Becky asked a very good Question.  How do we cut back on the hats we are wearing by adding more to do.  She’s right, I skipped a step.  In order to have time to discern purpose and drop hats, I believe we must build good habits to support the changes that will inevitably come.  The idea is to do the foundational things I need and enjoy and make them habits and use those daily activities to improve health, skills and spiritual life.  I picked one daily habit from 3 categories;  Exercise - Health, Praying - Spiritual Life, Guitar Scales - Skill.

Doing just ten minutes a day of each allows me to make 3 ten minute adjustments to my day.  Not adding new activities, but replacing ineffective, unimportant activities such as TV, net surfing and spinning, deciding what to do while accomplishing nothing.  Had I decided to stop watching TV, or pray for an hour, or Play guitar for 2 hours a day, those would be unrealistic and I would feel very much like a failure.  By making small adjustments and replacing or redefining small parts of the day, I can effectively set good habits and replace activies that are a distraction from any mission.

Steven Covey wrote a best-selling book - The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (There is a nice overview here http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~tanguay/7habits.htm )

He talks about the 4 quandrants of activities we choose.  We tend to spend the bulk of our time on activities that are Urgent and Important(Impending deadlines, Emergency Car Repairs, personal Crisis) and Not Urgent and Not Important(Video Games, TV, Internet Surfing) and even Things that are Urgent and Not Important such as running to a sale or cell phone calls  and interruptions.  These quandrant 3 activities can make us very active without being productive.  Have you ever seen someone start cleaning a room and get so focused on re-arranging the furniture or re-organizing the china closet and never finish cleaning the room?

Quandrant 2 activities, which are important but not urgent, are often overlooked, and yet in the long run lead to less quadrant 1 activities.  Prevention and maintenance.  Would you be looking for a new car because the engine in your old car blew up if you’d takem time to get oil changes and regular maintenance?  Relationship building, looking for new opportunities, personal education and taking time to plan, rather than always reacting to the current crisis are all examples of Quadrant 2 activities.

As I examine the hats and take time to weigh what I am called to do, I need to balance in the things I should do.  The things that are required as a good steward of the gifts, talents, and health I’ve been granted.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Daily Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.