One day a time management expert spoke to a group of business students. He set a wide-mouthed, onegallon mason jar on the table in front of him. Then he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and placed them carefully, one at a time, inside the jar.When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, “Is the jar full?” Everyone in the class answered, “Yes.” Then he asked, “Really?” He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar, causing pieces of gravel to work down into the spaces among the big rocks. He asked the group once more, “Is the jar full now?” By this time the class was on to him. “Probably not,” one of them answered. “Good!” he exclaimed. He reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started adding sand to the jar and it slid into the spaces remaining among the rocks and gravel. Once more he asked the question, “Is this jar full?” “No!” the class shouted. “Good,” he shouted back, grabbing a pitcher of water and pouring it into the jar until it was full to the brim. Then he looked up at the class and asked, “What’s the point of what I just did?”One student raised her hand and replied, “The point is, no matter how full your schedule seems to be, if you try really hard, you can always fit some more things into it.” “No!” the speaker replied. “That’s not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is, if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them all in.”

The Value of Time
You may have seen this popular, uncredited e-mail that has widely circulated on the Internet:
• To realize the value of one year, ask a student who failed a grade.
• To realize the value of one month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.
• To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.
• To realize the value of one hour, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.
• To realize the value of one second, ask the person who just avoided a traffic accident.
• To realize the value of one millisecond, ask the person who won an Olympic medal.
Time has a value greater than any currency. We may leave our children the money we don’t use in our own lifetimes, but we cannot leave them one millisecond of time.