The Urgent vs. The Important...

Time management... I've never been very good at it, and the older I get... well... I'm not getting any better...

I remember reading about the urgent vs. the important in some class of mine. I also learned quite a bit about the non-urgent... and the unimportant... and the truth is, I just can't seem to get it balanced...

Seems that I often come to a point in life that feels a little bit like "the eleventh hour" (have written about this before), and then I get really stressed, because there are a trillion and one things bearing down on me... and they're all "urgent"... and I can't get any of them done in time... so, instead, I focus my energy on something completely non-urgent, and often unimportant, to boot...

Ah...

I waste so much time!

The other day I was thinking about this as I installed a new toilet seat in our upstairs bathroom. Our old toilet seat came with the house. It was squishy (which I totally do not prefer)... and it was cheap... and it was broken! Well, I bought a new toilet seat several months ago, and it has been sitting on the bathroom floor ever since. When I finally sat down to make the replacement, I was shocked to find that it took me less than five minutes... FIVE! We have been sliding around on a broken toilet seat for months now, with a brand new one sitting at our feet, and all I had to do was carve out five minutes to fix the problem! But I was too busy... I guess... but with what? It was five stinkin' minutes! As I threw the old toilet seat away, I said to myself, "why did I wait so long to do this?" And there's something deeper here to be learned...

There are so many things in life that I just keep putting off... Granted, they are far more important than replacing broken toilet seats, and they are far more time consuming, too... But that's the point. I need to focus on what's important, because I don't want to wait longer than I should and then find myself staring at the trash and wondering why I wasted all this time...

Reevaluating is tough. We all get 24 hours every day. That's it. But somehow I have to find a way to put my 24 to better use, because I'm sick of wasting time...

Lisa