In a previous post (Finding Time for Important Things) I pointed out that the things we think are priorities in our lives are actually “imagined priorities”. Our Real Priorities can easily be determined by what we spend our life doing.
When you give your time, energy and life over to a bunch of mundane things that you don’t want to eat up your life, you are actually giving them the right to eat up your life. Your imagined priorities are fake, since you never get around to them.
A Life Consumed
Most people do not live their life, but they simply burn it up in the fire of activities they are trapped in. Most people get caught in useless cycles which steal, kill and destroy their potential and destiny. Time, talent, energy, creativity, potential, significance and the like, get burned up in some very ordinary things, such as the job, bills, domestic routine, trivial friendships, daydreaming, amusement, cheap entertainment, trivial activities, pointless processes, and so on.
Stop Worshiping the Ordinary
People worship very ordinary things with all their time, energy and mental and emotional faculties. They throw away decades of their life trying to empty the “IN” tray, only to have it filled up by others who don’t care about how they consume other people’s lives.
When people submit to that routine, pacing the treadmill of mundane chores, they give up all the “important things” and make the ordinary into their life obsession.
Work Will Finish You
I recently heard someone comment on the vanity of trying to get the job done. They were not talking about the importance of completing our tasks, but about the overall sense that work consumes us and never says “Thank You!”
All your endeavours to get on top of things is futile. The painting will need to be done again. The yard will need to be mowed again. What has been done will have to be re-done at some time. The customers will need new products. The current designs will need updating. The latest model will one day be insufficient for the task. And so it goes.
Work will never yield to your efforts. So don’t get excited about spending your life on the work that presents itself to you.
As one of my friends put it recently, “The Work Will Finish Us! We Will Never Finish It!”
Back to Priorities
The stuff that consumes your life probably does not deserve to eat up as much of you as you let it do. Your job and your workload could probably be scaled back with little real effect. But you may well have become so emotionally and energetically locked in to what you are doing that you let it simply eat you up.
So let’s get back to your priorities. Look again at those things you say are “important”. If they really should be important, how about taking time out of those things that are eating you up, and making time for those important things!
The only way to find time for important things is to take time off lesser things that you have allowed to gobble up your years. Remember, those things are never going to be conquered. Once you are dead and gone there will be others being eaten up by the never ending list of things to do.
So harness your life and set some new priorities, not by writing a list, but by changing what you do to fit something new in.
Go on. I know you can do it!
Tags: time management
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