Every morning, starting when I get out of bed, I find myself watching the clock. I have a certain amount of time to drink my first coffee of the day, walk the dog before my wife leaves for work, and get the kids out of bed and off to school. Once I get the kids out the door, I have a certain number of minutes before I have to meet with people, start writing the sermon for the week, do hospital visits, and tend to every other urgent thing that demands my attention now. I have to get it all done before the school day ends so I can pick up the kids and make dinner. As the week progresses, fires pop up that I have to put out. Emails need to be answered. Articles have to written. There are so many “urgent” things to attend to between opening my eyes in the morning and closing them at night, that I am shocked I find time to do any of the “not urgent” things done. Not surprising, the less than urgent things often fall to the back burner to be attended to next week. I don’t think I am the only one who labors daily under the “tyranny of the urgent.” Putting out fires or rushing between urgent tasks can rapidly consume all of our time. Eventually, we can reach a point where unimportant things that get pushed back become urgent because they have been put off too long. Worse, the things that really matter can get neglected. Playing with my children can easily fall off of the to-do list because playing doesn’t look as important as work demands. The problem is that when enough time has passed, we can begin to look back and realize that as important as work commitments seemed at the time, we would trade every minute of them to spend time with our loved ones again or to get back what we missed. The problem is that the busyness produced by dealing with urgent issues works against us taking the time to evaluate our major life objectives. If we don’t stop and think about where our time is going, we can easily spend it on things that don’t matter. Very few people I know live without a budget of some sort. They determine where their money is going in advance, so they know if they have enough to book a cruise and pay the rent. The thing is, it’s easier to make more money than it is to get more time in our lives. Some folks might scoff at the idea that it’s easy to make more money, but once yesterday is spent there isn’t going to be more. The trick to escaping the tyranny of the urgent is to identify what matters most in life and budget time for those things. My wife and kids are extremely important to me. Because of that, I spend time with them. Many folks waste more time staring at their smart phone in a day than they spend with their family. There’s always more work to be done. It can rapidly take over your life. My brother got me to do an exercise a couple years ago where I identified the most important things in my life and the rules I want to follow as a man. Regularly checking that list helps me keep my priorities in check. The trick is to be intentional. We have to plan and think about such things, like with a family budget, in order to make them work. Going into 2021, rather than setting resolutions, perhaps it would be a better use of time to identify the most important things in life and focus on those things.
