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New Years

People often ask me where I get my links and stories I share in sermons or on Facebook. One of my sources is an app called Pocket. Pocket is a way for people to quickly store articles they read. Pocket then sees what interests people and then develops a feed of what people are reading. About a week after New Years Day a flood of articles was in the stream was time management, reaching your goals, fulfilling your dreams, etc.

Why do all of these articles appear around New Years?

The publishers of course already know what the demand is at what time of year so towards the end of the year they look for people to write these articles. Why does everyone, at something as arbitrary as a change in a number, suddenly start to take stock of their lives and make resolutions to improve their performance in life?

We live in a culture that has perfected the art of keeping us pre-occupied and distracted with a thousand things around us. We try to keep ourselves in a coma of distraction. It is when the calendar changes that large number at the end that we begin to pull out our dreams, our expectations and redouble our efforts to find ways to acheive what we imagine we are capable of or entitled to.

The focus then turns to management. How can we plan better, be more intentional, be more proactive, find the technique in our life to grab a hold of ourselves to achieve what we imagine is beautiful, or will fullfill or make us feel alive or look successful.

In Defense of Management 

Before I go any further I should the attack on management I’m about to wage. Management is essentially stewardship. We all are given a limited amount of time, energy, resources, opportunities and we are responsible for what we do with them. Jesus has a number of parables that focus us on this and declare that in the end God will call upon us to give an account for what we have done with what we have been given.

One of the chief casualties of this coma of distraction is in fact our ability to be good stewards. We are too distracted by the daily to understand that we are frittering away important things. Our ability to estimate what is important and what is secondary is hampered by the tyranny of the urgent.

Because of this many of the articles exhorting us and helping us manage our lives better can in fact do us a world of good. the yearly tick of the calendar does us a favor.

Management in the Age of Decay  Continue reading →