Last week I annouced that I was going to start a blog series based off Kevin DeYoung's new book, Crazy Busy. In that post, I confessed that we are all often guilty of using phrases like, "life is just crazy busy for me right now...". My hope for the next few weeks is to walk through a few of the points that Kevin had to say in his book and offer some insight/tips in how to free up your "crazy busy" life. 

This week we will be taking a look at the typical day-in-day-out life and how we bring on our own busyness and how we create busyness for other people.[1] 

You Can't Do It All

"The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it and no marginal utlitiy curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and connot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever and will never come back. Time is therefore, always in exceedingly short supply." - Peter Drucker [2]

There is no way of adding hours, minutes, or seconds to our day. The time that the Lord has alloted for each day was how He willed our days. We can buy more and more things or work harder and harder to make more money for these things, but we can never acquire more time. 

So what is our loop hole around not having enough time? Multi-tasking. Kevin, through his research, concludes that we are able to multi-task with the mindless things like eating potato chips while watching tv. Yet we cannot hold a conversation with someone while drafting a email to our boss. He concludes that we are not "multi-tasking" rather we are "switch-tasking"; switching back anf forth between different tasks.

In this chapter, Kevin talked a lot about priorities. We need to be better with setting our boundries. We look at Jesus in his earthly ministry and how he was able to set priorities. Jesus had people hanging around him often (sometimes literally hanging) so that they could expereince new life and be healed. "The Son of God could not meet all the needs around him. He had to get away to pray. He had to eat. he had to sleep. He had to say no. If Jesus had to love with human limitiations, we'd be foolish to think we don't."[3]

How are you doing at setting your priorities? Are you able to tell what is and is not a priority? How do you go about ranking priorities? How are you doing at keeping your first priority-spending time in the Word and prayer?

They Can't Do It All

Something else we need to remember about busyness is that other people have just as much going on in their life as well. We are all busy in different seasons of life. Some of us are single and working hard at developing a working life or meeting up with friends or being the "on call" babysitter. Some of us are newly married and working hard at devloping what a family looks like and figuring out new jobs. Others of us have kids and are busy running to school, sports practice, and birthday parties. And don't forget about those who are retired, for they are busy trying to keep up with the "old peoples club" that meets on Tuesday mornings and then trying to be grandma to all her grandbabies. 

I will simply wrap this section up with what Kevin had to say on this subject: 

"It's not enough to set priporities ourselves, if we don't respect that others must set them too. Here's where we can help each other immensely. Don't always expect the lunch request to work. Don;t get upset when your "what do you think?" e-mail doesn't get answered. Don't be offended if your need doesn't go to the top of the pile. Understand that people often say 'I'm busy' because saying 'I have many priorities in life and right now you aren't one of them' would be too painful. Don't think it rude if some people have less availibiltiy for you than you have for them. And don't begrudge people the time you are so desperately fighting for. Unless we're God, non of us deserve to be the priority for everyone else all the time."[4] 

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[1] These principles can be found in Chapter 5 of the book Crazy Busy. 

[2] Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (New Yourk: Harper Business, 2006), 26. 

[3] Crazy Busy pg. 60

[4] Crazy Busy Pg. 64