About ten years ago I was living the dream: dream job, dream wife, 2 dream kids, and a dream dog. In spite of living the dream, I was still functioning off the same financial plan I had in my twenties, which meant if there was money in the account it was spent and then some. I grew frustrated because I knew there had to be a better way until I was introduced to Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Now I am not a paid consultant, I don’t get any royalties, but learning those simple principles and putting them into practice in my life turned things around in the right direction. You have to go through the whole course but a few principles stood out. First, most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and it doesn’t matter the size of the paycheck. My take was and has been that simply making more money somehow was not going to solve my financial situation. The second principle he teaches is that a budget is simply a plan to tell your money where to go instead of your money telling you where to go.
Fast-forward ten years later. I’m working in a very demanding high responsibility job, with my dream wife, and dream kids, we’ve buried the dream dog and are raising the dream puppy. My struggle lately has not been financial it has been about time. The nature of my work now has become physically demanding and it is challenging to get it all done. I find myself struggling because I don’t “have enough time.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the response to that challenge… “but that’s not true because everyone has the same amount of time in a day.” Well that’s true, but it sure seems sometimes as if my tasks, meetings, emails, phone calls, etc., can quickly mount up and take over. Enter Carey Nieuwhof. I’ve been following his leadership blog and podcast for about a year now. The “one thing” I picked up recently from Carey is when he shared the principle of planning our time in advance. I immediately made the connection back to having a financial budget, but now having to develop a time budget. It means that we know what we want to accomplish and spend time on in a given week, though very often we fail to take care of our priorities because we get interrupted or side tracked. I’m still seeing how this works out in my current work/life context, but when we take the discipline to plan ahead it gives us an opportunity to say yes to the things that are most important and no to those things that seek to get us off track.
What are your most important tasks, dreams, or goals? They could be spiritual, family, work, educational goal. How are you planning your time this week to make those things a reality?