Download PDF Schedule Template
Title sounds odd, huh?
Time management is one of the most spiritual things you can do as a means to growing closer to God. When we plod along through life haphazardly assuming that we’ll make time for this or that we normally realize somewhere down the road that it didn’t happen. How many new year’s resolutions have been broken by February in America? In your life?
The problem with sticking with going to the gym past January is not that we lack some amount of tremendous resolve to do it, but that it’s not part of our daily schedule; or that we don’t have one at all. Most people wake up, go to work, do what they’re told for 40-60 hours a week, come home and watch television and go to sleep. There’s normally a lot of gaming, recreation and other forms of leisure in there: the things that come naturally to us.
The problem with that kind of living is that no one wants to look back at their life when they’re 60 and say they were the best Call of Duty warrior they could be or that they’re entire body of knowledge came from Shark Week on the Discovery channel. Unless we’re intentional about planning out our time on the front end, we’ll wind up old and scratching our heads for what we’ve done with a life.
I’m not saying taking a mental break from life to kill a few digital Nazis is inherently bad (not in this article at least), but if we want to succeed in making our lives count for something, we have to do things on purpose with our lives.
I’m including a PDF document and an Excel spreadsheet with this article that has most of the waking hours of the day mapped out for you to fill in; either on Excel or with a good ol’ fashion wireless pen. Write down how many hours a week (or a day) you’d like to spend praying, studying the Word of God, working out, eating, working, sleeping, etc. When you chart it all out, you’ll find that you probably have a lot more free time (or wasted time) than you realized, even if you feel like you’re a very busy person.
So, even though it may not sound like it, making a schedule and managing your time is one of the most practical spiritual things you can do. You’ll find that over time you’ve spent way more time in prayer, study of scripture and an appropriate amount of leisure time than before you did this.
And remember: you’re not making a schedule so that your life will be rigid and inflexible. There’s plenty of times you have to stray from your schedule. Things come up. Don’t let your inability to stick to your schedule keep you from trying when you fail. Instead, try to stick to your schedule as much as you can. If you’re sticking to it 50% of the time, that’s way more than if you’d never made it! And don’t ever feel guilty if you’ve strayed from your schedule. Just keep it as best you can and over time you’ll find yourself a lot more consistent in life.
I am a writer, author and purveyor of ink on paper. I also preach, teach and create Excel spreadsheets. 