Uncovering the Time Warp

            We run out of time, we live on borrowed time, time flies. We long for “free” time, but “time is money”.  We waste time, we race time, we kill time.

There is no doubt, we have a complicated relationship with time. Everyone I know these days, complains about never having enough time. And yet, we have all these time saving conveniences. We can microwave dinner in minutes, or drive through and pick it up ready to eat. A load of laundry that would have taken our foremothers all day, takes less than an hour. We can have news and weather instantaneously on our computer, smart phone or other mobile device without even having to thumb through a newspaper or turn on our TVs. It’s truly an enigma how we spend less time at the daily chores of life and yet have seemingly fewer minutes in our day.

As a homeschooling mom, writing teacher and aspiring novelist, I suffer from this same time warp. The day dawns with sixteen hours of pregnant possibility and by the evening, it has shriveled into a mad rush to get dinner on the table and evening chores completed before bed, and this cycle is frustratingly repeated again and again.

I have the goals, but I can’t seem to find the time to accomplish them. So what happens?

Time is one of the only truly fair things about life. We all get the same minutes in every single day. So how we choose to spend it is the difference between a well spent life ending in satisfaction and a wasted one ending in regrets. Even the Bible, in Ephesians 5:15-16 admonishes us to spend our days wisely making the most of every opportunity.

So, I am on a quest to discover where the lost minutes are going. A journey to wisely make the most of every opportunity. Join me, and we will uncover the mystery of the time warp. We will harness those illusive minutes and make them serve our purpose to complete our goals.

Mission #1

Discover how we spend our time. For one week keep track of your time in fifteen minute increments. Take a notebook and in the left margin, list out the hours of your day, from when you get up until you go to bed. Use four lines per hour for 15 minute increments. At the top of every hour, record how you spent the last 60 minutes.  At the end of the week, we’ll examine how we’ve spent our time and evaluate how to improve our productivity in reaching our goals.

Next: Mission #2 Time to Write