manage

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Prioritize Or You Will End Up Picking Up The Pieces

We sometimes underestimate the time little tasks take and, therefore, fail to prioritize them.

prioritize or you will end up picking up the pieces

Maybe it’s just me but, when I’m not working on a significant project, I’m easily pulled away from the secondary work I have to get done. 

This week I didn’t have to write a sermon, which is normally a major weekly project. For that, I am pretty protective of my time and I manage it through the week. 

I don’t know what it is but, when I don’t have a major anchor like a sermon to structure my week around, I’m not as protective of my time. 

It’s like a high school kid on summer vacation. He wakes up every morning and his parents give him a bunch of things they want him to do before they get home from work. Any plans or ideas of what he wanted to do now come under the new assignments he’s been tasked with.

This past week’s disaster is mostly my fault; I just needed to guard my time better. 

Someone called and needed help with something. I was only working on little tasks so I left what I was working on to help them get their task done. 

That happened two or three times this week, and because I felt like I had some extra time, I also worked on a couple of other things I had not planned on. 

We’ve all seen jugglers who have about five balls in the air and then get someone to throw another ball into the air for them. Often they incorporate that extra ball into their routine seamlessly. 

But there are times when the ball that gets thrown in arrives too high or low or too hard. When that happens, the juggler doesn’t just miss or drop that extra ball. All the balls he has circling in the air also get dropped. 

The balls scatter.

That’s how I felt at the end of my week. I still had a bunch of little details and tasks to do that were all scattered around me.

When I was in high school, we liked to see how many pennies we could catch. 

… Remember those things? 5 pennies were equal to a nickel, and 100 of them made a dollar – I mean a loonie.

We would bring one arm up and rest the back of our hand on our shoulder so we could stack a pile of pennies on our forearm just before our elbow. 

Then we would snap our arm forward and catch the pile of pennies in our hand. We got up to catching 20, 30, even 40 or more pennies in as many as 4 piles on our forearm.

You had to snap your arm forward really fast to catch all those stacks of coins. But if you missed, you had pennies flying everywhere. (Don’t try this at home, kids.)

Today, I’m picking up pennies – I mean, tasks – that I just didn’t give the priority to that they required. 

Here’s the thing: When you don’t prioritize God in your life, there will be other things and other people that fill your day and keep you from having much or any time with God. When that happens, your life will tend to be a little scattered. You will lose the directional focus you need.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What are you failing to prioritize these days? Leave your comments and questions below.

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Managing Your Energy Levels

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to best assess and manage my energy levels. … I should have been looking into this before now, but I guess it’s better that I do some research now than not at all. 

We need energy to do anything. And it seems like today almost everything requires some kind of energy to be useful.

Now-a-days we have more and more things that require renewable energy rather than constant energy. 

… Just so we’re all on the same page, when I say “renewable energy”, I’m talking about battery powered items – items that require batteries that must be charged when they are depleted as opposed to something that must be plugged into a constant energy source to function.

We humans run on renewable energy. We need to rest, and when we‘ve had enough rest we are ready to go again.

The problem with renewable energy is knowing when we need to renew it before it runs out. Otherwise, we may find we go to use an item and it doesn’t have enough energy in it to do what we want it to do. 

My watch does that sometimes. It can be 9 pm yet it doesn’t have enough energy to keep working until I’m ready to go to bed. 

They ran into the same problem on the Star Trek TV show. Captain Kirk would call down to Scotty in the engine room for more power. Scotty would yell back, “I’m givin’ her all she’s got. We don’t have enough energy to go into warp speed.” 

Sometimes it can be a quick fix when an item’s energy is low – you just slap in a new battery. 

I have several tools that all work with the same batteries. And since I have several batteries, I never worry if I’m using my grass trimmer and the battery dies. I just slap in one of my other batteries and keep on going. 

Some batteries come with indicators to how much energy is left in them – that’s helpful. 

I remember Duracell once had battery indicators on their double A batteries. You would press on two points with your fingers. There was a yellow line that would grow along the side of the battery. How long the line would end up was depending on how much energy was left in the battery. 

But sometimes I wasn’t sure it was measuring the energy in the battery or the energy I was employing to get that little line to reach the other side. My fingers were always sore after those tests.

Sometimes you can tell when your own energy is getting low. You feel it; you get tired and don’t function at your best. Measuring and knowing your energy level is pretty important when you are dealing with renewable energy. 

And as we get older, our energy levels are going to change. My energy is not going to last as long in my 60’s as it did when I was in my 40’s. 

So knowing how to assess and manage my energy levels is  something I need to investigate …before I run out of energy to do it! 

Here’s the thing: God never runs out of energy; He is a constant source of energy. When you are low, no matter in what area of your life, you can plug into God and find a power source to get recharged. Have you ever considered spending time with God for this purpose, that your time with Him recharges you? It does when you fully engage. 

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: How do you manage your energy levels? Leave a comment below.

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How To Manage The Ups And Downs In Life

 

From time to time I republish an old post I’ve written. This post is from July 15, 2014. Enjoy.

My golf game the other day resembled life to a large degree. And, like my game, life is filled with ups and downs.

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When I was in my early twenties I played golf every Saturday morning.  It was like clockwork, unless I had a late night the night before and then I sometimes got a few pebbles thrown at my window to nudge me out of bed.

Well, this past Saturday was a blast from the past for me. I had an early 7:05 am tee off time with a couple of buddies.

It’s been years, but I still remembered the quietness of that time of day, and the stillness of the air. The dew was thick on the grass and the sun breaking through the trees created breathtaking patterns of light and shade on the fairways.

That’s a nice picture, isn’t it? Well it stops right about there because, for some reason, I couldn’t hit the golf ball on Saturday.

I started with a 6, and if you don’t know anything about golf, let me tell you, it doesn’t matter if it’s a long hole or short hole, a 6 is never a good score!

I posted another 6 on the next hole, and when I got my third straight 6, I glanced over at the score card my partner was keeping and I could see the pattern. My card read 666 and you know what that’s the sign of!

That’s maybe why I was kind of relieved when I scored – yup, you guessed it – another 6 on the next hole. With four sixes on the first four holes, it was very obvious I was having a terrible round. But at least now no one was going to confuse me for being the devil.

The rest of the front nine holes were up and down – a couple of good holes but also a couple of bad ones.

Then things changed around on the back nine. I don’t really know why; no one gave me a pep talk or anything. I just started to hit the ball better. I parred the next 5 holes in a row.

And if you don’t know anything about golf, that means I got the ball in the hole in the correct number of shots.

I had one little hiccup on the 15th hole but then I parred the next two. That’s seven pars on the back nine. That’s a great score for me, and I would say for most people.

Then came the last hole. I don’t know what happened to me, but I choked. I didn’t get a 6 though – I got a 7! I had such a good back nine but then one hole sunk it.

But you know what? As I stare at my score card now, I can’t wait to try again.

Here’s the thing: Life is sometimes bad – sometimes really bad – but it’s also sometimes very good. Often we can’t explain why it is so, we can only take what we get. We have a tendency to blame God for the bad, and just bask in our own glory during the good.

The Bible says everything comes from the hand of God, so we should be looking to God in the good and the bad. We should be seeking to know Him more in all of life. So whether life is good or bad, we should want to get up each morning and try again.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: How have you handled the good and bad in life? I’d really like to hear from you; you can leave your comment below.