What is Time Management?
A Different Time Management Philosophy – Part 2
While time management is one of those familiar topics, I’d like to put you at ease. We wouldn’t dare give you content you’ve heard time and time before. With that said we need to talk about time, but from a different angle. What if you’ve been viewing time all wrong? Here’s some of my extreme thinking. Again I’m only giving you this to increase the way you think about a particular idea, specifically time. What if time didn’t exist? By the way, this isn’t far from the truth. In fact when it comes to the universe and where God is there is no time; there’s only eternity, the place where there is no time.
Seriously, time was given to us as a gift to categorize the events of our lives. For example, the earth’s rotation around the sun isn’t an identification of time, but rather a repeating pattern of events. It’s the repetition of days and night cycles and the changes that occur as the earth finds itself on the various sides of the sun. Not to go too deep with that thought, the point is simple; if we allow God to elevate our thinking then there is no time. If there is no time, then there is no time to manage which brings me to what can be managed and that’s the events of one’s life. The events of our life which are a part of eternity are categorized by what we call time. I like to think of time as a map marker which are markers of events. It’s no different than the chapter and verse numbers we’ve applied to the Bible so that we know how to find a particular reference or event contained within its pages. With that said look as time as the page designations within the book that contains your life’s events.
“Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty.” – Proverbs [1]
Proverbs says that the key to being prosperous or having a life that flourishes is to be good at planning and work hard. In other words, it takes discipline and diligence. Let’s read it a different way. Poor planning and being lazy leads to poverty. What are you planning for and working for? The events of our life. We’re not doing all this work and making all these plans for the page markers (time) in our lives. It is the stuff that happens within and around those markers called time that important.
Naturally or normally we focus on the time markers more so than what it represents. This is what average, ordinary, common does to a person. This is why so many people lose the battle of what they do between their time-markers (a.k.a. days, nights, years, months, etc.)
“At the end of the day, successful use of these time markers you have comes down to diligence and discipline.” – KAC
What’s time?
To continue forward thinking as it relates to time, I will give you a couple of phrases we often use to prove this point. When someone says to you we can do it “anytime.” Anytime in this case is not definitive and is equal to no time or at least no marked time for this event to occur. “Anytime” says I give you all the available time, but not a specific time. In fact it says that eternity is open to you and we’ve not solidified a location for it with our time-markers.
Here’s another. Someday. We will get to that “someday.” “Someday” might as well mean never. This phrase says, we will not do this with any of the time-markers that a person has for themselves identified. It’s not today, nor is it tomorrow. It’s not next week or the week after. It’s not this month or next month. It’s not even this year or next year. “Someday” says I will leave that in some place in eternity that I’m not willing to define yet.
One more for you. One day. I will get to that “one day.” “One day” should be easy to nail down, but it is not because you never intended to nail it down. You actually meant one of two things: in eternity undefined or never.
If the earth stopped revolving around the sun how would you account for time? The answer is easy, we’d look for other ways to mark the passing of repeating events.
What’s discipline?
The repetitive events of life like the changing seasons are what we call discipline. The earth has a discipline to have both night and day to occur. It’s because of this consistent discipline we’re able to use it as markers that we call time. Discipline applied to a person means I can sit my tail down and get to work on my own or by force to produce a result that doesn’t come normally or by chance. The earth doesn’t rotate by chance. Therefore if you want to master “time” then you’ll need to become less chance driven. Don’t hear what I am not saying. I’m not saying don’t take risks, but I am saying take a risk with your disciplines. It’s this consistent realization that gives the assurance of measuring the places in eternity where events have occurred.
So then what does these two concepts mean as it relates to managing time. First, it means your focus on what you should be managing is off. Instead of time, you’re managing the events you place in and around time-markers. Secondly, knowing that the goal of time management is to yield greater productivity or productive hours, then time management is more about disciplines. These disciplines are also known as habits: positive habits and negative habits. Keep these two ideas in the back of your mind as we lay out specific principles over the next few weeks in this series.
Question: how have you allowed your thoughts of time to keep you from focusing on what matters more than the time for it itself?
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[1] Proverbs 21:5 NLT, Bible.com, accessed June 14, 2022, https://www.bible.com/bible/116/PRO.21.5.NLT
All Scripture references used by permission, see our Scripture copyrights.
