day 1120: Fully Scheduled

"May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think."

Something we all share equally is the amount of time in an hour.  No matter who you are, your position, or socioeconomic level, an hour is an hour.  Now what we do with it and how productive we are with that hour is not at all the same. There is a science and art to managing calendars and schedules. I have seen the most productive and I have seen some real disasters at managing a calendar.  I am pretty obsessive about my calendar and while not as disciplined about knowing when to say no, I do manage my schedule to my own level of fullness comfort, and sometimes beyond my comfort level.  I like a full schedule in that there is a certain level of productivity that comes with knowing that there is only so much time available to complete the tasks at hand.  We all have had the experience of what happens when the schedule is empty and at the end of the day, we say, “Where did that day go, I didn’t get anything done!”. Schedule fullness and is one that each need to learn and unfortunately it mostly comes with experience and the learning by trial and error.  A key lesson I have learned over the year is to always consider the other people involved so that whatever the decision is that the least amount of disruption to the schedules of others is the best course of action.  Constantly changing a calendar is not good for anyone.

A full schedule does not equate to the fullness of life. In fact, a fullness of schedule can be masking an emptiness of life. Consider that we can many times fill our days and hours with those things that take away our attention from the harder areas in our lives that need to be addressed.  We can find ourselves so busy with the everydays in life that we forget about the things that affect our ever after.  Our calendars and schedules can become so filled that we don’t look after our physical and spiritual well-beings.  Both, when denied take away from the fullness of life that we can experience.  Step back for a moment and look at the last month of your schedule, not to determine if it was full or not, but to determine if it was filled with the right things that you can say that was, “Time well spent”.

Reference: Ephesians 3:19-20 (New Living Translation)