If you were on an ark full of animals, similar to Noah’s, and the boat began to sink, would you first throw overboard the spiders, ants, and grasshoppers or would you start with the elephants?
The elephants of course, because they carry the most weight. You could throw thousands of insects overboard and not come near the weight of a single elephant. That illustrates an important principle for managing time.
We often focus our attempts to save time on little bugs like buying gadgets which supposedly make some seldom performed job easier, when it’s actually the elephants that are sinking our ship. Mammoth blocks of time like unfulfilling work or jumbo time wasters like frivolous television consume large chunks of our most valuable resource and hinder us from true effectiveness as Christians.
Take a moment right now to identify the big items in your schedule- your elephants. Then, determine which ones you need to keep feeding and which ones need to go overboard in order for you to redeem the time.
Rick Grubbs is best known as the host of “Redeeming the Time,” a one-minute radio program featured on hundreds of radio outlets around the world. He has spoken thousands of times on Biblical time management in all 50 states and 26 other countries. He is the author of the book “Morning Momentum: God’s plan for launching an unstoppable day”. He and his wife Carrie live in Salisbury NC with several of their 12 children.
