In 2016, I was deeply engaged in the tech industry. I had built a security company that was acquired and I was leading a large team working on major projects at one of the highest-traffic internet companies.
And I felt like I was drowning. I spent all day responding to messages and struggled to make progress.
So I created a system, which I called “Just Three” at the time. I designed a compact planner that I could carry in my pocket and printed hundreds of copies. I shared some with friends and used them extensively for years. Over time, the system has evolved and been refined. Sometimes I drift away from it for a while, but I always return.
I believe it has become even more valuable over the last decade, which is why I decided to write a book about it and collaborate with my friend David to develop an app as well.
So, for today’s Tuesday post, I’d like to share the first chapter of that book with you. I’m looking forward to sharing the full book with you soon, and I hope these methods I’ve honed over the years can help you in your (crazy) life:
Chapter 1: The Jar Is Full
You’ve probably heard this story before. It’s been told in classrooms, boardrooms, and church basements for decades—a parable so familiar it borders on cliché.
But clichés survive for a reason: they hold something true that we keep forgetting.
So let’s look again, slowly.
A philosophy professor walks into his classroom carrying a large, empty glass jar.
Without a word, he fills it with fist-sized stones until no more will fit.
“Is the jar full?” he asks.
The students nod. It looks full.
He smiles and pours in a box of pebbles, shaking the jar so they settle into the gaps.
Then a box of sand—the fine grains slip into every remaining space until the jar seems packed solid.
Finally, he pours in a cup of coffee that seeps through to the bottom.
“There’s always room,” he says, “for coffee with a friend.”
You know the moral: the stones are what truly matter, the pebbles are the supporting pieces, and the sand is everything else—the errands, emails, and micro-demands that fill the day if you let them.
If you don’t put the stones in first, you’ll never get them in at all.
We all nod at that lesson. And then, tomorrow morning, we go right back to shoveling sand.
You probably will too—unless you build a way of living that makes choosing differently automatic.
This book is about changing that—for good.
What You’ll Learn Here
• Why you’re always out of time, even when you’re busy every second—the psychology of attention, distraction, and why your brain is wired to chase the wrong things.
• How to divide your life into two kinds of energy—for yourself and for others—so you can fill your own cup while still showing up fully for the people and work that depend on you.
• How to see what truly matters, separating urgent noise from meaningful progress.
• How to scaffold your goals so that your three daily stones connect to your weekly, monthly, and yearly intentions, turning ambition into achievable motion.
• How to build habits that stick—small, repeatable wins that rewire consistency into your identity.
• How to triage the sand—errands, email, and maintenance tasks—so they stay in their place instead of stealing your life.
• How to rebuild your relationship with technology, the ever-present tide that keeps most of us reactive and scattered. You’ll learn practical ways to reclaim your focus, attention, and peace.
Along the way, we’ll talk about why busyness feels like progress but isn’t, how to use data without letting it use you, and what it means to measure your days not by volume but by meaning.
The goal isn’t to do more—it’s to do the right things on purpose.
By the end, you’ll have a simple framework that helps you choose what matters, finish what you start, and feel full again—not from squeezing more in, but from living more deliberately.
If you’ve ever felt like your day happens to you instead of through you, this is your way back to authorship.
So let’s begin where the parable begins: with the jar, and what we choose to put inside.
The Reign of Sand
Modern life is optimized for sand.
Your phone buzzes. Your inbox fills. The school sends another reminder. A bill is due.
You try to read a single paragraph of an article, but three notifications stack up before you finish the second sentence.
It’s a constant drizzle of demands—individually harmless, collectively suffocating.
You can fill every minute of your day and still end the week with that hollow feeling: busy but not better.
Your day happens to you.
Your week happens to you.
Your life happens to you.
Most productivity systems don’t fix this—they accelerate it. They help you process sand faster, color-code it, sync it across devices. You get better at reacting, but you’re still reacting. You’re still living at the mercy of the next ping.
And now, as artificial intelligence reshapes entire industries, the flood is only accelerating.
The tools meant to save us time often just give us more to react to.
The challenge of the coming decade won’t be how to work faster—it’ll be how to stay human while the machines get faster around us.
The False God of Throughput
I used to think productivity meant getting more done.
More systems, more hacks, more lists.
If I could just fit a little more sand in the jar, maybe I’d finally feel caught up.
But being productive without being intentional just makes you efficient at the wrong things.
A good system shouldn’t make you faster—it should make you wiser.
It should help you see what actually matters, and protect it.
About a decade ago, I built a small paper system to keep myself sane. I called it Just Three.
It wasn’t about doing more—it was about remembering what mattered.
Three Stones, No More
Most systems treat life like one endless list—one ladder of obligations. But you’re not one-dimensional. You don’t exist only to produce or to serve. You have an inner life and an outer life.
You have responsibilities, yes, but you also have needs.
Every morning, you begin with an empty jar.
Your job is to choose three stones—the three things that deserve space today.
At least one should be for yourself—something that refills you.
At least one should be for others—something that serves, contributes, or connects.
The third is flexible: it goes where it’s most needed.
The balance will shift with the tides of your life. Some days, the world needs more from you. Some days, you need more from yourself. The rule isn’t symmetry; it’s honesty.
Three stones total. That’s all a human day can hold well.
More than that, and the weight turns to noise.
Less than that, and you drift.
This is the discipline of enough.
Each stone is an intention made visible—something you can actually finish.
They’re not tasks; they’re declarations: This is what will matter when the day is done.
The Rule of Achievability
Each stone must be achievable, not aspirational.
If you keep carrying the same one forward, it’s not a stone—it’s a mirage. Re-shape it until it’s real.
• “Fix my health” → ❌
• “Book doctor’s appointment” → ✅
• “Write the book” → ❌
• “Draft the opening page” → ✅
Your brain doesn’t crave effort; it craves closure.
Completion builds confidence. Repetition without completion builds shame.
Start finishing again.
The Rule of Measurability
Every stone should have a clear edge—a done-state you can name.
“Work on project” is sand.
“Finish section 1 of project” is a stone.
Ambiguity kills momentum. Precision fuels it.
When you can see the edges of what matters, you can finally lift it.
Scaffolding Your Goals
Big goals can feel impossible until you see how they shrink.
Here’s where Three Stones becomes more than a daily ritual—it becomes a full framework for progress.
Start with Your Compass
Before you plan your month or your week, you need direction. Everything you choose should flow from the deeper things you care about—the forces that give your work and your days meaning.
In Three Stones, we think in two directions: inward and outward.
Internal intentions shape who you are on the inside—how you live, feel, and grow.
External intentions describe how you show up in the world and what you give to others.
Here’s an example of how my compass might look:
Internal
• Be intentional with how I spend my time
• Live an adventurous life
• Be physically strong
External
• Make sure my family is financially and emotionally cared for
• Help others gain control over their time and lives
• Help parents raise children with a healthy relationship to technology
These are your compass points. They’re not fixed forever; they’ll evolve as you do. But they orient you toward meaning.
On any given day, your three stones should point back toward them—at least one inward and one outward. When they do, life starts to feel aligned. Your actions echo your values.
Zoom One Level In: The Year
Once you’ve defined your compass, ask: What could I do this year to move these forward?
This is your long arc of effort—the twelve-month horizon where vision turns into concrete ambition.
Maybe it’s training for a triathlon, building a business, paying off debt, or taking your family abroad for the first time.
Yearly goals give the months context; they’re the first translation of intention into direction.
Zoom Again: The Month, The Week, The Day
From there, we get practical. You don’t just set three stones for today—you scaffold them.
Three for the Month—your broadest short-term intentions.
These are your “big stones” for the near horizon—meaningful goals that take sustained effort. They define the shape of your month.
Three for the Week—your stepping stones.
Pieces of those larger goals, broken down into what’s realistically doable in the next seven days. Each week becomes a checkpoint, a gentle recalibration.
Three for the Day—your daily actions.
The smallest, clearest pieces—achievable bites you can actually finish. They connect directly to the weekly goals, which ladder up to the monthly ones.
Why It Works
This scaffolding—from compass → year → month → week → day—transforms overwhelm into momentum. You’re no longer staring up at a mountain; you’re taking the next visible step.
It also honors one of the most powerful truths in behavior design: make success feel close.
When you win small, you keep moving.
When you only set grand goals, you freeze.
Each layer keeps the next one honest.
The compass ensures meaning.
The year ensures direction.
The month ensures progress.
The week ensures focus.
The day ensures completion.
Together, they build a life that moves in one clear direction—yours.
The Inbound List
Here’s the safety valve that keeps everything else from flooding your focus.
As new tasks, ideas, and interruptions appear during the day, log them in an inbound list—a single, running capture zone.
Don’t act on them yet. Don’t even evaluate them. Just park them.
Later—at day’s end, or when you plan tomorrow—you look through that list. Some items will graduate to tomorrow’s stones. Most will quietly die. And that’s fine.
The separation between capture and commitment is sacred. It’s what keeps your day yours.
The Real Point Isn’t Productivity
If you’re reading this because you want to “get more done,” I get it.
But the goal isn’t output—it’s authorship.
When you start each day by choosing three stones—at least one for yourself and one for others—you’re not just planning your time. You’re declaring ownership over your attention.
You’re saying:
These three things define what matters today.
Everything else is just sand.
That act—simple as it is—restores a sense of authorship that modern life erodes.
You stop drifting. You start directing.
And strangely, when you focus on your stones, the sand still gets handled—just more lightly, more sanely. The errands, the calls, the paperwork: they still happen, but they don’t own you anymore. They fit into the cracks and leave space for what matters.
The Emotional Layer
If you’ve ever watched a child build something—a fort, a tower, a cardboard spaceship—you’ve seen pure focus. No multitasking. No dashboards. Just absorption.
Adults lose that somewhere along the way. We start confusing attention with obligation. We trade depth for throughput.
But when you limit yourself to three meaningful things—one inward, one outward, one flexible—you rediscover flow. You stop scattering your focus so thinly that nothing feels satisfying.
You begin to experience the rare state of full engagement again—the feeling that this matters, this moment is enough.
What Stones Really Represent
Your stones aren’t just tasks—they’re values expressed as actions.
• “Go for a run” is a vote for vitality.
• “Read with my kid” is a vote for presence.
• “Call Mom” is a vote for connection.
• “Finish proposal” is a vote for integrity and craft.
Every checkmark becomes proof that you’re living the way you say you want to live.
That’s how a list becomes a mirror—a daily reflection of what you truly value.
The Promise
You can’t eliminate sand. There will always be laundry and invoices, browser tabs and birthday parties, errands and emails.
Life will always generate more small things than you can possibly finish.
But you can decide what goes in first.
That’s the work of Three Stones.
When you begin each day by naming three things—at least one for yourself and one for others—you start to reclaim authorship of your time.
Then, as you learn to scaffold those intentions—aligning them with your compass, and breaking them down into the year, the month, the week, and the day—your life begins to take shape.
Each layer connects to the next, like stones in a wall, until meaning and momentum start reinforcing one another.
Over time, something subtle shifts. You stop measuring success by how much you got through and start measuring it by what actually moved you forward.
You notice that your best days aren’t the ones where you did everything, but the ones where you did the right things—deeply, fully, without distraction.
The sand never disappears, but it starts to settle around your stones instead of burying them.
And when you look back—at the end of the day, the week, the month, the year, or eventually, at the end of your life—the jar finally feels full.
Not because you fit in more, but because what’s inside really matters.
Life’s like a movie
Write your own ending
Keep believing
Keep pretending
We’ve done just what we’ve set out to do
—The Muppet Movie, 1979
That choice—to act deliberately rather than reactively—is becoming more important by the day. Artificial intelligence is quickly mastering everything mechanical, repetitive, and purely efficient. What it can’t replicate are the things that make you human: attention, empathy, curiosity, and purpose. The future will belong to those who protect those capacities—who can still decide what matters and why.
That’s what Three Stones is really about.
Not efficiency. Humanity.
Follow these rules and you’ll still be busy—but you’ll be busy with purpose.
And one day soon, when you glance back at the jar of your life, it’ll finally look, and feel, full.
Most of us already know what matters. The problem isn’t clarity—it’s capacity.
We live in a world that hijacks our attention, rewards distraction, and punishes stillness.
Before we can live intentionally, we have to understand what’s stealing our time and energy in the first place.
That’s where we’re headed next.