How do you, as a pastor, use your twenty-four hour cycle? You are responsible to arrange your own schedule. Indeed, you have great liberty to plan your own time. Sometimes, in fact, pastors enjoy this liberty so much they waste their time on nonproductive activity, and it has an adverse effect on their ministry. You not only have liberty in planning your time but also responsibility. Do you know how you spend your time? Sometimes days or weeks go by and we cannot account for what we have done in that time. Someone has estimated that in the average seventy-year life span, a person spends his or her time
as follows:
3 years getting an education 8 years having fun
6 years eating
5 years traveling
4 years talking 14 years working 3 years reading 24 years sleeping
3 years convalescing
You can easily see where most of a person’s time goes. In the next section you will look at some ways to plan and account for how you use your time.