Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive famously challenges business leaders to use a detailed inventory to track, analyze and optimize their time. Fully implementing Drucker’s method is painful, and not just because of the detailed record keeping involved. It confronts us with:

  • Guilt: An honest accounting of our time reveals   we spend a lot of it on non-value-added activities.
  • Fate: Even when optimizing our time, there’s only so much and we can’t even come close to doing all the things we want to do.
  • Meaninglessness: Considering the limited   things we can accomplish in our time, we ask, “Is this all my time adds up to?”

It’s tempting to keep this existential horror contained to our lives at work. Yet, Lent calls us to confront our limits, and Jesus promises “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Only by confronting hard realities do we grow in faith. We owe it to God and ourselves to take stock of how we are using the gifts he gives us.

God grants our souls sensory powers that enable us to engage the world around us and frame our affective or emotional response to it. He gives us the power to think and to interpret what is happening around us. And he gives us the will to choose our actions.

A simple exercise over a week can help you track your actions and reactions to what you encounter throughout each day:

  • Actions: What were you doing at the time?
  • Thoughts: What were you thinking at the time?
  • Feelings: What was your feeling or affective response to your experience?

Unlike the Drucker analysis, this analysis focuses mostly on those times we are away from work. We have very few of those precious hours when we’re not working, sleeping, taking care of the kids or doing chores. It makes sense to pay attention to how we use this time over a week as a representative sample.

This inventory will spark us to ask, “Is that the best use of my time?” It also helps us see patterns: After looking at a political website, I feel upset and irritated. After I spend 15 minutes in prayer, I feel peace. When I read my children a bedtime story, I feel grateful.

Go to ln.archseattle.org/thoughts to get a printable PDF of the inventory. Print a copy for each day of the week. Do the hard work of tracking your time in half-hour increments. Then take what you learn to prayer and ask God, “Is this how you want me using the powers of my soul?”

I promise it will lead to a more fruitful Lent.

Northwest Catholic — February/March 2023