A Better Way To Look At Your Time Demands

Over the years, I have taken a lot of time management courses.  I even did a seminary level course on leadership that included a lot of study on the topic.  This is by far more insightful and helpful than anything I’ve ever studied.

“Your life is simply not a list of priorities but rather the coming together of three inescapable dimensions of calling. You are called to relationships, you are called to work, and you are called to God. Each of these is a significant expression of how God calls every one of us to live. In a way, none of them is more important than the other since each exists because of divine calling. So rather than a list, you have three intersecting, overlapping domains of godly living: the social domain, the labor domain, and the spiritual domain (although everything is spiritual). Think of these as a triad of overlapping circles, where each circle connects with the other two.

Yet you have a limited amount of time to devote to these domains—24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year. So if one activity expands over a longer span of time, it can only expand because you have contracted the duration of another activity. Almost no one says, “Work is a greater priority to me than family, so I am going to put family lower on my list.” Rather, the demands of work gradually begin to gobble up more and more of my time, and as they do, because I don’t have limitless time, I am left with less time for my family. Few believers would say that work is more important than their relationships with God and his people, but their life of work expands to the point where they have little time left to do anything but casually attend the church to which they once committed themselves. It is impossible for one area of my calling to expand without it causing other areas of equally important calling to contract. So it’s important to ask not what your priorities are but if your world of work has expanded to the point that it has caused a harmful contraction of your time with your family and your pursuit of God? This seems to me to be a much more helpful way of thinking about the schedule tensions that so many of us experience when it comes to work, family, and church”.^[1]

We do still think in some sort of “priority” management or triage.   The issue is, for instance, if my work starts to crowd out my recreation time, then the impact isn’t that serious.  But if work, or family, or whatever squeezes out my relationship with Christ or the Church, there are serious consequences.

The final word to Dr. Tripp: "God is too wise and loving ever to call you to one area of responsibility that will necessitate you being irresponsible in another."

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^[1] Tripp, P. D. (2015). Awe: why it matters for everything we think, say, and do. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.