Out of Time | Lifesigns Magazine

“I just didn’t have time.”

“I ran out of time.”

“I was so busy, that time got away from me.”

“I only have so many hours in a day.”

“I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do.”

“I have to rest some time, or I’ll work myself to death.”

These are all excuses that I have both heard and have used in my own life to make me feel better about not using my time wisely. In Greg McKeown’s book “Essentialism”, he talks of an experience he had of choosing to go to a client meeting because of pressure from his boss instead of staying at the hospital with his wife and hours-old daughter and the lesson he learned from it.

TIME AS AN INVESTMENT

“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

When I read that I inserted the word “schedule” for the word “life”, and it works.

“If you don’t prioritize your schedule, someone else will.”

“What do you mean?” You might ask.

Our time on Earth is short. Time is therefore one of our most precious gifts. We will all be called in to account one day on how we used our time. It might be at work, at home, at the end of our life, and most certainly when we stand before God and give an account for our life. Everybody fighting for your time is a given, but how you prioritize it is the big question.

I learned a long time ago that there are four people that have a plan for my life. Me, God, Satan, and everybody else. That’s when I learned with God’s guidance how to schedule my time and use it wisely. Time is a resource that we all have; how we invest it will determine what dividends we earn. You can’t save time because, as you know, “Time waits for no man.” But you can use it wisely. You can invest it in the things that have eternal value and will outlive you and not invest it in the fleeting, temporary, emotional, valueless activities and possessions.

You might exclaim, “But it’s hard to know what’s important, valuable, worthy, or eternal in a world and culture that values the earthly, mundane, repetitive, worthless, and temporal.”

You are correct. It is hard but not impossible. You will need to take some time and “invest” it in thinking about what you value. Or better yet, as a follower of Jesus, think about what He values. Once you invest time in that, your ability to know what’s important, valuable, worth-while, and eternal will become relatively easy, thus making your decisions easier and your time management a minor detail.

There are literally (I am using that word correctly) thousands and thousands of apps, notebooks, and time management paraphernalia and websites to help you use your time wisely. I have, however, found out that trying to find the perfect one is a waste of time.

GETMO

The founder and pastor of Life Church, the church that created the Bible app and pioneered church campuses, says this about the concept of GETMO. GETMO is an acronym for Good Enough To Move On. It is not do the bare minimum, but it is the stage where you get maximum impact for a sustainable amount of investment. Remember that perfection is the enemy of progress.

The reason I bring the GETMO concept up is that most people have high ideals and they believe they are going to do what their predecessors could not do; and in so doing, they never really make progress because they don’t invest their time wisely as they try to perfect whatever it is they are working on.

If you know me at all, you know that I have been labeled as having OCD or a perfectionist or highly driven, determined, and devoted. Those might be true, but this principle of GETMO has allowed me to be more productive with the time that I do have.

As I said earlier, we can’t save time but we most certainly can waste it. Time is one of those things that we tend to think we have an endless supply of. As you get older you realize that you don’t have an endless supply of it. Every day is precious, and you want to make sure you spend and invest your time for those things that will have more ROI (return on your investment) than those things that are fleeting.

WE HAVE TOO MANY CHOICES

Peter Drucker (1906-2005), management guru back in 2000, said this: “In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time—literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.” (“Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself,” Leader to Leader Journal, no. 16 (Spring 2000), www.hesselbeininstitute.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=26.

Decision Paralysis is a real thing. It is not some made up psychological condition that psychologists use to keep people coming back to their sessions. It is a recent modern condition that is affecting thousands of people every day. Why? I believe it is because we have too many choices; and thus we are afraid of making the wrong decision or we are afraid of missing out on something (FOMO), causing our minds to “lock up” and resist moving forward with simple decisions. This not only affects decision-making, but it also affects our use of time. We waste time on small, insignificant decisions to where the big decisions just never get made or we pass them off to other people who can make them.

JESUS AND TIME

What did Jesus have to say about time and how we use it? Actually, He had a lot to say.

Jesus said that we waste our time on things that just don’t matter. Well, in a manner of speaking, He did. Simply go read Matthew 6:19-34. It is chock-full of references regarding wasting our time on the accumulation of wealth that in time will simply fade away or deteriorate, or to stop wasting our time trying to figure out what we are going to wear that day or what our menu for the day is. I don’t believe Jesus is telling us that these things are not choices we don’t have to make but, as I stated earlier, they are basic, fundamental decisions that should not take up so much of our time. We have to wear clothes (thank God) and we have to eat. I know people who use so much of their time in the morning putting on clothes and taking them off because “it just didn’t feel right for today,” or people who waste 30 minutes of a one-hour lunch break trying to decide where to eat. It just doesn’t matter in the bigger picture of life.

Jesus also talked about how we as His followers and those of us that are leaders are to discern the times. We must pay attention to what’s going on in our world so that we can navigate it and help others navigate it, also so that we can affectively and powerfully speak into people’s lives the hope of the Gospel because we are not irrelevant and superficial. Look at Matthew 16:3 and you will see how He outlines this principle very well.

Jesus also said in John 9:4 that we must make the best use of our time. “Why should I do that?” You might say. Because, as I stated in the paragraph above, we don’t have an endless supply of time. Find out what is important to Him and spend your time doing that.

I’M ALMOST OUT OF TIME

A lot of what I have written has been philosophical more than it is pragmatic, but without the fundamental understanding of how we should use time we will never be able to use it wisely, nor will our use of it glorify Jesus. Years ago, I made a joke to one of my office mates about his philosophy degree by asking him what philosophy really was in a nutshell. I said, “Isn’t philosophy nothing more than an opinion that someone has about a particular subject, item, or way of thinking?” He looked at me puzzled and reluctantly agreed with me. I then in turn said, “So, you got a degree in your own opinion?” His face then quickly turned from puzzled to angry. My quick reply was, “Wait, wait! Without philosophy the world couldn’t function properly, because everything that we do, created, and build comes from a fundamental underlying philosophy. Whether that philosophy is correct or not is to be determined.” Whew! I avoided a potential mangling of a relationship. My point of the story is to say that if we don’t have a fundamental understanding of how we should use time, we will eventually run out of time and never even realize that we did.