What Does Your Day Planner Say About You?

Let me first say that I don’t use a day planner, nor do I keep a calendar, or plug in events into my cell phone. I tried to keep up with one for a while, but this is how it worked. I would go to the store at the beginning of the year and buy about 50 bucks worth of new inserts for my day planner. I would spend a couple of days trying to organize it and putting important information in it and updating the calendar to reflect important meetings coming up. Then I would carry it around and for weeks not update it. Weeks would turn into a month and so on. The day planner eventually became a glorified pen/pencil holder because that was all I would actually use it for because I had quit writing stuff into the calendar. Then I would misplace my pen or pencil out of it and I would just have this day planner taking up space that was used for nothing. Same thing would happen with my big desk calendars for school. Now I know people that it would drive them insane if they didn’t have their day planner whether it be a paper or a digital one. People ask me “how do you keep up with everything? How do you remember what’s coming up?” The answer is simple. I rely on the person who does keep a planner to remind me. Now I admit that this isn’t a perfect system and sometimes it has failed. However so far there have been no serious repercussions for forgetting so I haven’t changed my behavior.

Now I will get to the point of this post. I just finished a book titled A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. The final chapter of the book is on finding meaning in your life and work and it offered up a time management tool for the reader to check ourselves.

Step 1: Make a short list of the most important things in our lives
Step 2: Pull out your Day Planner/Calendar (or if like me you will have to use memory)
Step 3: Use your calendar and write out how many hours you spent investing into the most important items on your list.
Step 4: Ask yourself if the amount of time you invested into your most important list reflects that they are some of the most important things to you. If not make changes so that the time does reflect that.

So if I use this and say that my top 3 things are
1. My Faith
2. My Family
3. Serving Others

Does the time I spent last week or month reflect that? I’ll be honest. Some areas I think it reflects it, but other areas of priority don’t seem to be a priority at all. Check yourself and if you need to pray about it and make changes.