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December 1 - December 16, 2022
Enemy #3: Quick Highs
Enemy #4: Savior Complex
Enemy #5: Makeshift Omnipresence
Life’s too short to spend time on things that deserve only half our attention.
If Jesus couldn’t be in two places at the same time, neither can we.
Like Jesus, we must learn to “choose our absence,”
“The more we allow ourselves to be distracted, the more diminished our capacity for absorbed attention becomes over time. Much like an unused muscle, our attention grows weaker and shorter with disuse.”
Focus is like a muscle of the mind: work it out and depth will develop; ignore it and it will atrophy. In other words, when it comes to the skill of focusing your attention, you can choose to use it or lose it.
you have more control than you think over when you respond to incoming messages.
One study found that a quarter of people feel obligated to answer messages immediately.
In the heat of war, Napoleon waited three weeks before opening any of his mail. When he finally did crack open his letters, he would laugh at how many seemingly urgent, important things had miraculously resolved themselves.
Although many things look urgent, almost nothing
Depth requires two ingredients: focus and time.
Just as we need time to go deep in our sleep, we need long stretches of uninterrupted time to go deep in our work.
How much time should you schedule? Ninety minutes seems to be the sweet spot, so that’s a great goal.
Most scientists believe this cap is four hours in a twenty-four-hour time period.
PRACTICE 4: CREATE SPACE FOR THE SHALLOWS AND SERENDIPITY
“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day.”
EMBRACE PRODUCTIVE REST To redeem our time in the model of our Redeemer, we must embrace the God-designed rhythms of rest that are counterintuitively productive for our goals and our souls.
God created us to operate not as if we’re in a sprint or a marathon but as if we’re doing a workout.
Human beings are not designed to run like computers—at high speeds, continuously, for long periods of time…. We’re designed to pulse. (emphasis added)6
“To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment,”
failure to get adequate sleep is worse for your performance than “an equivalent absence of food or exercise” or showing up to work drunk.12
the less time you sleep, the less time you have to do good works for the glory of God and the good of others.
“When you are awake you learn new things, but when you are asleep you refine them.”
“If you rest one day out of seven you will get to California 20 days sooner than others who don’t”
that rest is productive as we strive toward our goals.
rest is not just productive for our goals; it is also productive for our souls.
Rest is a way of reminding ourselves that no matter how productive we are, no matter how many good works we accomplish, we are God’s beloved children, in whom he is well pleased.
PRINCIPLE #6 EMBRACE PRODUCTIVE REST To redeem our time in the model of our Redeemer, we must embrace the God-designed rhythms of rest that are counterintuitively productive for our goals and our souls.
if you work with your mind, rest with your hands; if you work with your hands, rest with your mind.
He once said that an ideal day would consist of “200 bricks and 2,000 words.”
man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it, just in the same way he can wear out the elbows of his coat….The tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened not merely by rest, but by using other parts.
It’s a holy, sacred day to focus on the fact that Jesus is our ultimate Sabbath.
Chapter 7 ELIMINATE ALL HURRY To redeem our time in the model of our Redeemer, we must embrace productive busyness while ruthlessly eliminating hurry from our lives.
Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives.
“hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
To live out this principle, we need to answer this question: What is causing all our hurry in the first place?
Could Jesus have squeezed in a little table flipping before he retired for the night? Sure, but he chose not to. He had counted the cost and knew that adding anything else to his already busy day would have tipped the scales from busy to hurry.
If we are to redeem our time, we would be wise to budget accordingly. We need to develop the habit of ensuring that every minute has a name before God gives us a fresh supply each morning.
If you think about it, time management might be more accurately described as energy management.
Routines are single decisions that eliminate a thousand future decisions and thus preserve your energy.
Time Budget: a plan for how you will spend your time in a given day
“Self-control is the ability to do the important thing rather than the urgent thing.”
Which problem, once solved, is going to make most of my other problems easier to solve or disappear entirely?
“The way I see it, books are my way of spending five hours with anybody, anywhere, anytime….There is tremendous value in meeting with someone one on one, but my time is multiplied only by a factor of one. With books, my time is multiplied by the total number of readers.”
an opportunity isn’t aligned with your goals, it’s probably not a good use of your time.
“opportunities are like buses—there’s always another one coming!”
“There are a thousand no’s for every yes.”
The law of time and trade-offs requires that we always say no to something.
