Scheduling the Gift of Time

Guest post from Chelsey Hall

I am a schedule person. I LOVE schedules… and organization. I have a schedule for everything and everything has a schedule. Probably the nature of being a first-born!

But why bother with a schedule?

Time is our most valuable resource and it must be budgeted wisely.

I heard a great analogy about budgeting our time. Think about it this way: if you were to go off and spend your husbands paycheck in whatever way you wanted to, most likely you would end up not having money needed to pay some of the essentials. So, what do you to do avoid this, you make a budget. In the same way, you need a budget for your time… or a schedule. This way, you can make wise choices in order to make room for all the necessary activities in your life; making sure you don’t “over-budget your time and end up with no time on the most important things in your life.

Sometimes, the word “schedule” makes people cringe and all sorts of excuses are thrown out.

→”I’m not a schedule oriented person”

Managing our time is not an option. Time is a gift from God and like all gifts given to us we must manage it wisely. A few years ago, I read a quote from Steven B. Cloud that really put “time” in perspective for me:

Time – we have done nothing to deserve it, earn it, or purchase it. Like the air we breathe, time comes to us as a part of life. The gift of time is not ours alone. It is given equally to each person. Rich and poor, educated and ignorant, strong and weak—every man, woman and child has the same twenty-four hours every day.

→”Schedules mess with creativity and spontaneity”

Much like a financial budget, schedules help keep us on track. They help us keep a focus and keep track of how we are spending our time. Schedules can, however, actually encourage creativity … when we manage our time effectively,there will be more time for creativity and spontaneity.

→”I make a schedule, try it out and then it fails and I get discouraged”

Some of the best advice I heard was this: You must be convinced that it is important to use time wisely before you undertake making a time budget; otherwise you will fail. Don’t begin to make a schedule if you are feeling peer pressure, or guilty about wasted time,or even if you are greatly inspired by someone else’s schedule, because your motivation is misplaced. If you do, when the going gets tough you will rationalize away your conviction and the guilt will set in. Instead, spend some time brainstorming about why and how a schedule would be effective in your home, and what it would look like.

Your schedule won’t and shouldn’t look like mine or anyone else’s. Some families thrive by rigid schedules; some by more loose schedule. However, there should be some kind of schedule or “budget” of your time.

I would encourage you to spend some time thinking about the best way you can make use of the the gift of 24 hours that has been given to  you. And not just once, but often. As life changes, so do our schedules.

How do you schedule your “time” right now?