Friday, November 06, 2009

To Become a Master of Fifteen Minutes

First, an apology:

As all of you have noticed... I haven't been here much lately, and for that, I sincerely apologize.  In the wide mix of things that I need to do here, blogging has been getting bumped toward the bottom of the list.

Everyone at home deserves better than that - and so I'm going to try to post more frequently.  Dan has really been doing great in picking up the slack in my absence.



Second, something of some substance.  As I said, things are a bit hectic here - we get pulled in a lot of different directions: prayer, classes, study, ministry work, other formation activities, and a little bit of leisure and fellowship.

This requires a lot of time management skills - something that I'll be the first to admit that I don't have.  Fortunately, I've already heard some good advice from some of the other seminarians and faculty that I'd like to share:

1) "You need to become the master of fifteen minutes" - This is one of the hardest things for me to do.  In my past experience, I've found it difficult to do anything productive with much less than an hour.  So I need to learn how to fill the gaps between events here.  Actually, most of this post was written in the little gaps between classes - so that's a start.

2) "You need to be 'rigidly flexible'" - This is a tip from our Dean of Academic Formation, and something that, if I can ever learn to master time in fifteen minute increments, this one will be rather useful.  It simply means that I need to fit some activities, like study, in around everything else, but I need to be consistent in doing it.