Today I want to talk to you about the compounding effect of focused time. Now, Albert Einstein was quoted as saying that compounding interest is the most powerful force in the universe. If you’ve got a mortgage payment or a car payment, you are probably thinking the same thing.
The same is true of time. When we think about the way we spend our time, we often get focused on all the tasks at hand, especially in the local church. Sunday is always coming, so when we think about carving out specific time for specific things we get ourselves in trouble.
One of the biggest things that I hear from leaders is, “I don’t have time for personal development. It’s not in my job description.” I would say to go to your boss and ask for one of these blocks of time to be added to your job description. Approach it like this. Say, “Would it be unreasonable for me to spend 10 percent of my time on personal development?”
Now secretly you know what this means. You actually have 24 days per year to spend on your personal development or two days a month. What that really breaks down to weekly is you could spend a morning or afternoon focused on personal development, whether that is reading a book, taking a class, or whatever it is, you’ve got that time. If it was 5 percent, you would have 12 days per year and one day a month. Or at 2.5 percent, 6 days a year and half a day a month. It’s all a matter of time.
Now the beauty of this tool is that it works with any task, it works with any part of your job description. You need to break down your work into manageable blocks of time and this is a great tool to do that.
Now that you have this framework, what are you going to do about it?
