This is part of a series of extremely simple articles to help you create margins in your life. They are based on Jay Pathak’s sermons on the same topic. The first article is called “Making Room for Life.“
“Why don’t I have enough time?” It’s a question I ask myself on a regular basis. You see, I’m a bachelor. I’ve got no real commitments or responsibilities besides taking care of myself. Pretty easy life, really. But I always feel that I’m stretched and slammed to the max. I’m sure you feel the same way, probably right now. The weird thing is that everybody seems to feel the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’re in high school or college, single or dating, engaged or married, have ten kids or no kids, work at Starbucks or manage an international corporation. But it’s a trick we play on ourselves. You see, we all have the same amount of time in a day. Everybody gets twenty-four hours. Everybody gets seven days in a week. So the real question isn’t “Why don’t I have enough time?”
The question that actually matters is “Where am I spending my time?”
It’s really hard to adjust things until you know that something needs adjustment. If you want to figure out why you don’t have enough time, start tracking it. Everybody gets 168 hours in a week. Most people work forty hours a week, and scientists say that your slowly killing yourself if you get less than seven hours of sleep a night, so we’ll knock out another fifty hours for that. That leaves you with fifty-eight hours. Track it - that’s the first step.
