Catholic Husband

It’s said that the worst boss that you’ll ever work for is yourself. At one time or another, you may take on a side job in addition to the work at your main employer. When you take on additional work, there’s little opportunity for you to take on additional hours in the day. Instead, hours have to be reallocated from activities such as watching TV, surfing the Internet, or sleep. At the same time, a fast paced life is kind of fun. The American Dream compels us to get out of bed at 5am and stay up late into the night toiling so that we can have it all.

We all wish we could spend hours every day with our family. In fact, family time is perhaps the single highest priority that we have in our daily schedules. No matter how hard we have to work or how long our to-do list is, we yearn to have downtime to play in the yard with our kids or at the very least to share a meal together. There’s no doubt that our schedules are pushed to the limit in an attempt to wring out every last moment of productivity. When you do find yourself in a place where you need more time during the day, cut television and internet first, then choose wisely.

Full schedules demand precise scheduling and sincere sacrifice. Sleep can only be trimmed so far before it starts working against you, but when your schedule demands more time, you can be certain that your days of sleeping in are over. That’s why it’s so important for us to be time management surgeons. We need to cut the right things, we need to trim other things back, and we need to act with deadly precision. There are some activities that can be cut out entirely, but there are others that will need to be aggressively curtailed. Take, for example, the time you spend reading daily. Reading is a very good thing and it helps you grow as a person. While reading the right books may be wildly stimulating, if you need more time, you might have to place limits on your reading, perhaps cutting back to 30 minutes a day. An hour or two a day of reading might get you further, faster, but when your schedule is tight, those extra minutes are a luxury that can be traded in for the sake of family time.

When it comes to cutting critical activities, it can be helpful to create a prioritized list. Prayer, work, play, and relaxation are all a part of a healthy lifestyle, but when cuts have to be made, everything is on the table. By prioritizing the importance of each activity in your daily life, you can save the most important while sacrificing the least important. In this way, you maintain the integrity of those things that are most essential to your routine. As always, when trying new systems and time management ideas, it’s best to experiment for a few days and see how things work out. You can always add things back in or make further cuts based on your experience.

Now, let’s briefly put these ideas into action. My web design business has really been taking off and I’ve needed to find more time during the day to work so that I can take on more clients and grow my business. I’ve determined that my maximum number of work hours during the day is around 7 hours. That gives me time in the evening to spend with Alison, time during the day to care for Benedict, and time in the morning for prayer, reading, and exercise. From my leisure time, I’ve had to cut reading the newspaper as it took almost two hours a day for me to get through it. I could have simply pushed newspaper reading into the evening, but that would take away from time with Alison, so the cut had to be made. With those 7 hours for work, I’ve allocated five hours to client web design work and two hours to Catholic Husband and other activities. Of those two hours, one is dedicated to the blog, so that leaves me with 60 short minutes a day to work on other projects, like books and iOS app development.

Would I like to read the newspaper daily? Absolutely. Would I prefer to release new products throughout the year? Definitely. Yet, I’ve come to the conclusion that there simply isn’t enough time. So, I focus on the activities that will generate the most revenue for the business and income for my family. At the same time, I made cuts in order to preserve my family time, and I’ve maintained focus on a project that I really love, the blog.

Time management is truly a skill that we must learn and master, and it demands that we make difficult cuts. Yet, to save the things that we love, we must sacrifice. I encourage you to go through a similar process and ensure that you’re doing the things that you want and cutting what needs to be cut.

Online news is both a blessing and a curse. You can get up-to-the minute updates, but oftentimes the initial reporting is wrong. You can read stories from across the country and around the world, yet the stories are usually filtered depending on the bias of a particular news organization. Perhaps the worst part about online news sources is that the vast, vast majority of content is simply republished content from another source.

A few weeks ago, there was an airplane accident in South Carolina in which an Air Force F-16 had a mid-air collision with a Cessna. I read the article on one major network’s website and then went to the local affiliate to get more detailed information. The articles on both sites were the same, verbatim. I went to other major news sites and the exact same thing happened. Each source was hosting the content of this article which was written by a staff AP reporter. What a huge disappointment.

I’ve been subscribing to the Wall Street Journal for the past nine months and I must say, it’s completely changed my views on news. I subscribe for two reasons. First, the quality of the articles improves both my vocabulary and global scope. Instead of reducing language to something commonplace, they elevate the experience by using appropriate and correct words at somewhere around an advanced high school level. It’s refreshing to be reported to as an adult. The range of articles expands my worldview from just where I live to issues and events impacting communities everywhere. Second, I subscribe because they do actual reporting. Generally speaking, the Journal seems to have very high editorial standards and so you don’t find much, if any, conjecture in the articles. It’s nearly impossible to identify the reporter’s thoughts on the issue save in the opinion section. Even better, their reporting is proactive. Instead of waiting for the AP to write the article, they go out and find stories. These stories are ones that no one else is writing. In fact, on the bottom of the front page, every day, is some quirky human interest piece.

Our cultural demand for 24 hour news has put journalists in a very difficult position. It’s an untenable situation that causes them to feel pressured to report something, anything, both to fill time and to beat their competitors. That’s where the newspapers bring redemption. Readers expect updates once per day. That gives journalists time to do research, discover facts and, frankly, to provide content that’s truly compelling. Certainly there are times when I skip articles that were published in the morning because by evening, when I sit down to read the day’s paper, everything has changed. However, for the most part, once per day updates is just right.

Newspapers offer one more key benefit that online news hasn’t quite mastered: a menu of options. News websites are massive and often confusing. A newspaper, even a newspaper’s app, provides a structured, organized menu of articles for you to choose from. They’re grouped by section and organized with some degree of prioritization. It’s through this menu that you find stories that you might not otherwise see and because of that feature, you learn things that you otherwise may not learn. They’re able to do this because instead of filling up screen space with ads, pop-ups, and sleazy clickbait stories, they place other articles in the same category together.

I use my time each day reading the paper as an intellectual exercise in which I expand my mind and my horizons. In all of my years of productivity hacking, I can think of few other habits that have helped me grow faster and resulted in higher rates of satisfaction.

Far too many of us carry around burdens that we don’t have to endure. Mistakes from the past haunt our daily lives and direct our actions. The guilt remains because, although time has passed since the incident, it remains unresolved. In the spiritual life, we have the Sacrament of Confession. The Sacrament is a time to talk it out, and receive forgiveness for our past mistakes. In our interpersonal lives, we need to make amends. Don’t let your mistakes be enduring.

We’ve all made plenty of mistakes. Some are due to youthfulness, others to stupidity, and others to selfishness and pride. Regardless of the reason, they all point back to us. We’re the cause of the error and that means that it’s up to us to fix it.

The worst possible response to an error is often the one that’s driven by shame: to do nothing. While we may have the capacity, ability, and the contrition to make amends and move on, shame keeps us quiet. It’s just a little too painful, a little too raw for us to breach the topic again. That’s no way to live. We need to summon the courage within, draw from our strength of character, and confront the person. We need to stand up, admit our fault, and sincerely apologize.

You both deserve more. You both deserve the freedom to move on. You both deserve the peace of resolution. Charity demands it and, frankly, mercy is more satisfying than revenge. We tend to get into the worst fights with those whom we are closest with. That means that the ongoing acrimony is preventing both of you from enjoying your friendship. Be bold, be brave, and make amends.