In Praise of Playing Hooky

On priorities, people, and what it really means to put first things first

There is a classic image that I'm sure you've seen - a jar filled with rocks, pebbles, and sand. Stephen Covey popularized it in First Things First, and the lesson is deceptively simple: fill the jar with sand first, and there's no room left for the rocks. Put the rocks in first, and everything else finds its way around them.

If the big rocks don't go in first, they aren't going to fit in later. Dr. Stephen R. Covey, First Things First

The rocks, Covey is clear, are not just the biggest or heaviest obligations. They are the things you value most. Your family. Your health. The relationships that hold your life together. The people without whom everything else would feel hollow.

I thought I understood this 15 years ago and I just realized I had it completely BACKWARDS.

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What I actually put in the jar first

Here is what I treated as my rocks: work, money, productivity, and achievement. The big imposing time-blocks. The things that felt urgent, that had deliverables, that generated visible results. The things that matter in America in a culture of capitalism. I put those in first every single day, automatically, the way you'd load the heaviest things first - because heavy felt like important.

And then, if there was room, if the day allowed, if I felt like it - I'd fit in the other things. A walk. A phone call. A long lunch with a friend. A picnic in the park on a Tuesday. I treated all of that as sand. The nice stuff, the optional stuff, the stuff for when the real work was done.

But here's what I kept noticing: when I skipped the call to my grandfather because I was too busy, something went wrong. Not just for him. For me. When I told a friend I couldn't do lunch because I had too much going on,  the work didn't get better. I just felt more hollow doing it. When I rescheduled the walk, cancelled the picnic, let weeks go by without sitting across a table from someone I loved, the jar looked full. The time passed. I guess I was productive. But the jar was full of the wrong things.

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My rocks are people

I've been rereading Covey, and I don't know why it finally clicked for me.He is saying to identify what you actually value most - and organize your life around that. 

The question isn't "what is most urgent?" It's "what would make everything else feel worth it?"

NOT WHAT SOCIETY TELLS YOU TO VALUE NOT WHAT YOUR MOM TELLS YOU MATTERS MOST NOT WHAT TIKTOK TELLS YOU MATTERS 

For me, the answer has always been people. At least that's what I told myself. But you know the adage that all you have to do is see someone's bank account and calander to see their values? I don't think my rocks have been people for a long time. I've relgated my people to sand.

The walk in the park is not sand. The long lunch is not sand. The phone call to my grandfather is not sand.

Those are my rocks. And I have been leaving them on the table while I filled the jar with things that felt important but weren't - not really, not in the end.

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The tree didn't grow overnight

I was on my usual walking route recently when I stopped short. The trees, bare-branched, skeletal things I'd been walking past for months, were suddenly, completely full. Dense green canopies. Cherry blossoms in hot pink. My entire yard has been taken over by yellow dandelions that appeared from nowhere.

My first instinct was to think: everything changed overnight. We did have a decent storm yesterday. But that's not what happened. The leaves didn't appear out of nowhere. They had been changing every single day - incrementally, imperceptibly - and I had just been too busy to notice any of it. The tree wasn't different. It has been changing this entire time. I just finally looked up.

Life doesn't transform suddenly. It transforms constantly. In small, quiet, daily increments that we mostly miss because we're distracted by things that feel urgent. The people we love change every day. Our relationships deepen or erode in tiny moments we barely register. Our parents age a little each week. Our children grow. The world keeps turning whether we are watching it or not.

Which means the question isn't whether I'll be ready when the big moments come. The question is whether I'm showing up for all the small moments that are, quietly and without fanfare, making up my life right now.

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Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed

The Iliad is, at its core, a 3,000-year-old argument about mortality and what it means to be alive. And its central figure, Achilles, makes a choice that defines the entire poem: he chooses a short, fully-lived life over a long, forgotten one.

He knows he will die young.

He goes to Troy anyway. Because a life of safety and half-presence seemed to him like no life at all.

I LOVE this quote from the film Troy. Achilles, on the eve of battle, says:

I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again. - Achilles, Troy — written by David Benioff, from Homer's Iliad

The gods, in Homer's telling, are actually pitiable. Nothing is ever truly at stake for them. They cannot lose what they cannot lose. We can. And that - the fact that any moment might be our last, that this exact version of this day will never come again - is precisely what makes it worth being present for.

You will never be lovelier than you are now. Your grandfather will not always pick up the phone. The friend who keeps saying "we should get lunch" will eventually stop asking. The version of your child that exists today will never exist again after tomorrow. We will never be here again.

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Even creativity needs room to breathe

This isn't just philosophy. It's data. It isn't just nice to have - it is a good business practice.

Daniel Pink ( you definitely should be following him on LI because he drops daily truth bombs plucked from his various books, which are equally amazing), has spent years making the case that unstructured time is not a luxury - it is a condition for human creativity and flourishing. 

"Playfulness," he writes, "is not only a source of joy, but also a pathway to more intense creativity and inspiration." The drive to do something simply because it is interesting, absorbing, and freely chosen is, he argues, essential to doing anything at its highest level.

Google. One of the most productive and productivity-driven companies in the world agreed with this model. When the company went public in 2004, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in their IPO letter that employees were encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever they thought would most benefit the company - no immediate deliverable required, no outcome guaranteed. 

Just space to think, wander, and create. That unstructured time produced Gmail, Google News, and AdSense. It turns out that some of the most valuable work looks, from the outside, like nothing much at all.

3M did the same thing decades earlier - giving engineers 15 percent of their time to pursue whatever interested them. The result was the Post-it Note.

The pattern is consistent and hard to argue with: when you protect space - real, unhurried, unaccountable space - remarkable things emerge from it. Not despite the lack of structure, but because of it.

And yet most of us schedule every hour, optimize every day, and treat any unstructured time as something to be filled or apologized for.

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You have to waste time with people

Dr. Vivek Murthy, who served as the U.S. Surgeon General, put it plainly:

If you want to build community, you have to 'waste time' with people. - Dr. Vivek Murthy

He meant it as a prescription, not a consolation. Murthy has spent years documenting what he calls an epidemic of loneliness in America, and his conclusion is that the antidote is not more efficiency. It is unstructured time — time without a deliverable, time that looks from the outside like nothing much.

Chronic loneliness is associated with elevated risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and depression. The health impact of social disconnection has been compared to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. A large-scale study of nearly 1,800 workers found that a meaningful increase in happiness produced a 12 percent rise in productivity. Happier, more connected people do better work. The case for protecting time with the people you love is not just emotional - it is empirical.

As a society, we are more productive than at any point in human history - and we have rarely been less satisfied. The United States dropped to its lowest-ever ranking in the World Happiness Report in 2025, falling to 24th in the world, down from 11th in 2012. GDP per capita has grown steadily over the same period. We have more. We produce more. We are less happy. The equation is broken, and I think most of us already know why.

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What I'm doing differently

I am done treating the people I love like sand.

I am going to call my grandfather - not when I have a spare moment, but because talking to him is a rock, and it goes in first. I am going to go to the park for a picnic lunch with my nephew, not as a reward for finishing everything, but because that hour in the sun is one of the most important things I can do with my day. I am going to say yes to the dinner conversations with friends that run long after the sun has set. I am going to stop and look at the dandelions. I am going to look up at the trees that were bare last week and feel genuinely amazed that they are full of leaves today - and remind myself that they have been becoming that every single day, whether I was watching or not.

The work will still get done. The bills will get paid. Heavy things make their presence known. They don't need to be protected - they fight their own way into the jar.

It's the other rocks that need protecting. The ones that don't send calendar reminders or generate deliverables. The ones that don't push back when you say "not today."

The ones that will simply, quietly, stop being available if you keep treating them like they can wait.

We will never be here again.

Covey had it right. First things first.

I just finally figured out what my first things are.

If you need me, I'll be going playing unicorns at my neighborhood park.

Keep Reading

I have been reading books by remarkable leaders and thinkers for thirty years. Every idea in this post came from that practice - not from a search engine, not from a summary, but from sitting with a book long enough to let it change how I think.

If any of this resonated with you, here is where to go next. These are not just the sources for this post. They are some of the books that have most shaped who I am as a leader, a thinker, and a human being. Check them out from your local library or buy them from an indie bookstore.

Let us bring back reading friends.

• Homer

    The Iliad (translated by Emily Wilson)

  
  

  Homer's central argument, made across thousands of lines of verse about humanity in ancient Greece, is that mortality is not a curse. It is the thing that makes everything matter.

  
  

• Stephen R. Covey

  First Things First

  
  

  This book challenged the typical capitalist and productivity approach to work and time - and made me question my own values.

  The question he forces you to sit with is not how to manage your time, but whether the way you are spending it reflects what you actually believe matters.

  
  

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

  If you haven't read this yet, you're in for a treat. Covey writes about character over personality, about being proactive rather than reactive, about seeking first to understand before seeking to be understood. It is a book about how to be a person, not just how to be productive.

  
  

• Daniel H. Pink

  A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

  
  

  Finally! A win for the right brainers! Pink argues that the Information Age prized left-brain thinking: logic, analysis, code, contracts. But the era we are moving into prizes something different - design, story, empathy, play, meaning. The people who will thrive are not the most efficient. They are the most human. This is pertinent now more than ever with the evolution of AI.

  
  

• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

  This is the book where Pink writes about Google's 20 percent time - the policy of giving employees one day a week to work on whatever genuinely interested them, with no deliverable required.

  
  

• Dr. Vivek Murthy

  Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

  
  

  My mental health friends turned me onto this but it is a must read for any leader in 2026 in America. The former U.S. Surgeon General spent years on a listening tour across America, and what he kept hearing underneath every story - addiction, violence, despair - was loneliness. The science is unambiguous: connection is medicine. Prioritizing people is not a luxury. It is survival.

  
  

• Brene Brown

  Daring Greatly

  
  

  If you've managed to not read this in an ERG group yet, honestly that's impressive. But you should still check it out. It's buld around one of my all time favorite writings, Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena speech, this book makes the case that showing up fully - in your work, your relationships, your life - requires the willingness to be seen. Not perfectly. Just honestly.

A note on reading

The best investment you can make in your leadership, your relationships, and your own thinking is thirty minutes a day with a book written by someone who spent years figuring something out and then sat down to tell you about it. We live in an age of infinite information and 90% is from a robot. Read books. Learn from people who actually did the work. Tell stories.

And then - please - tell me what you are reading.