I often preach about the importance of keeping a financial budget. I also think it's important to keep a "time budget." People sometimes talk about being burnt out as though that was their primary spiritual gift. If generations ago people thought "cleanliness was next to godliness", today we think busyness is. I'm pretty sure Jesus' last words weren't "Go forth unto the ends of the earth and be extremely busy for in this is the Father well pleased." But how often do we pull out our schedules and boast of how busy we are in an effort to form a sort of spiritual pecking order? "I must be growing spiritually," we often say to ourselves, "look how busy I am!"
I sketched out a personal time budget tonight. I needed to see for myself how thin my margins are and make sure I'm not spending my energy in such a way that I am depleting my personal capital. You can't do that for extended periods of time; it's not healthy. It's also important to note that sheer hours alone does not fully capture this. I can work 60 hours a week doing something I love when I'm generally contented and happy in life and still feel energized, but in the midst of grief, for instance, an hour trip to the grocery store can seem overwhelming.
What does your time budget look like?
5 comments:
So true! Time is a very precious comodity that we freely give away without thinking. There's value in spending your time recharging from life and just sitting and listening to God. I know I have had to learn that it's ok to have an evening free and not fill it with something.
Yeah, you do work too much! Get a hobby!
p.s. Tell that to a college student
Another thing is, one cannot budget time as though it were money. Can you put it in a box? Can you deposit it into a Roth IRA to mature later?
No.
Time is an endless stream of water slipping through our fingers. For me, it is going so fast, I cannot hold on to any of it. Truly, few men can.
Or can you put it in a safe, for no one to steal? You cannot do that, either; life tames and gives time as it wills.
Mankind has a funny habit of trying to control time, to define its rythm with our clocks and with our schedules to confine it, but it laughs at all of these pitiful attempts at control. Despite what the clock says, my minutes to prepare for school in the moring flash by as though a minute were nothing, leaving me to stagger out without a shower or a shave. Despite what my schedule says, the invisible things that fall in between fill the gaps, and I find that the time between the objects of the schedule is really no time at all.
So much for "budgeting".
It's so hard to learn to think differently especially when you feel the expectation from others that being busy equals beings spiritual or even on a more practical level simply being a good stewart of your time. I think one of my problems is that I tend to only chart the time that feels valuable where you really need to recognize all the time spent when figuring out where to set my margins. For example, I may not think team meetings are "valuable enough to countl" but at the end of the week if I don't factor in that they take 12 hours of my week I won't be able to margin accordingly.
So here's a question. Who is it okay to feel accountable to? Are we accountable to the Lord alone or others as well?
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