Breaking Busy

What to Add In

When I made the decision to see where I spent my time, I discovered how many distractions I let clutter up my day. But even more significantly, I discovered what I wasn’t making time for.

As my friend Christine often says to me, “You don’t burn out doing the right things. You burn out because of what you don’t do.” When can say no to nonessentials in order to do lost of great things in our lives. We can work all day and all night doing what God calls us to do. But without adding in time to connect with him and others regularly, we will burn out even on good activities. 

1. Add in time to stay connected to God through prayer and Scripture

One of the most beautiful reminders I have the importance of spending intentional time with God is found in Matthew 14. John the Baptist has just been beheaded, and Jesus wants to be alone, so he retires to a private place to grieve. But the crowds hear that he is there and follow him. He has compassion on them and heals the sick among them. Then he performs the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. And Scripture tells us this: “Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray…alone.”

Once again we see Jesus leave the crowd, with work still to be done, to take care of what is important. He knows he needs to connect to his Father, to pour out his heart to him, to rest in the comfort of his arms as he grieves the loss of John the Baptist. He doesn’t rush around to fix everything for everyone. He could have—he is God, after all. But he is also a human being who needs to spend time alone with God. 

We too must add into our lives what is important to the well-being of our souls.

I used to rush through my day and spend little “Help me, Jesus” prayers during my crazy day. Not only was I busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking content, I never felt any peace at all.

I’m a night owl, so I decided that I would pray at night. Guess what happened? Did I pray late at night? Nope. I never did. I played on my phone, texted with my friends, and read…but prayer? Nope. Not at night. That was when I could get a lot done, after all!

I knew I had to learn to become a morning person and get up to pray and have quiet time before the kids woke up and the hurricane of morning activity in the household started. So I began to wake up earlier every day to pray and read my Bible. 

It still hurts when my alarm goes off so early, and I need two cups of coffee to get going, but when I stay connected to God and prioritize that time, I am more likely to spend the rest of my day focused on the important instead of the urgent. There’s no right or wrong way to spend time alone with God each day. I remember in the early days of my faith, I heard that I should spend twenty minutes a day having a “quiet time” with the Lord. But later in life I met a woman who told me she never used the world “quiet time” to describe the time she spent connecting with god each day. Instead she calls it “unhurried time with the Lord.” I love the picture that paints. It’s not rushed, it’s intentional, it’s purposeful, and it’s meaningful. Exactly what staying connected to God through prayer and scripture should be like. 

2. Add in time to connect with others

We have to be intentional about connecting with others, including our spouse, our children, and our friends. It’s easy to allow our work, even our work for the Lord, to keep us from purposefully connecting with those we love. 

Throughout the Gospels, we see that Jesus spent time with those he loved. He spent weeks on end traveling with his disciples. Sure, they did ministry together. They even performed miracles together. But Jesus also went to weddings. He visited his mother and brothers. He hung out with his great friend Lazarus and Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha. (Of course, he had to raise him from the dead first…) Jesus was a man who not only understood the importance of spending time with those he loved, he modeled it throughout his time on earth.

3. Add in time to take care of yourself

Breaking busy also means adding in space, time, and energy to take care of yourself. Just as you would make an appointment to go to the doctor, make appointments during the weeks to exercise, to read that book you have been putting off, to take a bubble bath, or even just to lie on your bed and stare a the ceiling.

You have permission to take care of you because the world needs what only what you can bring to it. Your colleagues, your family, they need you to be who were created to be, and you were not created to be overstressed and overbusy.

Are you doing things today that are urgent? Or important? When we put every choice through that filter, we are able to prioritize how to spend our time instead of being busy with no direction.

Action Steps

1. Try doing a time diary experiment for a week. Download a printable Breaking Busy diary at AlliWorthington.com/BreakingBusy.

2. What activities drain you and prevent you from reaching your life goals? Make a stop-doing list and learn to say now.

3. What activities are important to you? Add them to your calendar.

4. Schedule in one hour next week to do something to take care of yourself. It can be reading a book, getting your hair done, getting a massage, whatever you have been putting off. Dr. Alli’s orders!

Which of these 4 action steps are you going to take this week?