minutes Solution Building

How I Spend My Time Today Will Have an Effect on That

It seems there isn’t enough time to get everything done. I don’t know about you, but I’m constantly looking around for more. I think to myself, “If I just had a few more minutes, I could get this one more thing done.”

The problem with time isn’t how much there is, it’s what we spend it on.

We spend time as though it will last forever. Not so. We each have a limited amount here on earth and we need to be more intentional about how we spend it. Time isn’t like money, we can make more money, but we can’t make any more time. When it’s gone, it’s gone. We can’t ever get it back.

Are we being good stewards of the time we’ve been given?

In Max Lucado’s book, “The Eye of the Storm” he tells a story about two paddleboats leaving Memphis headed to New Orleans. “As they traveled side by side, sailors from one vessel made a few remarks about the snail’s pace of the other.

Words were exchanged. Challenges were made. And the race began. Competition became vicious as the two boats roared through the Deep South.

One boat began falling behind. Not enough fuel. There had been plenty of coal for the trip, but not enough for a race. As the boat dropped back, an enterprising young sailor took some of the ship’s cargo and tossed it into the ovens. When the sailors saw that the supplies burned as well as the coal, they fueled their boat with the material they had been assigned to transport. They ended up winning the race but burned their cargo. Their cargo was gone, and they couldn’t get it back.

They lost sight of their purpose along the way and in the end had wasted their trip. Don’t waste your trip by getting caught up in the unintentional rat race of life and in the end, not achieve your purpose.

To live the most productive life we need to “begin with the end in mind”. We need to look at the end of our lives, our funerals, and imagine what people will say about us. In Michael Hyatt’s blog post, “What Will They Say When You Are Dead?”, he lays out a plan for this.

It is common to race through life getting caught up in the unimportant peripheral tasks that don’t contribute directly to what our purpose is. You’ve heard it said that “time is money”. What is the real value of your time? Are you spending your time wisely?

Time is a commodity that can only be spent. You can’t add to it, only subtract.

Are you spending your time wisely?

By Being Selfish and Not Letting It Have Any

The time monster will chew up our time if we let it. He gobbles it up as soon as it’s available and doesn’t leave anything but crumbs. This is one case when it’s okay not to share.

Don’t let the time monster have any of your time.

Last week’s solution was about ways the monster eats up your time. I concluded by pointing out that it’s up to me to manage my time, just like it’s up to you to manage yours. Let’s look at how we can get control of the time monster.

The first thing is to acknowledge that there is a monster. Pretending that he’s not out there won’t work. Closing your eyes and putting your hands over your ears doesn’t make the monster any less real. He’s out there and he likes the taste of time.

Next, we have to recognize it. Time monsters come in different sizes and shapes, see last week’s post. Each of our monsters are different. If you’re going to do battle with your monster you need to know what it looks like so that you can protect your time.

Once you recognize it and see how big it is, it’s natural to want to turn around and run. Don’t be overwhelmed by the size of the monster.

When dealing with a big hairy time monster the best weapon is a snowball.

The intentional, continuous, focus of small actions over time will bring the monster down. The process, known as the “snowball effect”, is the accumulation of small things upon small things until they become a big thing, like a snowball rolling down a hill.

The snowball effect works the same on time as it does on anything.

Small segments of time used wisely over and over add up to big savings. Saving a minute here and a few seconds there add up over time. If we save five minutes every hour, twelve times per day, we end up with an hour that the monster didn’t get. If you add that hour to another the next day and do that five times a week for a year the time saving snowball would be 260 hours. The monster is not going to like that.

We can’t imagine our little snowball having any effect on that big hairy time monster. At first it doesn’t appear that it does, but if we keep after it, it will. Those little wins add up. Being able to see each of these little wins give us an opportunity to celebrate. The more celebrating, the more winning, the more winning, the more celebrating.

This leads to another nice thing that happens when that snowball rolls downhill, it picks up momentum. This is another benefit of good time management. The better we get at spending time wisely the more wisely we spend time.

There are a lot of different ways to spend time and how you spend yours is up to you. The important thing here is to realize that you control the snowball. The only way to get control of our time monsters is to just do it.

What Will People Say About Me at My Funeral?