- Opening and Closing the Gate
- Do You Know What Your Kids Are Watching?
- How do you create a Christ-centered home?
- His Role and its Duties
- Men God Wants
- The Role of Friendship in Marriage
- Fathers who interact with children plant life-changing seeds
- Fatherhood isn't for Sissies
- How to Catch a Redhead!
- No Quantity, No Quality
Stop Time Leaks
Wherever you turn, everyone wants a piece of your time. A piece here, a piece there, pretty soon it's all gone. You lay back at the end of the day, wondering if you accomplished the most important things or even anything at all. You have time leaks.
In the software world, programmers refer to and try to track down "memory leaks." A memory leak in a running application will eat up more and more memory in the computer until it grinds to a halt. At that point, the only cure for the ailment is to restart. Programmers will go to great lengths to eliminate each and every memory leak they come across.
Time leaks are like memory leaks in that they grind your progress to a halt. You know what is most important to do, but you don't get to it. It may not be procrastination. Other things, also important, jumped in and took your attention. Or maybe they weren't important. That's part of the problem.
You have things you have to do in a day, no question. You have things you want to do in a day. How do you decide which things get done? There are several things that may assist you in this decision. You can do any or all.
This first one is the most important. You have to decide your priorities and goals. Take some time, sit down, and prayerfully consider where you want to be in five years. This is your long-term goal. You can write down others, but pick one to concentrate on. Also pick some intermediate-term and short-term goals. Intermediate goals are where you want to be in three years. Short-term goals can be accomplished within the next year.
Now that you have some goals, make sure that you work on them. God has a plan for your life. Amazingly, His plan intersects with your talents and abilities. He has gifted you to do what He wants you to do. You may not be able to change everything in your life so that each thing you do every day is related to one of your goals, but you can start working them in. If your goal is to read one book by C. S. Lewis a month, you have to work in reading time.
Each day make out a list of what needs to be done. Better yet, make it out the night before. Then prioritize it. As you look at each item on the list decide if it is related to a goal. If not, can you lower its priority? It may be a project at work that has a deadline even though your long-term goal involves a career change. In that case, you can't bump it down, but other things can be bumped.
Some people prioritize by deciding whether each item is urgent/not urgent and important/not important. Urgent means it has an approaching deadline. Important means that it has great meaning--things related to your goals fit in here. An important item is not necessarily urgent and vice versa. The plan at this point is to concentrate on things that are important but not urgent. If you get them done before they are urgent, you don't have that last minute rush. At first, you will have to do some things that are both, but you can also start working on things that are only important.
I, myself, have found the above methods helpful in staying focused on God. Your call is different, but it is just as important. Find your destiny; then get in it.