The Lie Behind the Parable of the Golf Balls and the Jar

When talking about prioritization, most of us stumbled over the parable of the golf balls in the jar. Its origin goes back to Stephen Covey’s 1994 book. For all who did not have the pleasure to hear about it (here is the video) it goes more or less like this: A teacher arrives in class one day carrying several golf balls, some pebbles, a bag of sand and a large glass jar. He throws all golf balls into the jar and asks: “Is the jar full?” All students answer “Yes”. Then he goes on to fill all pebbles and they neatly fill the rooms between the golf balls. “Is it full now?” The students still low-braining with “Yes”. The teacher fills the sand to have the jar full and finally even a beer goes on top. He then explains that the golf balls represent the important things: family, your passion, health and friends. The moral is that if you make time for the most important things first, you’ll get them all done and have plenty of room for less important things besides. The rest is just sand, and you can always fill in some beers with friends. But if you don’t approach your to-do list in this order, you’ll never fit the bigger things in at all.

Eyes on the golf balls

Pretty good storytelling, but far away from the real world. The teacher has rigged his demonstration by bringing the right amount of golf balls for the jar and filling them into the jar at one time. But the real problem of prioritization today is that there are too many golf balls – and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar. Furthermore, they do not come all at the same time. The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between projects that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as golf balls. Most organizations I work for have a packed portfolio and considerable time pressure to deliver them. The first impulse is to use more resources and/or work on several products at once. This might seem intuitive, however, is counterproductive. Fortunately, a handful of wiser minds have addressed exactly this dilemma and here are three principles that will help you and your products aka your golf balls.

1) Pay Yourself First

Are you also guilty of saying to yourself “The money which remains in my account at the end of the month, will go to my savings/investments”. Only to realize at the end of the month that it was too much month for your salary. Businesses commit the same mistake when prioritizing, first maintenance and meetings than development with the remainder of the capacity of the work force. You must pay yourself first! That is the only way to ensure that X money goes to your savings account or investments. This principle is transcending from your piggybank to organizations. Remember the jar and the stones. The problem is not that you only have enough money for all you want to do this month. The issue is that there are so many options to spend money and working time on. So, you have to be sure what you want to accomplish first. Ask yourself: what has the most impact for your team? Then ensure that you finish first the identified item. One practical idea is to block time in the team’s agenda that is dedicated to their main purpose / task. Do not multitask!

2) Brutal prioritization paths the way to freedom

There are many tempting side projects and requests, but there can only be one prio 1 topic, one prio 2 topic, etc. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett – although probably only in the fictional way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source – in which the famously smart investor is asked about how to set priorities. Buffett recommends making a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least.

‘The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which you organize your time. But contrary to what you might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which you should turn when you have time. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones you should actively avoid at all costs – because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to you to form the core of your life yet seductive enough to distract you from the ones that matter most. The real issue with prioritization is that there are more and more tempting options around us. Especially in software you can do so many cool things. Focus is important to be able to finish your goals. Prioritize your work/portfolio. You can do this by creating a goal for the team, e.g. we want to reduce critical bugs from 8 per month to 1. Make this goal visible on a board and if you want to gamify create a scoreboard. This helps you and the team to adhere to your prioritization and it limits your WiP. Everything that does not pay into your goal, is second tier and not worthy to pursue.

3) Limit your work in progress!

Once you’ve prioritized your goals and established a limit in WiP, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the X items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. It’s also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on your backlog.

Making this rather modest change to your working practices produces a startlingly large effect. It is no longer possible for you to ignore the fact that your capacity for work is strictly finite – because each time you select a new task from your backlog, as one of your work-in-progress items, you are obliged to contemplate all those you’d inevitably be neglecting to focus on it. And yet precisely because you are forced to confront reality in this way – to see that you are always neglecting most tasks, to work on anything at all, and that working on everything at once simply isn’t an option – the result is a powerful sense of undistracted calm, and a lot more productivity. Another happy consequence is that you learn to break down your projects into manageable chunks, a strategy you long agreed with in theory but never properly implemented. It is clear that if you nominate “develop and release software X” to your limited WiP, it will clog up the system for months, so you are naturally motivated to figure out the next achievable step. Rather to keep falling for the bias and trying to do everything, accept the truth that you can only do a few things on any given day.

Extra Tip: Don’t be a perfectionist

Any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality inevitably fall short of our dreams. Read that again! This is because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Waiting to act until you know you’ll succeed, is NOT the solution. Most writers spend countless hours brainstorming their characters and plots, and they even write page after page that they know they’ll never include in the books. They do this because they know that ideas need time to develop. We tend to freeze up when it’s time to get started because we know that our ideas aren’t perfect and that what we produce might not be any good. But how can you ever produce something great if you don’t get started and give your ideas time to evolve? Author Jodi Picoult summarized the importance of avoiding perfectionism perfectly: “You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank page.”

Extra Tip 2: No human can correctly estimate the time a project will take

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, even when you consider Hofstadter’s Law. In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning – to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need – could make matters worse. You might be aware of, say, your unrealistic tendency to assume that you can complete the weekly grocery shopping in an hour, door to door. But if you allow yourself two hours, precisely because you know that you’re usually over-optimistic, you may find it taking two and a half hours instead. Really, no matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way you’d like. But you can make it more precise by using the above tips.

Photo from iStock/D. Lentz

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