How to Get More Time Out of Your Day: Part 1

Allen Webster

Topic(s): Wisdom

Links to this entire series:

• How to Get More Time Out of Your Day: Part 1
• How to Get More Time Out of Your Day: Part 2
• How to Get More Time Out of Your Day: Part 3

Editor’s note: At the end of 1996, after completing a busy, stressful year, it became obvious that I would have to make some changes in order to maintain a schedule that would allow the good works that God had allowed us to start to continue. During a December holiday vacation, I went to Books-a-Million and searched for books on time management. After purchasing and reading three, I began trying to practice better time management and have much more thoroughly enjoyed the Lord’s work since. In the intervening years, much thought has been given to what the Bible says about managing time. After preaching/teaching several times on the subject, I have found that many Christians in various professions also longed to have information to help them manage time better. This series is a first attempt to make such information—from a Christian perspective—more widely accessible.

“The president of the United States has no more time than you.” It’s true. Every person has 24 hours, 1440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds a day. For many of us it just does not seem to be enough. Others seem to get so much more accomplished than we do that we wonder if they don’t get an extra hour every day or an extra day each week. It may well be that they do…read on.

Step 1: Become Time Conscious.

Thomas Carlyle asked, “So here hath been dawning another blue day; think, wilt thou let it slip useless away?” The truth is, most of us do waste a good deal of time each day. We need to become more aware of time. Einstein said time is “what the clock reads” (no wonder he has a monument in Washington!). There is solar time, Greenwich Mean Time, Atomic time, daytime, nighttime, local time, bad times, good times, and old times. The words time and times are found 765 times in Scripture. Felix waited for a “convenient time” (Acts 24:25); Christ said that now is the “accepted time” (2 Corinthians 6:2); and Paul said the “time is short” (1 Corinthians 7:29). We must make ourselves aware of what Shakespeare called “the in-audible and noiseless foot of time.” It can go by unnoticed.

It’s up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it.
Give account if I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it.

Emerson was right when he called each day “a miniature eternity.” Carlyle called life “a little gleam of time between two eternities.” Leslie Weatherhead wrote a book entitled, Time for God, in which he mathematically calculated a “one-day lifetime” for a person living an average life span. (His calculations are based on the waking hours of 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.).

• If you’re fifteen years old, it is 10:25 a.m.
• If you are 20, it’s 11:34 a.m.
• If you’re 25, the time is 12:42 p.m.
• If you’ve made 30, it’s 1:51 p.m.
• At 35, it’s 3:00 p.m.
• If you are 40, it is 4:00 p.m.
• At 45, the clock reads 5:16 p.m.
• For a person of 50, it’s 6:25 p.m.
• It’s 7:34 p.m. for those at 55.
• A 60-year-old is looking at 8:42 p.m.
• Retiring at 65 means it’s 9:51 p.m.
• And if you’re 70, it is 11:00 p.m.

Most time management experts suggest that a person keep a one- week log of how they spend their time (in fifteen-minute increments). Most will be surprised at where the time actually goes.

Step 2: Value the Time You Have.

There is more to gaining time than just being “time conscious” just as there is more to getting rich than just making money. John Foster observed: “If a person were so foolish as to throw away a valuable piece of money into a pit or into the sea, he would not literally throw away anything but the metal; but virtually he would throw away whatever best thing it would have purchased, as bread, clothing, medicine, refreshment... Even so a person wasting time throws away, not the time itself only, but the opportunities and the privileges which that time represents.”

Time is valuable because it is limited.

The reason diamonds and gold are valuable is not primarily because they sparkle or are beautifully colored. It is because the supply is limited. So it is with life—the supply is limited. The ancients had a saying, “An inch of time cannot be bought by an inch of gold.” Truly, “A day is a span of time no one is wealthy enough to waste.” Ethan the Ezrahite counseled, “Remember how short my time is…” (Psalm 89:47). Job compared his swiftly passing days to a weaver’s shuttle (7:6), a rushing postman, a swift ship, and an eagle hasting to the prey (9:25,26). He compared his few days to the time it takes a flower to grow and be cut down (14:1,2). David saw his time as a “handbreadth” (Psalm 39:5) and James saw an entire life as vapor appearing and soon disappearing above a teapot (4:14).

Every birthday is a milestone of the relentless march of time. It reminds us that we are quickly passing through the nightly campgrounds that mark our path to eternity (Psalm 103:15-18). A painting titled, “The Stages of Life with Death” hangs in the Prado Museum in Spain. Hans Baldung painted a newborn baby surrounded by three elongated figures. On the left is a beautiful young woman—alabaster skin, hair flowing down her back, the perfect picture of classical beauty. In the middle is a shriveled old woman with a hard, angular, mean-looking face. She is grabbing the shoulder of the beautiful girl, and with a sneer she is pulling her toward herself. With her other arm she is interlocked with a third person, a creature—a rotting corpse—holding an hourglass.¹ This pointed painting pictures the rapid transition of life to death. It is only when we recognize that we have a limited time on earth that we’ll live each day to the fullest.²

Time is valuable because it is irretrievable.

God can turn back the clock, but only He can—and He did it only once (Isaiah 30:8). We can never go back and must go forward. All the rich man’s money won’t buy him one hour back from last week. All the professor’s education won’t let him relive one day from last year. All the politician’s power cannot retrieve for him one wasted youthful year. We must learn, as Henry David Thoreau said, that we cannot kill time without murdering opportunity.³ The hour-glass is the only glass you can never refill.

Time is valuable because it is a gift from God.

Time began with God, though He lives outside of it (2 Peter 3:8). When He created the universe—He made day and night (Genesis 1:5), and created the stars in their courses which determine our hours, days, months, and years (Genesis 1:16). As the One who has control over time, God gives it out to us a second at a time. Someday we shall stand before God and turn in a timetable accounting how we have used His gift (cf. 1 Corinthians 4:2; Luke 16:2). Therefore we should value each day as one would who has already lived beyond the six months his doctor said he had left. We’re all living on “borrowed time.” Moses said, “…teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

Endnotes:

1 Donald W. McCullough, “Now is the Time,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 73.

2 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross