Category: General

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to what my time is worth. I would guess that the majority of people work something like a 40 hour work week. How much of that time is actually productive? How much of it is spent “putting in your time”? How much work are you getting done compared to others in the same position?

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is because I work in the IT field. In almost every IT position, tracking your time is involved. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is usually for billing your clients. The other is for tracking how much time has been spent on a project to determine if the estimates were correct.

If you’re paid for your time, you are making the assumption that your time is as valuable as other people being paid the same amount per hour. For example, lets say you’ve got a task and it takes most people 8 hours to complete it. However, you’re good at what you do and you can complete it in 4 hours. You can do the task twice in the same amount of time that it takes most people to do it in 8 hours. You’re essentially getting paid half what the other person is getting paid to do the same task. Another way to look at it is that you’re doing the twice the work as someone else but getting paid the same amount.

When it comes to keeping track of your time for a project, the same type of problem comes up. If you can get more of the project done in the same amount of time as someone else, then when you both record 8 hours towards the project, technically more work was completed by you than the other person. Eight hours is not a good indication of the amount of work involved. You could have a team of 3 highly effective people or 6 standard people. When the project is completed, the standard people will record more time towards the project than the highly effective people.

Why does any of this really matter? Well, it’s frustrating for one thing. It sure would be nice to leave after completing the standard amount of work that most people complete. You could even work a little extra to go above and beyond. However, sitting there the full day to collect a paycheck can be exhausting when you’ve got your work done.

Another big reason is because being paid for your time is what can keep you from being super successful. As author Dan Miller wrote, “Hourly pay will keep you poor“. If you’re good at what you do and you can get people to pay you by the project or task, you can significantly increase your income. Even if you decide to keep your day job, you could potentially do your “efficient” work on the side and make a ton of extra cash.

To put it simply, being paid for what you do and not how long it takes you to do it opens doors to time freedom and more money! Think about it.

You may be struggling as I have been with different things in my life, but I want you to remember that the future is bright. Your life is made up of several different components at one time. Even though your job may not be what you want it to be and it could be incredibly depressing, you have other areas of your life that may be great. There is usually something else that you can cling onto to get you through the tough times.

I usually look at my life as seven different spokes of a wheel.

• Financial
• Spiritual
• Career
• Social
• Physical
• Family
• Personal Development

Usually if one area is lacking, you might have a bumpy ride, but you can usually get through it. It’s the time of the year to set goals in each of these areas to make your 2014 better than your 2013.

So, for our LifeGroup, we had to write what we want our story to be in the future. Below is mine.

I want to raise Christ following kids that rely on God, believe anything is possible and don’t believe the lies of this world. I want to be someone they want to be around when we’re all older.

I want to do work that is productive, meaningful and profitable. I want my work to be an inspiration to others.

I want my marriage to be envied by others and to set the bar incredibly high for those that my daughters date.

I want to feel that in all things I’m growing closer to God and relying on him to provide. I want to recognize that I exist because he allows me to. As long as I’m on this world, he has something for me to do.

I want to honor god with my finances but not let others know about it.

I want to be someone who builds others up and after they’ve been around me, they feel better about themselves.

I wan to a live a life where my I wants are I ams.

I’m sure that I went to church when I was younger, but I honestly only remember going after my mom and step-dad were married. We lived out in the country and went to a church that was on a major road, but didn’t have very many people living in a close radius. The church seemed to draw quite a few people with anything between 200-350 in attendance while I was there. We went almost every Sunday, but never really participated in any of the extra services until I was maybe in 5th or 6th grade. That’s when we started going to the Wednesday evening services where we were split up by age group. We may have started going to Sunday School around this time as well.

Why is this important? Because this is when I really started to develop friendships with people who were outside of my class at school. Most of the students that attended the church also attended the same school, but some of them were in different grades, which widened the number of people I knew by quite a bit. Being an only child in a small school doesn’t exactly make you well known. If you’ve got older brothers and sisters, you’re usually set because all of their friends know who you are as well.

As I attended church and became more involved with the people there, I along with others would invite more of our friends to come. Believe it or not, they actually came and many of them got quite involved with the youth group. Sometimes it was because they were “interested” in someone in the group, or they were just looking for something fun to do. Either way, it didn’t hurt.

One of the things that would usually be a large draw were the youth retreats. We would go away for a weekend someplace (of varying distances) and do the usual youth group stuff like play games, bible study, listen to a speaker, sing, and generally hang out. I’ll never forget one of them. I have no idea what brought the course of events to where they had come, but I ended up spending quite a bit of time with one of my friends. I didn’t know her that well in comparison to other friends in my life, but we ended up having some incredibly deep discussions that weekend about Christ. I honestly don’t even know where some of the words I may have said came from.

Anyhow, Sunday rolled around and everyone went home for a while. The group was supposed to get back together for a concert Sunday evening, but unfortunately, I was so exhausted that I slept through it even though people were pounding on my door when they came to pick me up. I was told later that it was that evening my friend became a Christian. I wish I had been there, but for whatever minor part I may have played in it, I’m glad that God used me how he did.

This opened my eyes to another purpose that God had for my life. I was supposed to care about the future of others, and not necessarily their mortal future, but their eternal one. I’ve come to realize now, that I alone can’t lead someone to Jesus, but instead I play the part God puts me in. I may not even realize that I’m playing the part at the time until hours, days, or years later, but I should always be aware that no matter where I am, I could be used by God at any moment.

Just as most of us do, I went to school. I attended a small school, with about 50 people in each class. The good thing about this is that everyone knew each other, and the bad thing was that everyone knew each other.

For the most part, I enjoyed school, mainly because I was good at it. I did well in every class and eventually graduated as high school valedictorian. The downside to doing well for so long, is that you eventually fear that you will fail, or get a B (which is the same thing as failing).

In fifth grade, I forgot to turn in a homework assignment for one of the classes. Because of this, I got a zero on the assignment. That pulled my grade down to a B. This of course was unacceptable. Because I knew how to work the system, I talked to another teacher. Most of our teachers would drop the lowest grade each semester in case we were having a “bad day”. Somehow I was able to convince the one teacher to talk to the other teacher and my zero was dropped, and I was able to keep my streak of straight A’s alive.

School always came relatively easy for me. I didn’t need to study as much as other people did. I don’t think that I was really a teachers’ pet, but doing well in school gave you certain “privileges”. I could walk the hallway without being questioned, and go to my locker during class without getting the fifth degree. Doing well established a certain level of trust, even if it wasn’t earned.

So what does any of this have to do with life purpose? Doing well in school for me fulfilled my purpose for a time. It was a worldly purpose, one I placed on myself. No one pressured me to do well in school. I completely placed that burden on myself. I do believe that God gave me the ability to learn easily, but that has also led to my restlessness at this age when I’m not being challenged in life.

See. I brought it all together eventually.