Managing Your Time by Amber Willeford

You stretch and yawn, then throw back the covers, and your shoulders ache. All that weeding and tilling you did last Saturday still has you using Biofreeze.  You worked so hard, and your new garden looks great.  You took an eyesore of a backyard and you made it beautiful.

As you pull the mini-blinds to look at your masterpiece you see what looks to be the equivalent of a jungle in a blender.  What happened after Saturday?  Sunday was church all day.  Monday night was a PTA meeting.  Tuesday night you had planned on watering, but there was prayer and grocery shopping.  Wednesday night, of course, was church.  Thursday night the kids had piano lessons, and Friday night was youth service, and you and the hubby had a big date.  After working all day and filling your nights like this you had no time to keep your garden intact.  You had forgotten there WAS a garden with everything that went on this week.  You had such great plans to keep it weeded and watered, but you were just so busy.  Now the garden (a.k.a. “the jungle”) is overgrown with weeds; you’ve got crispy leaves and dried up dirt.  What few flowers made it through the week are being crowded out by dead ones.  You can’t see the beauty in your garden, and you basically wasted last Saturday and all that Biofreeze.

Does this garden sound like your life?  If you’re anything like me and the rest of the human population, there is a slight resemblance.  So, for the sake of this article, imagine with me that the garden is your life.

God has given us each a great gift.  Life.  How you till, plant and maintain your garden is up to you.  PTA’s, piano lessons, work, even relationships can block out the beauty of life if we don’t manage our time and prioritize.  Life was meant to be a beautiful thing. In order to see the beauty we must till our garden by prioritizing our tasks.  We’ve got things that are due and need to be done next month, next week, tomorrow and tonight by midnight.  A lot of times we are working on what needs to be done next week, which is a good thing, but what about the project that is due today?  When it doesn’t get done, we get frustrated and stressed out.  “Weed” out time wasters!  You know when you’re wasting time.  As you sit there, you can’t really enjoy what you’re doing because you’re constantly justifying yourself.  Unless, of course, you can turn off Sister Conscience, in which case reread this paragraph.

Planting time management strategies will help your garden grow.  A suggestion would be to sit down for just 10 minutes and write out tasks that need to be done.  Categorize the list by month, week and day or hour.  Keeping up with this each month will help to “weed” out stress.  Taking the list a “row” further, schedule out your day, spending a half hour on work stuff, another half hour on the home, maybe a half hour for miscellaneous, etc.  A concentrated half hour can go a long way.  If something comes up at the last minute, no need to fall down and play dead.  Fit it in and simply transfer your unfinished tasks to the next day.  Pace yourself, be flexible, link tasks and learn to say no with grace.  With seeds like this your garden will be beautiful.

As with most things, consistency is the key.  As you found out with your garden, in just one week’s time things can become very messed up and you feel that your life is overrun.  However, weed your garden of time wasters, plant priorities and water with consistency, and you can put away the Advil.  You will be able to enjoy the beauty of life and not have to look at the “jungle”.

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