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.
[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