big rocks first, representing our most important goals and values, they may not fit in later.
- In her Business Insider article, executive coach Shana Lebowitz applies the rocks, pebbles, and sand metaphor to a business context. Lebowitz emphasizes that focusing on the “big rocks” first in a professional setting is essential for effective leadership and meaningful productivity.
- In his article “The Truth About Frogs,” Brian Tracy introduces “eating the frog” as a metaphor for tackling one’s most challenging and important task first thing in the morning.
- The Redbooth blog article “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend, But When Do You Actually Get Work Done?” analyzes productivity patterns using data from over 1.8 million projects and 28 million tasks. The findings reveal that task completion peaks at 11 AM, with Mondays being the most productive day of the week, and productivity declining after lunch and towards the weekend.
- In the Forbes article “Why Senior Leaders Need White Space In Their Calendars (And How To Make It Happen),” Dr. Joel M. Rothaizer, MCC, explains the value of creating unscheduled time for senior leaders.
- In his commencement address at the University of Texas at Austin, Admiral William H. McRaven shared ten life lessons from Navy SEAL training, emphasizing how small actions can lead to significant change. The speech, titled “Make Your Bed,” underscores the idea that starting each day with a simple task, like making your bed, can instill discipline and set a positive tone for the day.
- Reference: an Instagram video where entrepreneur Kat Norton (also known as Miss Excel or Miss Optimize) explains the importance of maintaining a clean inbox.
- In the article “How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media in 2025?” published by SOAX, author Daria Sherr presents statistics on social media usage.
- In the CNBC article “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: How I use AI in my own everyday life—it’s great for ‘boring’ tasks,” Sam Altman shares insights into his personal use of artificial intelligence.