This week I’m going to be writing several posts on having life a focus and time management. It’s going to be a really great week. Life focus and time management have become two major passions of mine.
After seeing the response, or lack-there-of to this weekend’s survey question on life visions I’m hoping that you guys will really get some good ideas and life hacks.
A life vision is really just an action plan. It’s just having a plan, or a goal for your life. What do you want to do? Who do you want to be? Next week, next month, next year, in 10 years, etc… You know the drill.
It’s important to know that without a plan we just meander around in life and not really get the things done that are important to us. We won’t spend our money how we want to, we won’t accomplish things we want to and we won’t end up where we want.
I remember this past January, when my wife and I looked over our spending for all of 2005 and we were like “that can’t be right, we had to have given away more money than that.” Since we didn’t have a clear plan for giving and tithing we actually didn’t give away what we ‘thought’ we were giving away. We have since made clear system for giving so that we are following through with our intentions to be givers.
If we don’t have a plan for our life, then maybe we’ll end up somewhat with our life in the spot that we had wanted but not to the fullness that the Lord had for us or that we had wanted. We may blame it on external circumstances, but it ultimately boils down to our own focus and ownership of our life.
Having a focus applies to all areas of our life. Spiritual, emotional, physical, mental, economical, relational, temporal, eternal, etc…
What are your thoughts on the importance of having a vision or a focus for your life? What are some areas that you’ve seen a change in as you’ve grown and brought more vision or focus to that part of your life?
Technorati Tags: Life Hacks, Time Management
John Baw said:
Hi and greetings from the Rock of Gibraltar! I normally read your blog via RSS and I am encouraged with this theme of life focus. For me this is increasingly becoming a major issue in my life (If only because I have the tendency to be SSSOOOOOO unfocused, un-prioritized, and procrastinating).
I have recently gone through Mike Bickle’s “The Power of a Focused Life” and have been extremely challenged by (especially) his testimony of the amount of time he spent in the word and in prayer etc. Since then I have drawn up a life focus plan, and started to schedule my time accordingly. Cannot say I’m getting an “A” for consistency but at least I am measuring my time, comparing this to the plan and I at least KNOW when I am off-plan and WHY.
I encourage you to continue posting aloing these lines - God knows I for one need it!
Bless you, John Baw (Gibraltar)
Posted on October 16, 2006 at 4:08 am
Shawn said:
John - Yeah, I’ve gotten quite a bit of teaching from Mike as well.
I will be posting several more posts on time management, and ‘life hacks’ and living a focused life. I’m going to talk about my calandar and how I spend my time too. It should be good.
Posted on October 16, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Anna said:
What is a “life hack”?
Posted on October 16, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Shawn said:
If you click on the Life Hack link, and scroll down you can read the category description. Am I organized or what?
Posted on October 16, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Yuri said:
So, we begin.
Well, I can honestly say that intentionality has been one of the reoccuring lessons that God has been teaching me. I see so clearly how powerful it is. It all comes down to harnessing our desires and finding practical expressions for them.
There are two sides on the path of life here–at least from what i’ve seen in my life. Fistly you can have desires and spend most of your time thinking about how awesome it would be to live them out … but never do anything about it. Secondly, you can get really excited about living a purposeful life and forget to explore your deep desires … then you end up setting up a schedule and organizing your life, but there is no enduring fire.
We need to dig deep into our hearts and ask the Lord to show us what we REALLY want. Then we need to sit down and pray for wisdom on how to get there. We need both. The first requires us to trust God in that He will put His desires into our heart.
At times there are veils we need to peel away to get to the truest desires. Sometimes the truest ones have been twisted by our lives and the enemy and we need the Holy Spirit to breathe life into them once again.
What I struggle with in the second one (the practical application) is wanting to get everything perfect right away. I want a perfect schedule, and I want to follow it to the t. When that doesn’t happen I get discouraged and give up. Keeping in mind that it is a process, we ‘work it out’ and we will go deeper and deeper and it will get clearer and clearer (Prov 4:18) has helped me to stay on track.
Anyway–yes I think it is very important that we seek God for a vision/purpose and then actually write it down and remind ourselves. I’ve found that to be very helpful in anyting i’ve applied it to.
Posted on October 16, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Shawn said:
holy moly, Yuri. You should have your own blog on this subject.
That’s really cool what you said about the personal struggle of vision/desire and time management. needing to have both sides of the coin. That is huge.
Posted on October 17, 2006 at 12:32 pm
168 HOURS TO A FOCUSED LIFE « Tales of a Struggling Salesman said:
[…] Why we need a Life Focus […]
Posted on July 9, 2007 at 10:42 am
Sean said:
I’m really encouraged by your blogs and appreciate the amount of effort that you put into it but I had a question. Does it ever seem that you pick too many visions? Or that everything just looks so good that you don’t really know what to choose? I feel like I’m in that place because I want so much but it seems that I’m not going after all I want because I want everything. Does that make sense?
Posted on February 6, 2008 at 4:12 pm