A Mayonnaise Jar & Two Beers
When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 Beers.
A professor stood before his Philosophy 201 class and had some items in front of him.
When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.
He then asked the students if the jar was full.
They agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar He shook the jar lightly.
The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.
He then asked the students again if the jar was full.
They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.
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Taking a Step Back
Recently, I have noticed how much time I spend on “social networking” sites such as FaceBook and Twitter. Mostly, this is due to an application I use called Slife (http://www.slifelabs.com/) which tracks my computer usage and, specifically, monitors the amount of time that I spend on particular websites. After reviewing the results of the tracking, I was somewhat alarmed by the extraordinary amount of time that I spend doing what I can only equate to wasting time.
This prompted a series of thoughts and decisions that lead me down the path to taking a break from it all. I had all of my passwords (at least to the sites in question) changed so that I don’t know any of them and, therefore, can’t get in and feed this addiction. It’s a bit drastic, I know, but I think it will be a very helpful change for a variety of reasons.
First, by disabling my access, I am now forced to fill my time with other, more productive, exercises. By creating this void in my time usage, I anticipated that I would force myself to focus more attentively on whatever task I had at hand. Such was not initially the case. Rather than being able to focus on a particular proposal, for example, I have found myself distracted by thoughts such as “I wonder what so and so is up to…I’ll just look them up on FaceBook…oh…wait…I can’t…” and so on.