Time management, priorities, importance and intention

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1 I was reading a devotional on time management a few months ago. It was written by a well-regarded theologian so I thought he might have some interesting insight on the issue. I was pretty disappointed. He threw out several well known scriptures and then tried to attach “tips” to them like, praying while you are in the car, which to me is a no brainer. What it all boiled down to was, time is precious so don’t waste it. But it didn’t tell me how to manage time any better. I mentioned my disappointment to my pastor and pointed out that the admonition to not waste time was violated by actually doing that devotional. We had a good laugh about that and he said I should write a devotional on the subject. That brings us to this. In the next few pages I’m not going to give you tips on how to do more things within your waking hours. I’m going to give you biblical examples of how people wasted time and how they used it effectively, so you will know when you have been, are, and may be about to waste time. To begin I want to help you understand three things: the priority, the important, and the intention. All three are tied together, but they are not the same thing. The priority is what get’s done. That doesn’t mean it is important, it just gets done. Because the important may not be our priority at the time, it doesn’t get done. In the process we get frustrated because we don’t think we have time for important things. The reason that happens is we fail to acknowledge what our intention is at the time. When you understand the intention of your action, you understand your priority. And if your priority isn’t really important for that moment, you know your action is going to be wasted time. Intention is the planning process of time management. Say you want to build a shed on a patio, but the patio is covered in junk. You might shift the junk around to make room for your shed, but you’ll be stepping around the junk during the process, constantly shifting junk and taking attention away from your intention: to build a shed. If you clean up and toss the junk away first, you’ll have an easier time building. The intention of building the shed makes cleaning the patio important and a priority to accomplish your intention. Suddenly you see an effective plan and can assign time accordingly. So that defines our terms.