If you have so much business to attend to that you have no time to pray, depend upon it, you have more business on hand than God ever intended you should have.

The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.

On June 30, 1981, the "minute" extending from 10:59 to 11:00 a.m. was extended to include 61 seconds. This leap second was introduced to compensate for the fact that the earth's rotation rate is slowly decreasing. my note: learn more at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html "Since the first leap second in 1972, all leap seconds have been positive and there were 22 leap seconds in the 27 years to January, 1999. "

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want

By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.

Today is a gift--that's why they call it the present.

One thing common to most success stories is the alarm clock.

In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.

Psalm 23, Antithesis The clock is my dictator, I shall not rest. It makes me lie down only when exhausted. It leads me to deep depression. It hounds my soul. It leads me in circles of frenzy for activity's sake. Even though I run frantically from task to task,I will never get it all done. For my "ideal" is with me. Deadlines and my need for approval, they drive me. They demand performance from me, beyond the limits of my schedule. They anoint my head with migraines. My in-basket overflows. Surely fatigue and time pressure shall follow me all the days of my life, And I will dwell in the bonds of frustration forever. -- by Marcia K. Hornok, as first published in DISCIPLESHIP JOURNAL, Issue #60, 1990.

[The following was taken from an actual bug report that I have seen myself. It shows an edited bug report from a customer and an edited response. I did the editing, to protect the customer and company involved. - dhelrod] CUSTOMER BUG REPORT: The [...]Library service "incorrectly" assumes the year 2000 is a leap year. RESPONSE: Thank you for your forward-looking bug report. Various system services, such as [the one you reported] assume that the year 2000 will be a leap year. Although one can never be sure of what will happen at some future time, there is strong historical precedent for presuming that the present Gregorian calendar will still be in affect by the year 2000. Since we also hope that [our system] will still be around by then, we have chosen to adhere to these precedents. The purpose of a calendar is to reckon time in advance, to show how many days have to elapse until a certain event takes place in the future, such as the harvest or the release of [the next version of our system]. The earliest calendars, naturally, were crude and tended to be based upon the seasons or the lunar cycle. The calendar of the Assyrians, for example, was based upon the phases of the moon. They knew that a lunation (the time from one full moon to the next) was 29 1/2 days long, so their lunar year had a duration of 354 days. This fell short of the solar year by about 11 days. (The exact time for the solar year is approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds.) After 3 years, such a lunar calendar would be off by a whole month, so the Assyrians added an extra month from time to time to keep their calendar in synchronization with the seasons. The best approximation that was possible in antiquity was a 19-year period, with 7 of these 19 years having 13 months (leap months). This scheme was adopted as the basis for the religious calendar used by the Jews. (The Arabs also used this calendar until Mohammed forbade shifting from 12 months to 13 months.) When Rome emerged as a world power, the difficulties of making a calendar were well known, but the Romans complicated their lives because of their superstition that even numbers were unlucky. Hence their months were 29 or 31 days long, with the exception of February, which had 28 days. Every second year, the Roman calendar included an extra month called Mercedonius of 22 or 23 days to keep up with the solar year. Even this algorithm was very poor, so that in 45 BC, Caesar, advised by the astronomer Sosigenes, ordered a sweeping reform. By imperial decree, one year was made 445 days long to bring the calendar back in step with the seasons. The new calendar, similar to the one we now use was called the Julian calendar (named after Julius Caesar). It's months were 30 or 31 days in length and every fourth year was made a leap year (having 366 days). Caesar also decreed that the year would start with the first of January, not the vernal equinox in late March. Caesar's year was 11 1/2 minutes short of the calculations recommended by Sosigenes and eventually the date of the vernal equinox began to drift. Roger Bacon became alarmed and sent a note to Pope Clement IV, who apparently was not impressed. Pope Sixtus IV later became convinced that another reform was needed and called the German astronomer, Regiomontanus, to Rome to advise him. Unfortunately, Regiomontanus died of the plague shortly thereafter and the plans died as well. In 1545, the Council of Trent authorized Pope Gregory XIII to reform the calendar once more. Most of the mathematical work was done by Father Christopher Clavius, S.J. The immediate correction that was adopted was that Thursday, October 4, 1582 was to be the last day of the Julian calendar. The next day was Friday, with the date of October 15. For long range accuracy, a formula suggested by the Vatican librarian Aloysius Giglio was adopted. It said that every fourth year is a leap year except for century years that are not divisible by 400. Thus 1700, 1800 and 1900 would not be leap years, but 2000 would be a leap year since 2000 is divisible by 400. This rule eliminates 3 leap years every 4 centuries, making the calendar sufficiently correct for most ordinary purposes. This calendar is known as the Gregorian calendar and is the one that we now use today. (It is interesting to note that in 1582, all the Protestant princes ignored the papal decree and so many countries continued to use the Julian calendar until either 1698 or 1752. In Russia, it needed the revolution to introduce the Gregorian calendar in 1918.) This explains why [our system] chooses to treat the year 2000 as a leap year. Despite the great accuracy of the Gregorian calendar, it still falls behind very slightly every few years. If you are very concerned about this problem, we suggest that you tune in short wave radio station WWV, which broadcasts official time signals for use in the United States. About once every 3 years, they declare a leap second at which time you should be careful to adjust your system clock. If you have trouble picking up their signals, we suggest you purchase an atomic clock (not manufactured by [our company] and not a [system] option at this time).

Take heart, the only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.

"Committee - a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours."

Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear. -Bumper Sticker

No time for your health today; no health for your time tomorrow.

The primary paradigm of [time management] is one of control—plan it, schedule it, manage it. Take it a step at a time. Don’t let anything fall through the cracks. Most of us feel it would be great to be “in control” of our lives. But the fact is, we’re not in control; principles are. We can control our choices, but we cannot control the consequences of those choices. When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other. To think we’re in control is an illusion. It puts us in the position of trying to manage consequences. In addition, we can’t control other people. And because the basic paradigm is one of control, time management essentially ignores the reality that most of our time is spent living and working with other people who cannot be controlled.

"Keep in mind that you are always saying 'no' to something. If it isn't to the apparent, urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things. Even when the urgent is good, the good can keep you from your best, keep you from your unique contribution, if you let it."

Like the old Indian said when asked about Daylight Savings Time, 'It is like cutting one end off of a blanket and sewing it on to the other end to make a longer blanket.'

From Clutter to Order "At least 60% of the papers piled on your desk no longer have any value or meaning. They've piled up because you were lazy. Instead of deciding what should be done with them, you've just put them in a pile."-Jeffrey J. Mayer ARE YOU A PILER? TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR DESK... WHAT DO YOU SEE? BETTER YET... WHAT CAN'T YOU SEE? A cluttered office creates a cluttered desk, which creates a cluttered to-do list and, eventually, cluttered thinking. Cluttered ministry priorities will follow. Many times a cluttered desk is allowed because of fear -- fear that if things are out of sight, they're out of mind. We hesitate to put things away because we're afraid we'll forget them or never find them again. If you're a piler, you recognize that as the piles grow, it becomes more difficult to separate the important from the unimportant. It's almost impossible to decide what to do first. The past few Leaders Edge Articles have dealt with effectiveness. This month I'm dealing with just one area of efficiency, recognizing that if it is practiced regularly, it will lead to better stewardship of time, which eventually leads to greater effectiveness. When you arrive at the office and have piles of paper on your desk: You don't know where to begin. You see a piece of paper while looking for something else within the pile and are distracted for several minutes. You see so many choices that seem to be important that you become paralyzed. You waste valuable time and energy on trivia, and when you're finished, the important work is still buried in a pile. The real issue is not whether your desk is clean or messy. The real issue is stewardship of time and money -- the quality of your work and the length of time to complete it. Creating Order Out Of Disorder Set a goal. Decide to change. Block out two hours of your time. Allow no interruptions. GET ORGANIZED! STEPS FOR DEVELOPING AN ORGANIZED, CLEAN DESK 1Look at each piece of paper on your desk and make an immediate decision to keep it or throw it. Throw it if you can. You have just transferred all those piles of files into just one stack of papers. 2Create a master list; choose a large piece of lined paper. Don't use small pieces of paper. Some people only move from piles of files to piles of little pieces of paper. Your master list will now become your inventory of unfinished work and ongoing projects. You have automatically created a new follow-up system, one based on a list instead of a pile. 3Prioritize your list. Place a "1" by all critical and strategic items that must be completed first. Then place a "2" on all of the next important items. Put a "3" on all the remaining items on your list. 4Develop a filing system that is simple and very near your desk. Here are some special files that will help clear your desk and give you immediate access to important information. TICKLER FILE: Get forty-five file folders. Number the first thirty-one of them 1 through 31, for the days of the month. Label the next twelve by the months of the year. Take the final two and label them 2001 and 2002. PROJECT/EVENT FILE: If you're responsible for a project or ministry event, create a sectioned folder for the event. Keep the promotion in one section, the correspondence with speakers and musicians in another section, the contracts for the hall or banquet facility in another section, etc. DICTATION FILE: If you're unable to answer a letter the same day you received it, make sure you place it in your correspondence (dictation) file so it won't get lost. You will always know where to find the letters that need answering. Set at least a weekly appointment with this file. READ FILE: When you receive a report, meeting minutes, or a magazine you desire to read but can't deal with immediately, place it in your read file. Whenever possible, keep your read file in your briefcase at all times. You will find yourself taking full advantage of any down time. STAFF FILES: You may desire a file for each staff person directly responsible to you. If one of your staff gives you a letter or report, it's important to them. Reviews and job descriptions of your people should always be at your fingertips. BOARD FILE: Let me encourage you to have at least a three-section folder for three separate Board files. One should be for regular Board minutes, action sheets and meeting information. A second section or file should be for materials that relate to the business of your Executive Committee, and the third section or file should be for items pertaining to the Board Chairperson only. The purpose of this system is to liberate you as a ministry leader to do your most creative work. An organized desk will free you up, not tie you down. It will empower you, not control you. An organized, efficient desk saves both time and money. Fewer things will slip through the cracks. You'll be able to stay on top of your unfinished work, locate your papers and files within seconds, and become more productive. You'll look forward to coming to work in the morning, and you'll probably get home earlier in the evening. You'll no doubt feel better about your role, and you'll for sure feel better about yourself.

How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.

We all get 168 hours per week. If you spend 8 hours a day sleeping 3 hours a day eating and socializing 1 hour a day exercising 1 hour a day on personal hygiene 15 hours a week in class 15 hours a week studying 15 hours working at a job You would still have 32 hours a week available!

"2 Laws that govern my life: The law of cognition: I am what I think. The law of exposure: My mind will think most about what it is most exposed to."

An efficiency expert concluded a lecture with a note of caution: "You don't want to try these techniques at home." "Why not?" asked someone from the back of the audience. "I watched my wife's routine at breakfast for years," the expert explained. "She made lots of trips to the refrigerator, stove, table, and cabinets, often carrying just a single item at a time. 'Honey,' I suggested, 'Why don't you try carrying several things at once?'" The person in the audience asked, "Did it save time?" The expert replied, "Actually, yes. It used to take her 20 minutes to get breakfast ready. Now I do it in seven."

Organization is a decision followed by a process.

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - If you thought Venezuela's political crisis seemed to be dragging for an impossibly long time -- you were right. In a bizarre mass-malfunction, Venezuela's clocks are ticking too slowly due to a power shortage weakening the electric current nationwide. By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight. "Everything that has to do with time-keeping has slowed down. If it's an electric clock, it's running slow," said Miguel Lara, general manager of the national power grid. "Your computer isn't affected. Your television isn't affected. No other devices ... just clocks," he added. The meltdown has taken a total 14 hours and 36 minutes from Venezuela's clocks over 12 of the past 13 months, he said.

Dallas Willard noted an experiment done with mice a few years ago. A researcher found that when amphetamines are given to a mouse in solitude, it takes a high dosage to kill it. Give it to a group of mice, and they start hopping around and hyping each other up so much that a fraction of the dosage will be lethal—so great is the effect of "the world" on mice. In fact, a mouse that had been given no amphetamines at all, placed in a group on the drug, will get so hyper that in 10 minutes or so the non-injected mouse will be dead. "In groups," Willard noted, "they go off like popcorn." You'd think only mice would be so foolish as to hang out with other mice that are so hopped up, so frantically pursuing mindless activity for no discernible purpose that they put their own lives at risk.

When I was seven or eight, we lived next to a boarded-up school. We took turns rotating the merry-go-round in the playground for our friends. They'd climb on and grab the rails, and we'd run alongside as fast as we could, pushing. The bigger kids relished the thrill of hanging out beyond the platform to experience maximum Gs. The smaller ones were taught to quit crying by slowly working toward the center pole. The closer you got, the more stability you enjoyed. This is an important principle. The faster your life goes, the more focused you must be on your center if you're to survive and thrive. And what or who is the center of your life? It's not your family or career; it shouldn't be your golf game or favorite football team. It's God. We often forget or neglect that. Due to the exhilaration of our ride or sheer panic from its velocity, we hang on for dear life but never catch our breath. It's time we realign our activities around the security of that perfect center, drawing closer to him.

There is not much risk that an executive will cut back too much. We usually tend to overrate rather than underrate our importance and to conclude that far too many things can be done only by ourselves. Even very effective executives still do a great many unnecessary, unproductive things. But the best proof that the danger of overpruning is a bugaboo is the extraordinary effectiveness so often attained by severely ill or severely handicapped people. A good example was Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a dead man for whom every step was a torment, he could only work a few hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, ‘Lord Heart of the Matter’ and accomplished more than anyone else in wartime Washington." (I cannot count the number of times that illustration has come into my mind at critical moments. I determined to ruthlessly cut away whatever was not crucial to the task, asking myself repeatedly, "If I had two hours per day or ten hours per week to this job, what specific things would I do and what would I not do? As Drucker indicates in many books, no matter how much wise pruning one does, the information worker will always have much more to do than he can possibly get to. as much as possible must be delegated to others.)

If you could once make up your mind in the fear of God never to undertake more work of any sort than you can carry on calmly, quietly, without hurry or flurry, and the instant you feel yourself growing nervous, like one out of breath would stop and take breath, you would find this simple common sense rule doing for you what no prayers or tears could ever accomplish.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

When it comes time to die, make sure all you have to do is die.

Professor C. Northcote Parkinson has pointed out in one of his delightful satires that the quickest way to get rid of an inconvenient superior is to make a world traveler out of him. The jet plane is indeed overrated as a management tool. A great many trips have to be made; but a junior can make most of them. -- Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

A few years ago I met an old professor at the University of Notre Dame. Looking back on his long life of teaching, he said with a funny twinkle in his eyes: ‘I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work.’ This is the great conversion in life: to recognize and believe that the many unexpected events are not just disturbing interruptions of our projects, but the way in which God molds our hearts and prepares us for his return. -- Henri J. Nouwen, Out of Solitude, 1974

Better to be three hours too soon than one minute too late. -- Shakespeare

It's not so much how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is to be praised. The mosquito is swatted. By: Marie O'Connor

In the March 22 issue of Newsweek, columnist Robert J. Samuelson points out that the wealthier a society gets, the more it complains about lack of time. He says we are concerned about "the 'time squeeze' — the sense that we're more harried than ever. We all know this is true: we're tugged by jobs, family, PTA and soccer. Actually, it's not true. People go to work later in life and retire earlier. Housework has declined. One survey found that in 1999 only 14 percent of wives did more than four hours of daily housework; the figure was 43 percent in 1977 and 87 percent in 1924. Even when jobs and housework are combined, total work hours for men and women have dropped. "Still, people gripe — and griping rises with income, report economists Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas and Jungmin Lee of the University of Arkansas. They studied the United States, Germany, Australia, Canada and South Korea. People who were otherwise statistically similar (same age, working hours, number of children) complained more about the 'time squeeze' as their incomes rose. Hamermesh and Lee's explanation: the more money people have, the more things they can do with their time; time becomes more valuable, and people increasingly resent that they can't create more of it."

Sometimes we get walloped with the messiness of life when we least expect it. Take what happened in Tainan, Taiwan. On January 17, 2004, a 66-ton sperm whale died and was beached on the southwestern coast of that island. Two weeks later, on January 29, authorities decided to truck the dead whale to a laboratory where they could do an autopsy. So they loaded this 56-foot behemoth on a flatbed truck and were hauling it through the streets of Tainan, when the whale exploded. Yes, exploded. It had been decomposing, of course, and all those internal gasses reached a breaking point. As the truck was making its way down a busy street, all of a sudden the whale exploded, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours. Isn't that just like life sometimes? You're going about your business, and the whale explodes. Job had something like that in mind when he said, "Man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward." (Job 5:7). Citation: Lee Eclov, Vernon Hills, Illinois; source: "Thar She Blows!" AOL News (1-29-04)

Be still and know that I am God Be still and know that I am Be still and know Be still Be

<img src="http://glenandpaula.com/quotes/uploads/1107587149clocmain1.jpg" width="350" height="350" /> This fiendish alarm clock requires you to reassemble a puzzle in order to turn it off. There is no cord to unplug--no way short of destroying the clock or solving the puzzle in order to silence the beast. $50.

A lawyer dies and goes to Heaven. "There must be some mistake," the lawyer argues. "I’m too young to die. I’m only fifty five." "Fifty five?" says Saint Peter. "No, according to out calculations, you’re eighty two." "How’s you get that?" the lawyer asks. Answers St. Peter: "We added up your time sheets."

The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he even suggests the wish to undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. He does not care how many plans and beginnings we make, provided nothing is finished.

I never wear a watch because I always know what time it is. It is always NOW. And now is when you should do it.