Opportunity and Time
Without opportunities to work at something and get better at it, there is no growth, potential is never realized, and treasures of talents and abilities remain hidden and undiscovered. Opportunity must present itself in the form of time; specifically time to practice, time to learn, time to develop. It has always been an essential part of the development for anyone who has grown to the point where they could accomplish something that is noteworthy and of value.
Time is very important, and sometimes it is hugely important. One of the mindsets that is popular right now is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a world class expert at something. References to this are often called the 10,000 hour rule. That’s approximately 8 hours of practice per day, six days per week for four years. Yes, that’s a lot of practice, and most will never have the time to reach that, but many people can reach anywhere between three to ten hours per week each year if they make an intentional effort to manage their time wisely. Time management is not an automatic thing, it often takes effort and planning to consistently create the time needed to get good at something or pursue a goal or ministry.
When Time Doesn’t Seem to be an Option
It is possible for a person to lack the availability of time because of the multiple responsibilities that life has dealt them. They may be using their time wisely, but the demands of life take up all of their spare time and they really don’t have any extra time. This is not a healthy situation, but it is often a reality. If you are in this situation, and can figure out how to change your situation with less work, less responsibility, and less obligations, I recommend it, but sometimes it doesn’t happen right away. But just because you don’t have time at this season of your life doesn’t mean that you’ll never have time and that you should give up on your dream of putting enough time into something that you excel at it.
Even though I mention that some people may not have any extra time to pursue something that they want to excel at in life, there have been people in that very situation who somehow seemed to find the time to develop themselves and achieve outstanding accomplishments. There have been many musicians who disciplined themselves to get up early in order to practice. Likewise, if you go to a gym at six in the morning, it is not uncommon to find people who are there working out while others are still in bed. This is often the only way that they can make time to do something that is important to them.
You must Choose What you Want to Focus on
Most people know that desire in needed in order to make a commitment to become excellent at something. However, there are people who want to excel so badly they want to be highly successful at everything. These people often end up pursuing too many different things. They do have time, and they are using their time to work really hard at a lot of different pursuits, but there isn’t one thing in particular that they are focusing on to excel at. They are hoping to do a little bit of everything and become outstanding at everything, but in the end, they never get very good at anything. They may improve a little at everything they are doing, but they never reach their goal of becoming excellent at any of those things.
Making time will often mean making a choice to do something you really want to get good at, while also choosing not to do other things that you may also want to get good at. You can always change your mind and switch which activity you are pursuing the most as long as you don’t do it too often. The main thing is, getting good at something takes focus, and that means choosing what you are going to focus on as wells as choosing what you are not going to focus on.
Finding Ways to Make Time
Assuming you do have time to focus on what you want to excel at, it is still important to manage that time in order to keep it, or you may end up losing it more often than you want. We can look at the example of Julie. She sincerely loved playing the piano, and she would play it any time she had the opportunity.
Unfortunately, Julie had homework almost every day. Not only that, she had a tutoring session with her math tutor every Monday evening in order to keep up with math. On Wednesday evenings, she went to her church youth group. On Friday nights, she usually went to a high school sports event with her friends. On Saturdays she just wanted to get away and often went to a shopping mall or a movie with her friends, or they just gathered at one of her friend’s houses to hangout. There were several families in the neighborhood that knew she needed extra spending money, and that she was looking for baby-sitting work on the weekends. Because of this, she was fortunate to receive offers for baby-sitting jobs on Saturday nights. On top of all of this, she had home work on a regular basis.
In Julie’s mind the only time she really had to practice the piano was Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evenings for about 45 minutes. She cherished those practice times and loved the chance to play. She did improve little by little, but it was slow, and even though she got better, she never played the way she dreamed of playing. She always believed she had the ability to play really good, but she never believed she had the practice time to be able to play really good.
Samantha had a schedule very similar to Julie’s and she also loved playing the piano. Samantha really only had time to practice three evenings per week, but it didn’t matter because she was willing to get up early and practice in the morning if she knew she wouldn’t have time in the evening. She had often tried to practice in the evenings but found that friends would either call, or drop in at her house, or some other family obligation would come up when she planned on practicing. Instead of reasoning that she didn’t have enough time, she reasoned that she would have to find a way to make time. It wasn’t easy because she hated getting up early in the morning, but she also hated missing out on playing the piano. She love playing the piano and found a way to make time for it, because without time, there is no opportunity to improve, and God given talents remain buried away where they never become discovered.
Time Management
Since time is often intruded upon by unforeseen circumstances, time management skills are important for anyone who is struggling to find enough time to develop an area of life that they want to improve or excel at. Sometimes it’s a matter of sitting down and doing the math in order determine how much time can be allotted for various tasks. In other instances, creating time will come in the form of learning how to focus in order to do tasks in a more time efficient manner. For others, it’s a matter of finding ways to eliminate unplanned intrusions and distractions. When all of these things are considered, people who feel they have no extra time find that they do have enough time to pursue something that they truly desire to become good at.
A Designated Time
Sometime the simplest way to create time to do things you want to grow and improve at is to decide on a time to do it and stick with it. You don’t necessarily have to write it down and do all kinds of planning, just figure out a time. Quite often, the time to pursue something has always been there but it’s easy to go into the spontaneous mode where one thing keeps leading to another. Suddenly you realize that time has slipped away and your opportunity to do what you thought you had time to do is gone. This is why you don’t take chances with unconsciously letting your time disappear and just doing something when you get around to it. Instead, you schedule something that is important to you at a designated time.
While scheduling a time to do something may be simple for some, it may not be for others. Schedules can become complex and sometimes everything will have to be written down or you will over commit or mismanage the amount of time you spend on something. Mothers and fathers may be constantly on the run to take their kids to school, clubs, activities, or sporting events that they are involved in, and the schedule may be constantly changing. This is when a written schedule becomes important, or your time will get swallowed up by one thing after another. More on planning written schedules later.
Minimizing Intrusions
Even if you have schedule, you may find that there are distractions and intrusions that come up and throw you off track. The phone rings and people come to the door. You check your email, text messages, facebook, or whatever you are using for social media, and suddenly you get caught up in all of it for an indefinite amount of time. You were just going to check for five minutes, but it turned into an hour or more, as one thing kept leading to another, and you completely lost track of time. It often takes a deliberate effort to stay on a schedule by saying no to spontaneous things of life that capture your attention, and sometime it means telling someone your busy, and you’ll have to get back to them later.
A Free and Focused Mind
Having taught 6th grade classroom subjects for several years, I have had the opportunity to see first-hand the students who are able to get work done, and students who seem have difficulty getting anything done. Sometimes the inability to complete work is due to a student being a slow worker who needs extra time to processes information. But just as often as not, a student who frequently lags behind in their work has the ability to easily keep up, but they don’t because they are full of distractions.
When I would sit down with Barry and watch him do his work, it was amazing to see how easily he could keep up his work pace with the other students. When I wasn’t right there with him, I could glance over and see that he was looking around at other students, playing with something in his desk, or doodling on his worksheet. On the other hand, Jessica was extremely focused and never let anything break her concentration or interfere with the assignment she was doing. She was both quick and meticulous with her work, checking it as she went and revising as needed. She didn’t always have time to finish early, but when given a substantial work time, she often did finish her work early and wanted to either help other students, read, or look ahead to another assignment.
Single Mindedness
The biggest difference between Barry and Jessica was not the amount of time they had, nor was it that one was smarter than the other. The main difference was that Jessica had a clear, focused mind, and Barry had a cluttered, unfocused mind that kept wandering all over the place. He did his work intermittently instead of steadily, which wasted away the free gift of time that he had to do his work. Barry claimed that he never had enough time to finish his work, but the truth was, he didn’t use the time that was given to him. When it came time to do what Barry wanted to do, he often found himself staying in for recess or loaded down with homework when he would rather be out playing.
If you have something that you want to excel at and you don’t feel like you have enough time to improve at it, it doesn’t hurt to ask yourself if you can finish work quicker by simply being more focused. When you finish the tasks that you must do throughout the day at a faster speed, it allows you to focus more time on things that you want to excel at or pursue.
The Getting Things Done Expert
David Allen
His goal is to help people accomplish as much work as possible within the amount of time they are given. His research shows that people get things done much more efficiently when they are clear on what they should be doing and their mind isn’t distracted with all kinds of things that aren’t related to what they are doing. Often times while a person is doing one thing, a thought pops into their mind about something else that they could be doing. These thoughts kill the ability to focus on a task and slow down the work process. Of course, it also eats away time that could be better spent doing what you want to do.
One trait of a person who gets things done is seamlessness between activities. In other words, when they finish one activity, they don’t aimlessly meander around and get caught up in whatever happens to grab their attention. Instead the flow from one task to the next without wasting time between tasks. If they do take breaks, they are limited breaks that don’t turn into a prolonged waste of time that pulls them away from the next task that they need to do. The right kind of break can refresh you and actually help you to work better when you delve into another task.
Capturing Distracting Thoughts
If having a focused mind is one of the keys to getting more done in the same amount of time, how do you do it? David Allen advises that you learn how to capture distracting thoughts about other things that you could be doing. There are many things that scream for your time and attention, but you can’t do them all at the same time, yet people are often mentally engaged in several things that aren’t even related to what they are doing during a given time. This kills having a clear focused mind with which to accomplish things at the pace and quality that they are capable of.
Write It Down and Forget it
One of the ways to deal with this is to make a list of things you want to do and need to do. Once you have done this, don’t let those things that you have written down intrude upon the task you are doing at the moment. One of the reasons you write it down is so that you can forget about those tasks until it’s time look at the list and see what you need to do next.
Prioritize What you do
Sometimes people write down a list of things that they have to do, but they still think about those things because they haven’t prioritized them or categorized them. Even though the tasks are written down, people will still be trying to figure out which one to do next or if certain tasks are more important than the one they are doing at the moment. To prevent this, once you write down a list of things to do, there may some activities that need to be done before others. If that’s the case, list what you need to do in priority order. There may be other tasks that aren’t so important and they just need to be done when you get around to them. Put those activities in a separate category for things that you can get to when you have some spare time.
Another problem may be that you don’t know how long a given activity is going to take because you don’t know how involved the activity is. If it’s something that doesn’t have a deadline, you can just put it on a schedule and keep doing it at a regular time each day or each week until it get done. If it is an activity that has a deadline connected with it, then you will need to identify what aspects of the rest of your schedule are flexible, as the flexible part of your schedule will need to be adapted around the important things that you need to get done until they get done.
David Allen
David Allen
Time Management and Relationships
Having difficulty keeping a schedule because of activities that take an unknown amount of time can also come in the form of relationships with people who are not on a schedule. You may start on an activity with a friend or family member that you thought would only take an hour or two. But one thing leads to another and pretty soon most of the day is gone. If this tends to happen frequently when you are with certain people, you may need to tell them ahead of time how much time you have to spend with them, or the time spent can easily turn into a whole day. Spending a whole day with someone is ok if you have time for that, but if you don’t, you may need to communicate a time frame that you can spend with them.
People who want you for an extended amount of time or a whole day will often want you to go somewhere in one vehicle, which means you’ll be stranded if they begin to improvise their plans until an entire day disappears with a long string of random activity. You thought you had most of the day to get around to what you wanted to do, but then you find your day is gone, and you suddenly realize there were errands, or house-keeping work, or yard work that didn’t get done. You didn’t have to do those things right then, but they are essentials that need to get done sometime, and you’ll have to do those things later on in the week in the midst of an already busy schedule.
Where Did all the Time Go?
By the time you do all of the essentials you never got around to doing because you were obligated to spend an entire day with someone, you run the risk of not having time later on in the week to do something that you wanted to spend time doing in order to improve at it. If this is happening to you, I have already suggested that you may need to communicate clearly to people how much time you can spend with them. In addition, you may also need to have your own vehicle available in order keep from being held hostage by the endless string of activity that occurs when people get into the one thing leads to another, to another, to another mode that eats away more time than you had predicted.
You must be intentional about your time or you will keep running into the phenomenon where you feel like you have a lot of time to get things done, but at the end of the week, you’ll say to yourself, “Where did all the time go? I thought I had plenty of time to get things done, but somehow I ran out of time to do it.”
Saying No Without Guilt
One thing that can eat up your time quicker than anything is an, “I can’t say no” mentality which leads to overcommitting to too many activities. Sometimes people say “yes,” because they really do want to be involved in something and they eagerly volunteer. However, if they would sit down and look at what they have already committed to, they would see that they don’t really have time to do everything they would like to do without over-extending their schedule. Pretty soon they are constantly on the go with no free time to develop their own gifts and abilities.
Of course constantly being on the go to serve and relate to others is fine if your gift is to help, and to serve, and be there to relate to others. This is the treasure that you are giving to the world and it will be blessed. However, if you are in a place in life where you need to develop your own self in order to be of value to others, then you will need to keep from over-committing in order to have time to do so.
Remember that saying, “yes” to too many things is the same as saying, “no,” to what you want to do in order to develop yourself. The only way around this is to be honest with yourself and with others, and to say “no,” to doing more things when you already have enough to do.
If there are people who keep holding it against you when you say, “no,” to something that they think you should be doing, it’s possible that you may need to pull away from them as they may not be a healthy person to be with. Even if they have a good cause that they really think you should get involved in, there are a lot of good causes that any of us can be involved in, but no one can be involved in all of them. The one’s that you should be involved in are the ones that God has put a desire in your heart to do.
Even Jesus was limited by time and location, and he could often only help one person at a time. He could only do what God called him to do and no more than that. There were a lot of other good and important things that he could have done that would have kept him from doing what his father had called him to do. You are no different and will have to say “yes” to what God wants, and there are times when you will need to say “no” to what others want.
People Will Question a Developing Gift: They won’t Question a Validated Gift
People with a highly developed skill or ability will often be affirmed when they are using their skill, or are working on perfecting their skill. The highly skilled person is often appreciated for what they can do as their skill reached a level where it is highly valued by others. Their excellence at a skill seems to validate the work that they do, and they appear as though they were called by God and blessed by him with ability to do what they do. It seems as though they are in God’s will when they using their skill.
You may not possess a high level of skill yet. It may seem that your efforts to improve are not as significant or important as someone who is highly skilled. In fact, your practice time, study time, or development time, may be seen as a waste of time by many others. This is because your skill or ability is not at a level that’s highly valued yet, and many will perceive that if God really meant for you to work at that skill, you should be better than you are. You should be doing something else that does more good. People who think like this often forget that none of the experts they admire started out as experts. There was a time when those experts were just like you are if you are not highly skilled, they lacked skill and were working hard to get better.
Dealing With The Perceptions of Others
The church member that is in awe of an organist who was highly disciplined to reach his or her level of organ skill, may frown upon your efforts if you are aspiring to be an outstanding organist in the future. They may want you to get involved with activities or ministries that they think would be more worthwhile because you aren’t blessing anyone with your current level of ability. And they may assume that because you aren’t at an advanced skill level now, that it means that you won’t be in the future either, so why bother trying with something that you’re no good at? Why not quit wasting your time and get involved with what they want you to do so that you have an immediate impact, rather than to keep trying to accomplish something that they think will never happen?
You’re current level of ability can make it seem like you’re wasting your time, and that you should spend more time doing something else that is more worthwhile. It’s up to you, but if there is something that you really want to accomplish, you may have to say, “No” to being involved in something that seems to be of value now, in order to get better at something that will be of value in the future.
Managing Crises and Time
In your search for enough time to do something that you desire to get good at, you may run into someone who is constantly in a crises mode, and somehow you get pulled into their crises again and again. There are people who tend towards drama, emotion, and urgency. They have their antennas out for the purpose of quickly detecting a crises. If they can’t find one, they’ll often find a way to create one themselves. It may be that they are bored and they need a crisis for excitement, or it may be that a crises carries a level of importance that will validate them as a worthy person if they can take on the star role of being the chief rescuer. This serves to validate their own identity as being someone who is important.
Healthy Help and Unhealthy Help
Other people are well meaning and just want to help in a humble genuine way. These are usually the ones who will let you be you if you choose not be on the constant lookout for a crises. They don’t need an audience or a support group to follow them into a crises, and they’re fine if you’re not in the middle of the latest crises with them. You don’t usually have to worry about these people. It’s the one’s who drag everyone into the messes that they gravitate towards and often create themselves. It’s not always healthy to help these people and get involved because it never ends, and it actually becomes an undisciplined form of living that keeps everyone else scrambling and struggling to attend to the areas of their own lives that will become a crises if left unattended enough.
One of the difficult things about living with purpose is the need to steer away from unhealthy situations and unhealthy relationships. If you don’t do this, you will continually be captive to a lot of other people who will be making decisions for you when it comes to your schedule and what you should be doing. In order to avoid this, you must have the freedom to say, “yes” or “no” within the limitations of a healthy lifestyle.
Inner Conflict Over Helping Others
Still feel like you can never say no after reading this? If the problem is that you would feel guilty and unrighteous for saying no, see the section on Identity in Christ and Overcoming False Guilt. If the problem is that you see the multitude of needs that others have in life and you feel so compelled to help them that everything else should be put on hold, then maybe that is your calling and what God has given you the ability to do. If in spite of this, you still feel like there is an area of life where there is hidden treasures of abilities that you need to develop, then read the section on conflict over God’s will.
Remember that time is a gift from God and that everyone is given the same 24 hours each day to accomplish things. We can be wise about how we spend time, or frivolous about how we spend time. If you feel that you have hidden treasures that you want to develop, it will take time. For some people, the time to develop themselves is assigned to them and time won’t be an issue. For others, time will be a big issue and a conscious effort will have to be made to manage their schedule and learn how to work efficiently, or the time needed to develop an ability will never be available.
One of the main purposes of this entire series on Hidden Treasures is taking into consideration how to make the most of your time. It’s nice to have several hours a day to develop your abilities, but you may only get three to six hours a week. The better you learn the variables that pertain to improvement, the better you’ll be able to make the most of the time you have. Without this, you run the risk of putting forth a lot of effort while accomplishing very little. Activity does not always lead to achievement, so it’s important that you learn how to maximize your activity.
Staying On Track with your Time
Are you Nice? Are you helpful, responsible, compliant and easy going? Are you happy to let people be who they want to be without having an agenda to push? Are you a good listener who will give a sympathetic ear to the causes, passions, and desires of others? Do you tend to keep your own dreams, goals, causes, and pursuits to yourself, and pursue them on your own, rather than to announce them and be public about them? The more that these things are true of you, the more approachable you will seem to be when others are looking for people to include in their cause, their goals, their vision, their pursuits, their leisure, and their plans. This can be a wonderful thing if that’s what you want. But if you have goals of your own that you want to pursue, you will have to have space and time to do it.
Without a clear role, a clear identity, a clear cause, a clear direction, and a clear voice of influence that is important to others, you may find that there will be those who have an agenda for you. Of course not everyone will have an agenda for you; the majority won’t, but some will, and they will have an eye for those who seem like good candidates to be their followers. Most of us like it when we have others to follow at times, but most of us don’t want to follow all of the time. However, if you are unselfish, helpful, and a good follower, there will be more people who want you to follow them than you can possibly follow in a whole hearted manner.
Being Helpful While Recognizing Your Own Call
Most of us have our own identity, interests, and areas of life that we think are important. If we don’t, then there will be others who try to determine this for us and we will take on the identity and interests that someone else thinks are important, and we’ll be pulled into the areas of life that are important to others, rather than to pursue what is in our own hearts. Of course we should be interested in what others are interested in, and we can help people with things that they think are important, but not to the complete exclusion of forsaking the call that God has put on your life.
Knowing Your Own Call Determines How You Spend Your Time
Jesus knew his mission. There were others who would have preferred that he kept the status quo and simply remain the son of a carpenter. Those in his home town didn’t like it when he claimed to be the Messiah. They wanted to kill him for this. People from his hometown were offended that he traveled around from town to town, village to village, and city to city, teaching, preaching, healing, and performing signs and wonders. He wasn’t a recognized religious leader and this was not what they envisioned for Jesus. He didn’t fit their plans, but he did what he knew he was called to do, and that was the key to how he spent his time, he knew what he was called to do.
Conflict over what you should be doing with your time can come with conflict over knowing what God has called you to do. If you know what God has called you to do, and truly accept that it’s from God, then your conscience will pull you in God’s direction. If you are wishy washy about what God has called you to do, then you may feel like you should be doing something else that seems more important than what’s in your own heart. The call of God on your own life will constantly be overshadowed by others who make what they are doing look like it’s bigger, better, more important, more successful, and more worthy than what God has called you to do. When this happens, you never invest the necessary time into the assignment that God has given to. Without this, the treasure that God has put within you never grows, develops, and matures as God intended.
Identity and Calling Determine What You do with your Time
God introduces himself in the first verse of the bible by saying, “In the beginning, God…..” He makes no apologies for being God. He knows who he is and he wants you to know it too. Who he is determines his identity which determines what he does. What he does determines how he spends his time. He’s not going to take a vacation from watching over you; he’s God and part of what God does is to watch over you.
The apostle Paul introduces himself in all of his letters by saying, “Paul and Apostle.” He makes no excuses for being an apostle; he knows he’s called by God to be an apostle and he wants everyone else to know it as well. Why? Because it’s an assignment that let’s everyone know what he fully intends to spend his time doing. Out of all things in life that he could be doing, he’s focused on what an apostle does, not all the other things that other people do.
As an apostle, Paul goes to areas to preach the gospel to those who have not heard it. He will seek to make new converts, start new churches, organize them, and disciple the people in the new churches. After that, he’ll go somewhere else and do it again. Paul especially knows that he will be going to the gentiles. He could spend his time going to the Jews like Peter, James, and John. This would please the Christian Jews, but he’s not making decisions about his calling based on what pleases people, he spends his time with the gentiles because that’s what God called him to do. Paul won’t let others pull him off course and spend his time on other things. Some won’t like it. They’ll even put him in prison, but Paul will still spend his time doing what God has called him to do.
Follow Your Own Call
There will be times in life when you are overwhelmed with options, and people will compete for your time to go in all kinds of different directions. In these circumstances, it doesn’t matter what choice you make, you will let people down because it’s impossible to fully commit to everyone. Some people make choices based on the fear of letting someone else down and disappointing them. It may feel godly to do this because it seems submissive, compliant, and unselfish in regard to going along with someone else’s desires. But if it goes against the call that God put on their life, it’s not godly.
I say all of this to point out that we all must decide how we spend our time. Without clarity as to what God wants you to do in life, it’s hard to choose the best way to spend your time, and it’s easy to become someone you were never meant to be, focusing your time on things that you were never meant to focus on. The way to settle this conflict over how to spend your time, is to first draw close to God until your heart becomes one with his, and then follow your heart.
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