Pickle Jar Theory: Proper Time Management Without Burnouts

Do you ever feel like there is never enough time to finish all your work? If your answer is “yes”, press 1!

If we had a dollar every time someone pressed 1, we would probably be too busy counting our millions, but here we are. According to research, a staggering 82% of people don’t rely on a time management system.

Even more shocking is the fact that your average employee spends just 2 hours and 53 minutes a day actually working. Also, businesses lose $588 billion each year due to employee distraction. And then you have stuff like burnout and workplace procrastionation, which ends up creating a vicious cycle.

We waste time ruthlessly, even though it’s the most precious commodity, since we can’t get it back or get more of it. But we can break the aforementioned cycle and start making the most of it by learning about the benefits of the Pickle Jar Theory.

What Is the Pickle Jar Theory?

Introduced by Jeremy Wright in 2002, the Pickle Jar Theory (also known as the Jar of Life Theory or Bucket of Rocks Theory), is a time management technique that uses a jar of pickles as a metaphor for the limited amount of time you have inside a day, and its contents as all the different everyday activities and tasks.

The goal of this theory is to prioritize those tasks and responsibilities in a specific order. This visual metaphor helps you to estimate the amount of time it will take to finish a portion of your daily work.

And since your typical day probably involves multiple urgent tasks and tight deadlines, the Pickle Jar theory can be a powerful tool in your arsenal for tackling those obstacles in a productive manner while avoiding burnout.

Before we get onto how you can apply this technique to your agency, let’s check out the basic elements of the metaphorical pickle jar.

Elements of the Pickle Jar

You probably already know that there aren’t any pickles involved (we are just as disappointed as you are), but what’s with all the rocks, pebbles, and sand? What’s all that about?

Well, simply put, these elements or objects represent the tasks and responsibilities you need to complete each day, where the object size is directly proportional to the order of priority.

The pickle jar contents include:

• Rocks: These are your most important tasks during the day, such as developing your agency's overall strategy and making sure that the project deliverables are progressing according to schedule, or meeting with stakeholders and clients.
• Pebbles: These are tasks that aren’t as crucial as the rocks, even though they may appear urgent. For example, answering emails, having meetings, or making phone calls, while important, can be postponed or delegated.
• Sand: Small and trivial tasks, busy work, and distractions that eat into your productive time, such as surprise office visits, unplanned phone calls, or social media scrolling.
• Water: Finally, water represents your time off in the day, and includes work breaks, leisure activities, hobbies, spending time with your family and friends, exercising, and sleeping. Although non-work related, they are crucial to your well-being and health.

Now, let’s take a look at how you can apply this technique to manage your daily workload and avoid overworking yourself.

How to Implement the Pickle Jar Theory and Prevent Burnout: 5 Steps

To put together your pickle jar, you can just use a simple piece of paper and a pen, or an Excel sheet. Or, if prefer to visualize your daily workload, you can use a project management tool or a productivity workspace like ActiveCollab.

Whatever your method of choice, implementing the pickle jar theory boils down to five straightforward steps:

1. Identify Your Main Goals and Priorities: Creating Your Pickle Jar

What are your work priorities? What are the high-value, high-priority tasks that contribute the most to the big picture? What are your rocks?

You need to be realistic about how much time you have and how productive you can be. You can’t just fill the entire jar with rocks, because that would quickly lead to burnout.

Aim for quality instead of quantity, which works out to 2-3 high-priority tasks per day. Then, consider tasks with a lower order of priority, or pebbles, as well as sand, which are small tasks or distractions that can fill the gaps.

Finally, take a look at the remaining time, represented by water, and establish a healthy balance between your personal and professional life.

2. Schedule Your Most Important Tasks: Add the Rocks

With your tasks categorized, it’s time to focus on the rocks and schedule them. Because these are crucial, high-priority tasks, you will need to create large uninterrupted time blocks in order to tackle them properly and make any significant progress.

The smoothest way to do this would be to use ActiveCollab, because it comes with features that align perfectly with the pickle jar technique. Here is an example of how you can schedule your rocks with ActiveCollab:

• Mark high-priority tasks
• Create custom labels (Urgent, Normal, High, Low or even Rocks, Pebbles, Sand, and Water)
• Use different view types (List, Grid) to visualize top-priority tasks
• Apply filters to display only your rocks

Plus, there is also a time tracking feature that tracks how much time you’ve spent on high-value tasks, as well as similar rocks in the past, which enables you to give a more accurate time estimate.

3. Plan Medium-Priority Tasks: Adding the Pebbles

With your rocks in place, you can start to add a handful of pebbles to fill up the space around the rocks. As we have pointed out previously, these are the tasks that are important, but which aren’t necessarily as pressing the rocks, nor do they play a huge role in the bigger picture.

Still, stuff like answering emails and having meetings with your team needs to be done, because often, high-priority tasks cannot move forward without it.

Now, because those tasks still require focus on your part, having too many of them throughout the day would deplete your energy in a big way, so make sure to distribute them throughout your week or month, so that you can cross a lot of them off your list without getting exhausted.

4. Tackle the Low-Priority Tasks: Filling the Gaps with Sand

Each small grain of sand represents an equally small task or errand that you can complete in 15-30 minutes or even less, such as answering a quick phone call, or reading a piece of copy or content that needs to be approved for publishing.

Once you’ve scheduled your rocks and pebbles, fill in the small gaps with sand. We recommend that you deal with these when you have small breaks between high or medium-priority tasks, or at the end of the day when there is no time left to complete a larger task.

Another thing about sand tasks is the fact that they are usually not critical or urgent. Also, as in the case of pebbles, don’t fill all of the remaining space in the jar with sand, as it will add up to a lot.

5. Leave Room for Non-Work Related Tasks: Pour the Water In

Last, but not least, you have water tasks which should take up the remaining space inside your pickle jar. The best part about these tasks is that they are mostly about keeping you rested and energized during and after your workday.

Water tasks should include things like:

Of course, these tasks are the most flexible ones, but don’t fall into the trap of sacrificing sleep or rest in order to indulge in binging TV shows or gaming.

Pickle Jar Theory Example

Here is a quick example of how your schedule would look like if decide to implement the pickle jar theory:

Pros and Cons of the Pickle Jar Theory for Agencies

The benefits of the pickle jar theory far outweigh the disadvantages, but we will still take a look at both:

Advantages of the Pickle Jar Theory

By implementing the pickle jar theory, you get to reap the following benefits:

• More free time: If you succeed in staying away from shallow busy work and repetitive tasks and shifting your focus toward rock tasks, you will manage your time better and reduce the occurrence of bringing your work home.
• Visualize your time: Whether you are using a productivity and PM tool like ActiveCollab or just a pen and paper, presenting your workday in a visual manner can help you perceive time more effectively.
• Streamline prioritization: This technique requires you to get good at figuring out what your work priorities are, and how to go about tackling them one by one.
• Reduce multitasking: By allotting time blocks for all of your tasks, your focus won’t end up getting scarce across multiple projects.
• Beat procrastination: With better organization and time management, you reduce the risk of falling into habits that lead to procrastination. Procrastination is also a stress response, so once you get all your work done on time, there will be no stress to trigger it.
• Keep distractions at bay: Nobody can be productive 24/7, so the pickle jar theory leaves room for distractions, but only at specific times, and only after you have done most of your deep work.

Limitations of the Pickle Jar Theory

As good as this technique is, keep in mind that it does have certain limitations that make it less than ideal in some circumstances. These include:

• Lack of flexibility: Some people may find this technique too rigid, as it revolves around a predictable routine.
• The difficulty of estimating time: It can be difficult to estimate how much time it will take you to complete certain tasks, especially those that are high-priority.
• Doesn’t account for unforeseen events: Even the most well-thought-out daily schedule can be sidelined by an unexpected interruption or event.
• Risk of overcommitment: As mentioned earlier in the article, taking on too many rocks or pebbles can lead to exhaustion and burnout.
• Overprioritization: While it’s important to focus on those tasks that move your agency closer to its main goals, overemphasizing their importance at the expense of medium or low-priority tasks can harm your progress. For instance, if you don’t take enough to rest and recharge, your well-being and productivity will take a hit.

Conclusion - Create Your Agency’s Pickle Jar with ActiveCollab

The Pickle Jar Theory is a simple, but effective way of approaching time management and making sure that you make good progress, even on the busiest of days.

Once there is a clear separation between tasks and a fixed time slot to complete them, it leaves very little room for distractions, procrastination, and multitasking. And because all the work is so structured, it leads to less stress and minimizes the chance of burnout.

But, prioritizing your tasks and creating a schedule manually is work in itself, which can be made easier with ActiveCollab, which features task visualization, time tracking, and task prioritization functionalities, ideally suited for the implementation of the pickle jar theory principles.

Is your pickle jar overflowing? Are you stressed, overworked, and falling behind on deadlines? Give ActiveCollab a shot!

Feel free to reach out to us and sign up for our 14-day free trial, or book a demo. Our industry experts will demonstrate the effectiveness of ActiveCollab when implementing the Pickle Jar Theory!