Prioritise Your Time With The Mayonnaise Jar And Two Beers Method

Whenever it feels like you don’t have enough time (perhaps to do all the nothing you want), think of a mayonnaise jar and beer. In this time management fable, a professor fills an empty mayonnaise jar with golf balls and asks his students if the jar is full, to which they say yes.

Picture: Jeffrey Beall/Flickr

Then he pours pebbles in, filling up more space. Then sand, which fills up everything else. And then, finally, two beers.

The moral, you’ve probably already guessed, is to spend time first on the most important things — your friends and family, your passions. Then add other priorities (the pebbles), like your job, and, finally, everything else or the small stuff (the sand). If you put the sand in the jar first, there would be no room for the more important things.

Variations of this story have been circling around the web for some time, but it’s a memorable refresher, whether you’ve heard it before or not. Plus, it adds this beer point:

The beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of beers with a friend.

Mayonnaise Jar and Two Beers [Colorado State University]