A few years ago, BJ had this job where his boss required him to fill out time slots–for every 15 minutes, he had to document what he did and what he accomplished. Yes, this was a very tedious and micro managing sort of task that I am sure this particular leader felt was necessary to ensure people within the organization were being productive. And, although I don’t agree with the leadership model, there’s something we can take away from this.
What if we took the same inventory of our time? What would we log every fifteen minutes of our day? Would we find countless time scrolling through social media? Would we find ourselves racking in the hours watching television, or maybe day dreaming of a life we don’t have, or worrying about our job, our friendships, our future? Or maybe we would find that we are taking better care of our health & working on our goals.
How we spend our time says a lot about who we are. It shouts our values, our beliefs and even exposes the idols in our lives. How we spend our time matters.
I believe that time is one of the greatest gifts God has given us. And as much as we wish we could have more of it, we don’t need another hour in a day, we need to spend our time, better.
So I encourage you to try this and take a daily log of your time! It will reveal areas where you can make your time more meaningful and productive as well as show you areas where you are making the most of your time. It will show you patterns of your day–when you are most productive, when you are most unproductive.
I did this excercise and it was incredibly eye opening and really helped me SEE areas I needed to be more intentional and identify time stealers and time wasters. Try it and let me know what you discover and how I can support you as you work to make your time count!