Time Management Results

Months ago I read an article from Matt at Becoming Last. The article suggested that readers take a time inventory of their lives to determine how much time they spent on work, sleep, preparing and eating book, etc. The purpose of the exercise was to evaluate if the way we spend our time matches what we claim to value.

For an entire week I wrote down everything I spent my time on. I discovered that I spent much of my free time with friends and doing bible studies. This matched two of the four priorities of my life (read about those here). I spent much more time on those two things than I did the top two things on my list (loving and serving my family, and loving and serving others). I realized my free time was being spent on the four areas of my life that were important, just not in the order I desired! I came to two conclusions from this exercise.

Schedule Change
We had a few conversations about our desire to love and serve other people. We were able to do this on the rare occasion a girl from church needed someone to go to an appointment with her because her mother lived out of town, or helping a family move who didn’t own a car. But we realized we needed to be much more intentional in this area.

We also realized we needed to drop a few commitments to spend time working on our marriage. We started limiting our time on church related activities to twice a week instead of three or four. We started picking up and doing housework for 5-10 minutes at breakfast and lunch so we had time in the evening together. I stopped spending as much time online, and as you have probably noticed, on this blog.

Continued Evaluation
In a short time, this exercise opened my eyes. I realized that I don’t always spend my time in a way that matches what I say I value. I get so busy with life and the things that I have scheduled that I neglect the things that are the most important to me! This was very helpful to Mr. DFx40 and I, and we plan on doing this again.

Conclusion
It was a looong 6 months away from this blog, but it was well worth it. Mr. DFx40 is graduated and finally starting to settle in at his new job. My job has had a major schedule change. And we have added another member to our household. But we can catch up about life a little later!

What about you…what are the priorities in your life? Do you consistently spend your time in a way that reflects that?

Time Management

Last week Matt at Becoming Last posted an interesting article about time management. First he suggested we take a time inventory of our lives. Write down how much time you spend on different areas of your life for a week: work, sleep, preparing and eating food, driving, leisure (tv, games, hobbies), working out, church activities/volunteering, internet, etc. Then he posed this question,

“Does the way we use our time match what we claim to value?”

I thought for a while and came up with a list of things I value in my life; things I want to be a priority. It was hard for me to put into words the things that I value. As I’ve said in previous posts, the main goal for my life is to live missionally. But that is a little broad for this list, so I broke it down a little. I managed to come up with 4 things that I want to be priorities in my life.

Loving and serving my family
This includes any quality time that I spend with my family; going for a walk, watching a movie with them, sitting and talking with them. It also includes any time I spend serving them: making their dinner, folding their clothes, giving them a massage.

Loving and serving others
This includes any time I spend serving other people; giving someone a ride, verbally affirming my friends, or serving at a soup kitchen.

Increasing my knowledge of God
This includes any time spent in prayer, reading my bible, attending church, or leading bible studies.

Taking care of my mind and body
This includes any time I spend doing things like exercising or gardening.

Starting this Sunday I am going to keep a rough estimate each day of how I spend my time. At the end of next week I will share my results, and see if how I spend my time matches what I value. If it doesn’t, I’ll try to determine what I can do to change that.

What about you…how do you think you spend your time? What do you want your life to reflect about your priorities?