What's Time Worth, Anyway?
by William G. Jones -- Guest Writer

Today I was running late for a meeting. My whole morning had been geared around it. I put off my normal routines and squeezed an hour of exercise in and gave myself just enough time to shower and change and be at the hospital cafeteria where my weekly accountability group meets. Somewhere in all the confusion, it hit me. I needed a set of video cables to tape a presentation tonight. So I tried to call my girlfriend at work, but she was out to lunch. So I tried on her cell phone--that Orwellean leash of modern business that rings every time we try to have diner together or go see a movie or even try to sit through a mid-week church service. It rang and rang and rang. No answer.

Here I am, just out of the shower, five minutes away from my accountability group meeting that takes me ten minutes to drive to, and this. I think to myself, how come our relationship has suffered at the hands of this cell phone that never stops ringing because she can't let her co-workers or her bosses down, but when I need to talk to her, she decides to turn off the ringer or leave it in the car? Frustrated, I pick out something comfortable to wear, find my most intimidating pair of sunglasses, and head out the door.

As I'm in the doorway, my phone rings. It's her. I'm already late and I need those cables anyway, so I take the call.

"Why can't I ever get a hold of you on this thing?" I ask. Bad move. Small argument ensues. So I ask about the cables, because I knew they were in her apartment. I just wanted to grab her key, go in, get the cables, and be gone in a couple of minutes. Problem is, she doesn't know where they are. She'll have to go with me to find them. Just great. I hang up the phone, thinking to myself how much more time it's going to take for her to find those cables.

Now I'm really late for my accountability group. I rush through packed mid-day traffic and arrive at the hospital exactly eleven minutes late. I rush inside, into the packed cafeteria. People are staring at me like I'm crazy, but I walk around, looking for the guys. I check the usual table. Nothing. I check the food line. Nothing. So I go into the lobby and look for any sign of their vehicles. For ten more minutes, I wait in the lobby, thinking that the guys are running late. I thought about spending the time in prayer, but I was too agitated. So, instead, I did nothing. Finally, I hear Roger, one of the men from the group who also happens to work in the hospital, talking to some nurses. I flag him down and ask what's happened.

"Didn't you talk to Brian?" he says.

"No," I replied. Actually, I had talked to Brian the night before, but he neglected to tell me that Roger had a staff meeting, the other Roger was on vacation and so was Steve, so they'd decided to call off the group for the week at the last minute. Great. Nobody called me. There's thirty minutes of my life that I'll never get back.

Since I was nearby anyway and had already wasted so much time, I stopped by to see if my girlfriend would go with me to look for those cables. Of course, I had to vent my frustration to her. "That was my time they wasted," I said. "I'll be sure to mention it to them the next time I see them, too."

We go to her apartment and she starts looking for the cables. We find the camcorder box, but no cables. Great. Even more time wasted. Thirty more minutes, to be exact, before she came running down the stairs saying, "Eureka!" Then she hurried out the door and into the car.

We hardly talked the whole time.

After she was back at work and I was driving home, I thought to myself, why? Why do we do this? What is time really worth?

As men, we've gotten sold into the slavery of productivity. It's not enough to work at your natural pace. No, that's just lazy. We need to push harder, work faster, and plan every moment of our time to achieve that ever-elusive productivity margin. A couple of years ago, when I was working in the corporate world, I found myself at a point where I was trying to figure out how to sleep less and still get through the day so I'd have enough time to do everything that I felt I like needed to do. My work got so sloppy that I finally decided I couldn't do it anymore. Either I was going to cost the company a lot of money and get fired, or I'd have to give up my writing and my relationship with Annie, or I'd have to quit. There was no keeping up with the pace my life was going anymore. Of course, a job is a job, and with the economy in the shape that it was in, I was too scared to do anything but keep doing what I was doing.

When my boss made the announcement that he wanted to interview everyone there to find out where they saw themselves in five years, I realized something. If I gave up my writing, I'd be giving up on a gift that God had given me. And if I gave up on my relationship with Annie, I'd be giving up one of the best things that ever happened to me. In exchange for what? The same job I had, possibly with a better title attached? More and more and more responsibility for relatively less pay? The sad thing was, I wasn't even making a decent living there. What little money I did make was spent before I even cashed my paycheck.

See, I'd bought into the lie that success in life equals success on the job. I lived for promotions and raises, even when they were essentially meaningless. I was selling out to corporate culture. I equated my time to my salary and pushed myself to make the most of every moment I had. I skipped lunches, I didn't take brakes. I worked like a machine, doing anything and everything I could to get that next raise, that next promotion. What I found was, the harder I worked, the harder my work-life became.

I can remember being in business school and hearing a professor chide the class about the lazy attitude of the American workforce. Prior generations, he said, had to work twelve and fourteen hour days doing hard labor in the sun six days a week. We, he said, had it easy. I really took that philosophy to heart until I got bogged down in the corporate world. What I realized was this: a farmer cannot push the crops to grow. No amount of motivational speakers or pay incentives will make those crops grow any faster than God intended. Sure, the work of a farmer was hard before the advent of modern machinery, and I'm sure the work of a farmer is still hard even with all the tools of the trade, but the farmer doesn't have to be concerned about multitasking. He doesn't have to tend phones and process reports and prepare billing statements to meet an impossible deadline. He simply does his job without the corporate office breathing down his neck and demanding results.

Our ancestors understood it. Even today, many people outside the corporate rat race understand it. A man can only work so hard, so fast, and so well. The only thing that makes him a better worker is time, time spent perfecting the craft. A woodworker or a carpenter or a bricklayer would be foolish to try and do more than one thing at a time. That's why you don't see carpenters working with a hammer in each hand, or woodworkers building two chairs at the same time, or bricklayers laying more than one row of bricks at a time. They understand that it takes time. Sure, they work as fast as they can work and still do the job right, but they don't try to work any faster.

As I was driving home from Annie's apartment today, camera cables in hand, I glanced at the clock. It was the time my group normally let out, and while I was aggravated with Brian for not telling me that group had been canceled, I really had come out ahead time-wise, even though it didn't feel like it. But I'd also wasted an opportunity to spend time with my girlfriend and an opportunity to spend time with God because I'd carried too much self-importance into the time I could have been building a relationship.

I'm thankful that God pulled at my heart and urged me to take some time away from corporate life. I truly am. In the time that I've been on my own, so to speak, I've developed a new appreciation for Bible study and prayer, for exercise and reading and even for writing. I've grown spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Yet, I realized today, I hadn't outgrown that mindset that time equals money.

Time is what we make of it. Whether we spend it wisely or waste it away, time rolls on at a steady pace. The value of time is something far beyond money. We should measure it in opportunity. Every tick of the clock represents an opportunity to witness to a lost soul, to feed the hungry and clothe the homeless, to spend time with family and loved ones. We all have responsibilities, but we all need to assess the quality of the time we spend. When we're with loved ones, are we still thinking about work? Still plotting to get ahead in that rat race? Still bitter because someone wasted our time? Or are we focused on relationship building?

Life, in essence, is defined by the relationships we forge with God and with our fellow man. When a man dies, nobody stands around the casket and fondly remembers the week he worked ninety-four hours to develop a proposal for the company. Nobody will wipe a tear from their eye as they fondly recall the itinerary of that three-week business trip he volunteered for. Nobody will stare in amazement at a bank statement or a payroll stub and marvel at how great that man's life was. The only thing we live behind is a legacy of relationships. That's how we're remembered. Not for the quantity of time we spend, but the quality. And when we draw our last breath and see God face to face, He won't care about how well we performed our jobs. He'll only care about what we did for His kingdom in the short time we were here on earth. To me, that's a chilling though.

What is time really worth? To your family, to your church, to God, and to the people who need you--whether you know they do or not--your time is worth everything. How are you spending it?