Big Rocks

Are you accessing the Big Rocks in your life? Are you living the life you want to live?

If you are a Global Creative you are likely a master of the urgent, and sometimes even the urgently important, but how do you rate spending time with the stuff that really matters? The really important stuff?

Covey refers to them as Big Rocks - the big things you want to accomplish in life - and his eternal words remind us, if we don't put the Big Rocks first, we might never get to them.

Covey's Quad II  - the important/not urgent things in our life - (also referred to as the Eisenhower Matrix) is the access ramp to higher, richer and more rewarding plateaus in our lives.  The advanced training to diversify your skill set and boost income, or the project that will highlight your leadership skills live in QII.

On a simpler note, the stuff that is expected, but not expected today or tomorrow - the long range plan, the business plan, the employee improvement plan - quietly resides in this QII place.  Accessing these tasks can be doubly challenging for Global Creative business owners since there is no one above them holding them accountable. No external structure.

Smart people with ADHD tend to be frustrated by Quad II, flummoxed by this mysterious and fleeting landscape outside of our daily routine.

Is this you?

Did you know that your ADHD likely plays a direct role in your challenges with this type of work?  We often use urgency to prioritize our tasks but the nature of QII items is that they rarely respond to urgency.  The reason we use urgency in the first place is because items on our task list can present with equal weight.  This is related to the Global Creative's lack of a sequential perception of time and a tendency for black and white thinking.

Russell Barkley fans.  Notice I did not use the term "time blindness".  For the Global Creative time is measured not as a linear process but more like a good story - very much related to our context, who we are speaking with and what has our attention.  We measure time in a different way.  More by association than sequence.

Pausing to stop and distinguish items prior to prioritizing them can be a useful exercise.  This 1-2 step is a part of a bigger process for tackling those Big Rocks.  Re-Activating or re-engaging is the other really key step in D-PARC.  Big Rocks are big for a reason and we need to find ways back to reengaging them on a regular basis.

Here is a deeper dive into each element of D-PARC.

- Distinguishing - Prioritizing - Activating - Re-Activating - Completing