Rocks First: A Simple Strategy for Overwhelmed Fundraisers
I like to say a little bit of strategy goes a long way. As a fundraiser, I know how important it is to get things done. Execution matters. But I also know that if you want to get the right things done, you have to step back occasionally.
You do need that little bit of strategy—especially if you don’t want to get swamped swinging at everything coming at you. The inbox fills up. Urgent requests pile on. And before you know it, you’ve been busy all day without feeling like you moved anything meaningful forward.
That’s why I like this simple framework from Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: rocks and pebbles.
Picture your time and energy as a bottle. The rocks are the few priorities that truly matter—the work that, if you made progress on nothing else, would still make the week, the month or even the year a success. The pebbles are everything else: important, necessary, often urgent, but ultimately secondary. Emails. One-off requests. Last-minute fire drills.
If you pour the pebbles into the bottle first, it fills up fast—and there’s no room left for the rocks. That’s the trap. When your days and weeks are driven by pebbles, they expand to fill all available space. You feel productive, but the rocks never get lifted. Fundraising becomes reactive instead of directional.
If you put the rocks in first, though, the pebbles can still fit around them. The difference is that the most important work has a place, and it’s protected.
The rocks-and-pebbles idea isn’t about ignoring the reality of our day-to-day demands. Pebbles still need attention. It’s about sequencing. Name the rocks first. Protect time, attention and energy for them. Then, let the pebbles fill in around that structure.
For fundraisers, this kind of clarity can be grounding. It creates a pause—a chance to ask: is this a rock, or is this a pebble? That small moment of strategy, applied consistently, can be the difference between feeling overwhelmed and actually making progress on what matters most.