Taming the Clock: Be On Time!

(edit end of 2024:  Originally written when I was seeking to coach Christian single moms around stress, money, and feeding their kids a healthy diet.  The advice here is applicable to everyone however, so it stays posted here)

Truth-telling, or integrity is huge when it comes to building relationships with your child(ren) in a way that will allow tighter household collaboration and partnership with them as they grow. Keeping your word is step one in managing your time wisely. If you have a tendency to overbook yourself because you forget who you promised what to when, this will be an issue you need to work on. This issue alone can lead to a lot of scrambling, stress, and believe it or not, wasted time.

Thanks to the current crisis, most of us are not as busy out and about as we used to be. With many businesses on reduced hours or shut down altogether, we are home more often than we used to be. So this is a good time to look back on how busy we were running around town, and how we can streamline that to save ourselves both time and money while reducing stress in the process. This week’s theme is simply: BE ON TIME! The concept of reverse scheduling is a little trick has so many applications, but in this video I talk about it in relation to being on time for a group meeting of some kind.

Being chronically late, or fashionably late as some refer to it, is not beneficial to yourself, or to others around you. Fellow attendees may have schedules of their own after the event you are attending, and you showing up late may have the leader of the event postpone starting it, making other attendees late for their commitments after this one. As adults and as mothers, we are called by God to put others first ahead of ourselves. We teach this to our children in various ways from not butting in line to waiting our turn to giving the other sibling the larger cookie, etc. But something seems to shift when we look at our own time commitments and we take the attitude that everyone else can wait for us, we’ll get there when we get there.

Yes you very well may have reasons for why you are late some days, but not every day. Those reasons you may be relying on to justify why you are late may turn out to be excuses instead. You have to ask yourself how you feel every time someone else holds up what you are trying to rush through before you get to your next appointment. The later others are, the more antsy you get. You might even get frustrated that someone held things up so badly that you almost missed the next appointment altogether. Let me be blunt and tell you straight up that this is downright selfish and rude! Scripture tells us to treat others how we want to be treated.

Matthew 7:12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

So if it annoys you when others make you late, don’t make them late. When you show up on time, you allow the leader of the event to begin on time and this allows them to cover all the content they needed to share or work through with your group. This may even allow them to wrap up earlier than they had planned so that both they and you can get to their next engagement, whatever that is. When you choose to show up on time, you are putting your fellow attendees and your event leader, ahead of yourself and you are showing them that this appointment has meaning, value and purpose for you.

“oOn time” should be no less than 5 minutes ahead of the event start time so that you have time to park your vehicle, hang up your coat, and find your seat. You may even need to find the room if you are meeting at a hotel conference centre, college campus or church complex. It’s even better if you can give yourself 10 minutes to do all that when you pull in to the address off the street.

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