Out of Schedule out of Mind

I said it recently in a meeting I was having at the church, and since then it has almost become a mantra with me. What I said was, "If something does not make it into our weekly schedule, then it will not make it into our weekly planning." That may seem simple enough, but when applied it becomes a rather profound truth. The fact is that there are only so many hours during a given week. What I choose to fill those hour with will be what my life becomes filled with in the future. We all know this at some level, but we don't live like it because we still do one of two things that we otherwise would not:

1. We fill our time with things we don't really care about.
2. We don't plan out our time and just let it fill itself.

As a result I started a project (mostly for myself, but I encouraged the rest of the staff to join me) in which we are scheduling out our weeks in 30-minute increments. The idea is similar to the Dave Ramsey "Zero-Budget". Every time slot has to be dedicated to something, even if that something is "Free Time". Then, just like a real budget if things come up that require me to miss a scheduled event, I have to find somewhere else in the Schedule (my time budget) for it to fit.

I really think this is the step that keeps most people from realizing their dreams. If people actually stop long enough to let God speak a dream into their hearts, they rarely continue on to re-schedule their lives to make time for that dream to come to pass. If you feel God calling you to a new career that requires more education, and yet you don't make time for school... how will you ever realize the dream? If you want to be a better parent, but you don't schedule more time with your kids, how will you ever improve? Simple in theory, difficult in practice. The main thing that separates pure dreamers from dream-doers is follow through. And, follow through only happens when I give it time to happen.