What time do you have?

I have a friend that recently got into watches.

Not the kind of watches that you buy at Walmart or at a local shop. These are the kind you do research on. They are nice watches. As a matter of fact, if he reads this, he’ll probably comment on the watch in the photo.

Recently, I asked him to find me a stop watch. I was mostly curious and also a little interested in upping my stop watch game. I’m not sure I have a stop watch game, but the guy who ran the game clock at home Concord games when I was in high school had one and I thought that was pretty cool.

It’s interesting what happens when you don’t wear a watch when you’re used to typically wearing one. Or if you are used to living by a schedule or a calendar of sorts. You can lose track of so much!

When I was in college, I struggled to get things going. I found myself devoting my time to things that I wanted to do. Things that were more important to me. Things that, I felt, added to my life.

There’s a load of things that I could say about what happened in those particular times, but there was something that remained true:

What I devoted time to produced a predictable result.

Have you ever stopped to notice what you spend your time doing? I think we could learn far more about what we believe and the priorities we have put in place simply by examining the things that we give our minutes to each day and each week.

We devote time to the things that are actually most important to us.

You remember the last conversation you were in that felt like it wasn’t going anywhere? That conversation that seemed to drone on and on as if Charlie Brown’s teacher just wouldn’t land the plane and wrap the lesson up? I’d bet that at least one thought that rolled through your head was, “I could be doing something else with the time this is wasting.”

The things that are most important to us will always cause us to invest more time into those things. We will move things around to make those things happen and be realities in our lives.

What IS important will always get our time before the things that we WANT to be important…. Unless we make intentional steps to change it.

I think it was around my junior year at college that I was introduced to Psalm 90 and verse 12. It says, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

I love this verse because the impetus of needing to be taught is the recognition that there is something to learn; that something needs to change. But, how do I come to that recognition?

In my work with students, I have not enough fingers and toes the number of conversations that I have with younger people experiencing anxiety over appointments, commitments and priorities. But equally as prominent are students who have never put a calendar into their daily rhythm.

Even if they have begun to navigate the ins and outs of keeping commitments, they still find themselves unable to grapple with the mounting requests that come with being the keeper of their calendar. Without fail, they think they are overwhelmed, they are sensing stress, and they find their current existence unsustainable.

The problem is often that they don’t know where there time is going and so they don’t know how much time they actually have.

It’s a new year and for many of us, the regular rhythm of things is kicking back up. School is getting back to session, extracurriculars are firing again, and things are happening again. And with all of that starting back up, the anxiety, stress and tension of getting from thing to thing and wanting to the other thing comes back.

I wonder how your life would be if you took the time to evaluate how you have actually spent your time and your day? Do you know how much time you actually devoted to that thing that you said was super important to you? Is there an accounting for how much time you gave to that thing that wasn’t a big deal to you?

A practice I have employed and I suggest to students all the time is to not only maintain a calendar of things in the future, that’s important. What is just as important is going back and adjusting your calendar to reflect what you actually did during the day. I usually do it in 15 minute increments.

When I was in 4th grade, I was officially diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). I’m not sure I would have called it that, since I have no deficit of attention, I just pay attention to too many things. I digress.

One of the variables with ADD is an inability to appropriately or effectively manage time. The single greatest thing I have done to change that and account for that is to know what I actually gave my time to; whether I wasted it or leveraged it.

If you’ve read to this point, maybe it’s worth it. You’ve wasted enough time reading this. What time do you have? Do you know?