Time - 06/08

Time

During a visit with my Father one day, we started talking about our lives and the choices we have made.  He said that if he had it all to do over again, the one thing he would have changed was to spend more time with his children during their growing up years.  He was a great father but he was very busy. Dad was a doctor in the small town of Blackfoot, Idaho and he was the only surgeon.  So when ever there was an accident in town, or when someone needed an emergency operation, Dad was called to take care of it.  This, coupled with his church responsibilities, meant that he was often away from home.  As we talked about this, he recognized that he could have made adjustments in his life and career to have made more time for the family.

I believe that we should constantly evaluate our life situations and do our best to identify where we need to adjust, change and grow.  How we spend our time and what we focus on should be one of the most important factors we should evaluate.  The reason that this is so important is that we live relatively short lives.  Things pass us by so quickly and before we know it, opportunities are lost. One of my favorite quotes is from a Star Trek movie.  Captain Picard said, “Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey that reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again.”[i]  In Psalms it says, “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.”[1]

It is true that there are times when opportunities pass us by and then are gone forever.   When we were married, we had moved to Fresno California and lived there for about ten years.  We would come home to visit as often as we could but we could really only get home once a year.  As my parents got older, I said to Jo, “If my Dad lives another ten years, then I will only see him another ten times.”  I felt that it was important that something change.  I wanted to be able to be closer to our families, and for my children to be around their grandparents.  This was a significant factor in our decision to move back to Utah.  I am glad that we did.  Ten years later, my Dad passed away, but during those ten years we went to many football games, worked together and played together.  I think of all of the wonderful memories that my family and I would have missed if we hadn’t gotten that better perspective on time.

I am constantly amazed at how fast time passes.  I feel this temporal sensitivity when I see my grandchild and remember that it was just a few short years ago when my daughter was little herself. I feel this every time I see our youngest daughter put away a pretty dress that she has outgrown.

John Randolph said, “Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.”  I believe that all of us at some point regret the time that it took us to come to some important decision, or to make a change in our lives.

So how do we identify where we should best spend our time?  Well, the answer comes with a bigger question: What is important in life?  In a movie titled “The Ultimate Gift” a young girl is asked what her dream would be if she could dream anything.  Her reply was, “My dream is to be with people I love, that love each other and that love me.”[ii]  Christ said that we should love one another.  I feel that this is the most important thing in life – to love each other, to help each other, to be with those we love and who love us.  I also believe that it is important to expand this love out and not to just include those who already love us.  Jesus also taught us that we should “love our neighbors as ourselves.”

So we have answered the question, “what is most important in life?”.  Now, how do we adjust our time to drive ourselves to act on this knowledge:

In business, I have appreciated the analysis of time usages as it is broken out in to four quadrants or categories.

Stephen Covey has written about time use and devised a four-quadrant principle to help us judge where we spend most of our time:
Quadrant One: Urgent and Important: Crises, problems, deadline-driven projects.
Quadrant Two: Not Urgent, but Important: Preparation, problem prevention, planning, relationship building, values clarification, true recreation.
Quadrant Three: Urgent, but Not Important: Interruptions, some phone calls, some meetings, some email.
Quadrant Four: Not Urgent, Not Important: Junk mail, spam, busywork, trivia, “escape” activities, mindless web surfing, etc.

Let me give some other examples for the top two categories:
Quadrant One: Urgent and Important: A child wants you to read to her, family meals, A teen-ager wants to talk, someone needs help
Quadrant Two: Not Urgent, but Important: Going on outings together as a family, teaching time, playing together, Family Home Evening, improve family relationships.

Think in your own mind of all of the things that should fall into your list of things that are most important. If we know what is most important and everything that doesn’t fall into these two quadrants is not as important, then we know where we need to focus our time and attention.

There are good ways to spend our time, and then there are the best ways.  Dallin H. Oaks said, “We should begin by recognizing the reality that just because something is good is not a sufficient reason for doing it. The number of good things we can do far exceeds the time available to accomplish them. Some things are better than good, and these are the things that should command priority attention in our lives.”[iii]

So while it is good to do the necessary things to make life function – work, dishes, shopping, etc. there are some things that are better.  Being there when someone needs help – doing activities as a family, helping your family, blessing the lives of those around you.

Working and providing a living is certainly important.  But we should not let it come at the cost of the most important things of life.  I had a boss one time that told me that he doesn’t work for money.  When I asked him to explain, he said, “I work for time.  I work because it gives me time after work, which I can spend with my family and do what I want.  I work for the time after work.”  It is hard not to focus on money, because it drives everything, and often controls our time.  A line from one of my favorite songs says, “…all your money won't another minute buy.” 

Sometimes life feels like a losing battle – opportunities lost, time lost, experiences lost that I can never regain.  I sometimes feel like I am in a river swimming upstream and all of these important things are rushing by.  I try to grasp as many as I can, but much of it slips by me because I am also trying so hard to swim against the current.  I need to remind myself that the goal isn’t to reach a target; it is to grab as many of these important opportunities and I can. 

In Psalms it says, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”[2]  I believe what this is saying is that we want God to help us understand our mortality and how short our life really is.  Then we will be able to understand where we must spend our time.  “..apply our hearts unto wisdom” means that we must not make things of the mind our top priority. These are things like work, money, and the urgent but not important things of life.  We must wisely choose to spend our time on things of the “heart” which things are the most important things.  These are the things that matter most and that will ultimately have the most value for us here on this earth and the next.



[1] Old Testament, Psalm 39:4-5
[2]   Old Testament, Psalm 90:12



[i] Captain Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek Generations, Paramount Pictures, 1994
[ii] The Ultimate Gift is a film based on author Jim Stovall's bestselling novel
[iii] Dallin H. Oaks, “Good, Better, Best,” Ensign, Nov 2007, 104–8
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