Making time

Today I decided to get an album done for my niece Paola but can't get the printer to work. How frustrating. I don't have time to do this but I want to. This brings up a good subject of how we make time when we need to and how we distribute time in our life since we only  have 24 hours each day. I saw this post the other day that caught my attention:

"Ah, yes, time.  The one thing we never seem to have enough of.  Days pass by so quickly that it feels impossible to get it all done.  And yet some days we go at a million miles an hour only to come to the end of the day and wonder what on earth we actually got done.  If I have one big frustration in my life I think it would be that I never feel like I have enough time.  And I am horrible about keeping balance.  It is something I desperately want to improve about myself.

As I thought about that this weekend I realized that there is absolutely nothing in this world I can do to make a day longer than 24 hours.  It is what it is.  So I can either feel frustrated by it and let it control me, or I can reset my thinking and start to view it in a different way.  And so I decided to do a reset.

I have 24 hours each day, so how am I going to use that time?  I made a list of the things I know I want to make time for each day and this is what I came up with:

Time for the Lord, time family, time for exercise, time for learning, time  for work, time for service, time for recreation.

Then I decided to make a template for myself where I took a word document and divided into those seven sections with each as a heading in its own box.  And this week I am going to do an experiment.  I am going to categorize my “to do” bullet items for the day into one of those seven sections where it would best each item fit.  Then I am going to see how many bullets I have in each section.  I think doing this will help me see whether I am achieving any level of balance in my life or not.  To achieve balance I should have items falling into each category.  To avoid getting out of balance I need to make sure that no one category is overloaded.  I have no idea how my experiment will go, but I feel like it may be a good start toward me trying to be better about achieving balance in my life and I feel good about at least making the effort.   I genuinely want to take better control of the time in my life and I definitely want to live a more balanced life, where I make time for everything and everyone that is important to me.

“The direction in which we are moving is more important than where we are at the moment.” –Marvin J. Ashton

And so this week I am moving in the direction of making time for the things that matter and achieving better balance in my life." This reminds me of a book I read long ago by Steven Covey " Spiritual Roots of Human Relations" where he clearly talked about being well balanced in your life by distributing your time on our most basic needs.  I hope this week somehow I get very productive and don't feel like it was a total waste. I love to feel productive!!