"Would you like a quick way to get some focus to your day? Try listing 5 things you want to do before you die.
This is a powerful technique for revealing what things you should be working on today. We all have things we’d like to accomplish. But we aren’t making any meaningful progress toward them. That’s often because we forget about them in the busyness of daily activity. It’s the continual struggle between the urgent and the important.
The key to this activity is to do it quickly and do it now. Don’t let yourself spend more than 10 minutes creating the list. If you have in mind anything longer you’ll put it off and probably never do it. But you can surely spare 10 minutes. If you can’t do it right now, at least identify a time between now and bedtime, when you can do it.
Listing 5 things you want to do before you die may your key to getting God’s best today and redeeming the time.
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"Here is a time saving tip that will apply to every one who takes a bath or shower. If that includes you, and I hope it does, consider this.
Most people step out of the shower and dry off using a single towel. The problem with that is the towel generally reaches a saturation point where it looses some of it’s effectiveness before you get completely finished drying yourself. That means you spend extra time trying to finish drying with a wet towel. You can save time by getting two towels ready before you shower so you can use one for heavy drying and a second for finishing the job.
If this little technique saves you just 30 seconds per day, in the next 10 years you could spend 30 less hours drying off.
Jesus told us to be faithful in little things as well as big things. Continually looking for ways to do just that, is an important part of redeeming the time.
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"Would you like some direction for how to use your time today? Try naming one eternally significant activity you would like to do in the future and list why you want to do it.
This can be a very powerful exercise because it will often reveal something God has placed in your heart to do, but which still has not come to pass. When I asked myself this question, the first thing that came to my mind was a desire to speak at conferences for Christian students attending secular universities.
Why? Because I became a Christian as a college student when some young men from the campus Christian groups witnessed to me. Those conferences then became a big part of my early discipleship. I've always thought I'd like to speak for one of them, but never done it.
Identifying an eternally significant activity you desire to accomplish and stating why you want to do it might give direction to your day. If so, go for it, and you’ll redeem the time.
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"A few years ago, I wrote a little booklet called “Learn How to Wake Up and Get Up!” where I talked about the dangers of oversleeping and how to know just how much sleep God wants you to have. I included some practical tips on getting yourself out of bed even when you don’t feel like it.
I’m currently updating that booklet and including some novel ideas like one I just heard about of a man who was having trouble with repeatedly hitting the snooze each morning, until he attached a mouse trap to the snooze button and set it before going to bed each night. When I read that I thought “Wow there’s an extreme measure that might just work!”
Sometimes we fail to get up on time because we don’t go to extremes. When you need extra time in the morning, don’t try getting up at 6 or 6:30. Set your alarm for 3:30 or 4:00. Just the sheer jolt of waking up at that hour can get you started redeeming the time.
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