Take Control of Your Time

Think back to the first day of summer break. After nine months of early mornings, scarfing down a bowl of cereal or oatmeal, rushing off to make it before the morning bell, lugging books from class to class, enduring pop quizzes and spending evenings slogging through homework—you were looking forward to three months of freedom. What could be more exhilarating?

Pretty much every adult looks back with fondness on summer vacations. No matter how much time passes, it is hard to forget the joy and excitement that accompanies an extended break from the structure and responsibilities of school.

But what really makes summer break so special? Is it sleeping in? Spending time with friends all day? Staying up later than usual? Reading your favorite book instead of one assigned by your teacher? All the fun activities in the middle of the day such as hiking, biking or working on a hobby?

While these are all notable, they are merely the effects of a central cause.

What truly makes summer great is that you have more time to do the things you enjoy. Seven or more hours of your day are not taken up by school and homework, which for most of the year leaves you with less time to spend on yourself. The open schedule of summer break gives you a lot more time to do what you like.

However, you do not have to wait for summer every year to have more control of your time! You can wield such power all year.

With just a little knowledge, it is possible to squeeze every drop out of every minute you have. You can do the things you enjoy and stay on top of all your responsibilities—not only from school but also those from God, your parents, and your boss if you have a job.

Time management is arguably the most important skill you could ever possess. By putting it to use, you can have more memorable moments, valuable accomplishments and thrilling stories than you thought possible.

Basics of Time Management

Everyone knows what a multimillionaire is—a person who possesses large amounts of money, well beyond the average person. Such individuals are featured on television, in magazines, and in other media, usually to display their outlandishly priced gold-plated yachts, animals from another hemisphere for personal pets and exotic homes. Reporters seem unable to stop themselves from documenting every detail of the lives of the wealthy.

Yet have you considered that you are also a multimillionaire? A multimillionaire in time, that is. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. No one—regardless of how much money they have, how smart they are, how old they are—has any more seconds, minutes or hours in the day than you. Stop and consider this fact and think about how you can use it to your advantage.

You may also be familiar with the saying that “time is money.” Does this mean you can use the extra hours in your day to pay for a 65-inch 8K television? Of course not! It means that the time you have is a commodity. It has value. Time can be used to accomplish great things—but you must know how to harness it.

God, the Author of time, also equates it to wealth. Through the apostle Paul, God instructed Christians to “redeem the time” (Eph. 5:16; Col. 4:5). The Greek word translated “redeem” means “to buy up,” “ransom” and “to rescue from loss.” Clearly, wasting time is a natural human tendency, so much so that God characterizes its proper use as buying it back.

Paul continued in Ephesians 5:16 by stating this approach is necessary “because the days are evil.” The implication is, if you do not keep track of your time, you could be dragged down into spending it on the wrong things.

In Luke 14:28, Jesus Christ asked, “Which of you, intending to build a tower, sits not down first, and counts the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” No construction company would begin pouring concrete or laying bricks without first knowing that funds would be available for their materials and that they would be paid for their work. Again, associate “cost” with time. While this verse has many applications, it can be used to show that you should actively think through how you will use your time.

Your “Roadmap”

Imagine opening your mailbox to find a large brown envelope containing $1,000 in cash. Along with it is a handwritten note stipulating that you use the money to explore a place you have never visited. In your excitement, you immediately stuff the money into your pocket, jump into the car, and drive off to “go wherever the road takes you.”

There is a certain adventure in the idea of traveling to an unknown destination. However, the reality is, such an impulsive response would likely end up with you getting lost, hitting endless road construction, being turned away from hotels with no vacancy and finding certain attractions closed for the season. In this scenario, you exerted effort right away, but without having a destination in mind, which can lead to wasted energy and frustration.

This illustrates an important principle when it comes to managing your time. It is crucial that you set a destination or goal along with how you will get there, prior to exerting the effort required to reach it.

While there is room for spontaneity in life, setting clear goals for yourself creates your own personal “roadmap.” Pursuing them gives you a sense of purpose and vision, instead of the ambiguous anxiety of wanting to do something, but not knowing exactly what or how to do it.

Apply this lesson to the scenario of finding the envelope full of money. Instead of immediately hitting the road, this time you go into your house, pull out an iPad, and generate some ideas. These could include where you would like to go (perhaps somewhere tropical, natural or historical), where you would like to stay (a hotel, motel, golf resort, cottage or tent), which route to take (highways, back roads, railroads or a plane), whether your vehicle needs work (an oil change, air in tires or a new transmission), and so on.

Having a goal or objective directs your actions. Everything you do becomes aimed at reaching your destination. By constantly working toward your objective, you spend your time most effectively.

Types of Goals

Understand that there are three types of goals: short-term, medium-term and long-term.

Short-term goals could be things you want to accomplish during a particular day or week. These can include walking the dog, emailing your uncle or buying a new tie. Medium-term goals are projects spanning multiple weeks or a month, such as planting a garden, watching a documentary series about the Civil War or painting your basement. Long-term goals cover greater periods of time, such as graduating from high school, learning to play the flute or reading the Bible in its entirety.

Take a few minutes to think about the goals in your life, and which of these three categories each one falls into. For instance, think of all the things you want to accomplish today, a few months from now, and several years from now.

Perhaps you have never considered your life in terms of goals. But this does not mean you do not have any. Everyone has goals even if they do not put them down on paper or focus on them frequently. For instance, if you plan to finish reading this article, that is a goal. If you plan to complete your weekly chores, that is a goal. If you want to save enough money to buy a sweater or pair of pants that you like, that is a goal.

In addition, saving second tithe for the Feast of Tabernacles, graduating from high school, getting a driver’s license and going to college or trade school are all goals.

You are most likely to accomplish goals that are recorded—whether using hardcopy pen and paper or an app such as OneNote or Trello. Be sure to review them periodically.

Writing down the goal, ideally with a timeframe, will help you stay focused and remember what you are trying to accomplish. When you think of a new goal, simply add it to the document. You can have fun by sharing some of them with your parents, siblings and friends, who can provide encouragement to help you stick to them.

While maintaining a detailed master list of overall goals is valuable, daily goals can be recorded on a simple to-do list. It can be as basic as jotting down bullet points on one side of an index card or a piece of paper. Whether you are writing down responsibilities such as mowing the lawn or something fun such as going swimming at a lake, writing things down and crossing them off as you achieve them will help you stay organized and give you a greater sense of accomplishment.

Science backs up the importance of recording your goals. One study found that people are 42 percent more likely to achieve their hopes and dreams simply by putting them down on paper.

Think back to the roadmap principle. View writing a to-do list as an important daily meeting with yourself to plan how you will spend the precious 24 hours you have.

Taking time to set short-, medium- and long-term goals will allow you to get a lot accomplished because you will be thinking and planning instead of just doing. The adage, “an ounce of prevention [or planning] is worth a pound of cure [fixing what is broken],” applies here.

The Melt Factor

To illustrate another important lesson in time management, picture yourself seated at a picnic table on a 90-degree day. Before you are 12 ice cream cones. In each is a scoop of ice cream of a different flavor—butter pecan, pistachio, fudge ripple, and strawberry shortcake, among others.

The ice cream will not last in the sweltering heat! You must decide which flavors to eat in the few minutes left before the table becomes covered in gooey sludge!

Just as you cannot eat 12 ice cream cones before they melt, you cannot tackle every pursuit you can imagine in a single 24-hour period. You must decide which are most important given the time you have to accomplish them. You may want to eat strawberry shortcake first since it is your favorite or butter pecan because you have never had it before. Pistachio may be at the bottom of your list because you do not like nuts.

Deciding what order to eat the ice cream, or do any task for that matter, is called setting priorities. Merriam-Webster defines a priority as “something given or meriting attention before competing alternatives.” In other words, completing tasks in order of importance.

Go back to your master list of goals. Though you would like to accomplish them all as soon as possible, there are only a finite number of minutes available each day.

Similar to the way you had to choose which scoops of ice cream to eat first, certain goals are more important, more time-sensitive and in some cases more fun than others. This should help you decide the order to accomplish them.

An effective way to prioritize your list is to assign each a number value from 1 (not very important) to 10 (very important), or to list them in order of importance. This is especially helpful for your daily to-do list and short-term goals. This will make it easier to decide what to tackle when.

Many like to try and accomplish the most difficult tasks first, which makes it easier as you go down your list. Others prefer to start with something easy and build momentum toward completing more difficult tasks. Whatever your approach, know that setting priorities will help ensure you do the things you have to do—and will make you better able to do what you want to do.

Habits and Routines

There is a category of things you do that are so routine that there is no need to write them down, such as brushing your teeth, making your bed or combing your hair. Yet these habitual everyday tasks take up bits of precious time and therefore cannot be overlooked.

First, recognize that everyone has a daily routine. Even if not by conscious choice, anything you do consistently is a habit—good or bad. Multiple habits set to an order and time sequence comprise a routine.

Analyze your life for where habits exist. Do your best to nurture the good and productive ones, and eliminate the bad and unproductive ones.

Return to the concept of setting priorities. What does your morning routine reveal about your character and what is most important to you? Do you consistently devote time to prayer, Bible study and meditation? Or do you allow yourself to become distracted by physical pursuits, assuming you will focus on spiritual matters sometime later?

A pitfall of having big blocks of time under your control, such as during summer vacation, is the tendency to jump from the structure and order of a schoolyear routine into loafing around and having no productive routine at all.

While it is fine to enjoy leisure, strive to avoid extremes like sleeping in until noon or watching several hours of television before even eating breakfast. Challenge yourself to come up with a stimulating summer routine in which you get up and get ready in time to make the most of each day. The habit of motivating yourself to accomplish things will make it much easier once you are back in school and even beyond as a working adult.

It is also helpful to have a special morning routine for the Sabbath. While the seventh day of the week is not a time for aggressively pursuing goals, it is beneficial to have a basic structure for this day that allows you sufficient time to communicate with God. Just because the Sabbath is a day of rest does not mean you literally lie in bed until it is time to attend Sabbath services! Use the additional time for helpful pursuits such as exploring nature, catching up on news or reading an article from one of the Church’s magazines.

Additionally, consider ways to add efficiency to things you do repeatedly. For example, because you have less time in the morning during the school year, consider organizing your clothes and books the night before so that you have one less thing to do in the morning. Another tip is to put items back where they belong as soon as you are done using them so you do not have to waste time looking for them the next time you need them.

Also, focus on one job at a time and strive to finish it before moving on to another. Some people start one activity and then quit in the middle to do something else. This is a huge time waster and a letdown because it means you do not experience the satisfaction of fully completing a task.

Training Tool for the Future

As wonderful as summer is, it always ends and you must go back in school. This is often accompanied by thoughts such as, All my freedom is gone. Now I am back in prison where they control all my time.

But the reality is much brighter! Even during the school year, you possess much more control over your time than you may realize. With this in mind, you can take care of your responsibilities and still have time for fun.

Even though the demands of classes and homework is great, and your parents control large portions of your day, you do still have quite a bit of time under your control. In fact, learning how to fit in your own goals and projects around other responsibilities forges your time-management skills. For some, adulthood becomes a crash course in time management because they never truly learned how to properly use their time when they were young.

Start managing your time now—and you will be ready.

Summer is a great time to fortify your time-management skills and take them beyond. Learning how to organize a schedule and accomplish important tasks prepares you to take on greater responsibility in the future. Before long, your present responsibilities—homework, chores, keeping your room clean—will give way to matters requiring much greater judgment—baptism, employment, secondary education, marriage, starting a family, renting or buying a home, and much more. They will be much easier to handle, however, if you are in the habit of taking control of your life and the time you have been given.

How you spend time, your most precious resource, will have a dramatic impact on your future. Take full advantage of it!