Exhorter Podcast
Welcome to the Exhorter Podcast where we aim to stir up love and good works, through bite-sized biblical discussion. This local effort of the Church of Christ located in Clovis California is hosted by Kyle Goodwin, Paul Nerland, Nate Shankels, and Jon Bradford.
Exhorter Podcast
68 - Making the Best Use of Our Time
Have you ever wondered how you can juggle a bustling career, family responsibilities, and personal time without feeling overwhelmed? This episode explores the Pareto Principle, emphasizing that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. We discuss goal-setting strategies based on this principle, the importance of prioritizing meaningful relationships, and practical tips for managing time effectively.
With wisdom drawn from Psalm 90, Ephesians 5, and Mary and Martha from the book of Luke we reflect on the true worth of time, offering practical tips on goal setting and prioritizing the things that truly matter.
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Welcome to the Exhorter podcast, where we aim to stir up love and good works through bite-sized biblical discussion. Welcome back again and we have another topic for you, nate. Nate will be leading us off today. What are we talking about?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I'm excited about this because it is something that I have really worked on and I'm continuing to work on in the past few months. So I have two jobs I have my full-time teaching job and then I also work for a tech company on the side and I have three kids and a wife and we homeschool and blah, blah blah. So I just don't have a whole lot of time. I find myself very, very busy and I think a lot of I'm sure a lot of you listening find yourself just very, very busy and there are certain things that you want to do that you're unable to do and maybe certain things you know that you do that you're like well, that's probably useless and not getting me the results that I want.
Speaker 2:Anyways, a friend of mine suggested a book to me, and the book was all about a principle that I had heard about but hadn't really delved into, dived into very much, and it's called the Pareto principle. It's this idea that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions, and I thought about that and it resonated with me. It made a lot of sense. There are a small number of things that we do that result in the vast majority of the results that we get, or the results that we want to see. And so why does that matter? My wife and I were setting goals this year, and do you guys ever like have a lot of? Do you ever realize how many things you want?
Speaker 1:Want to achieve in general. Yeah, have you ever made? Have?
Speaker 2:you ever, just like, made a list of the things that you want to do or want to buy?
Speaker 1:I generally stay away from feeling sad about myself, so I want to Jeep, oh, you've been talking about that for years. Like years.
Speaker 3:I, oh yeah, I can. I'm too obsessed with it. Have you ever made a list of, like the projects that you want to do around your property? Yes, no, because there's too many of them.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, okay. That's what happened when Ashley and I made goal, set our goals this year. It was like I want to do all of these things and I heard someone say one time if you have more than three goals, you don't have any right, because you just you're. You're too drawn out, you're too focused on too many different things. So then I started to think okay, let's apply this Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule, to this list of goals that we want to achieve and cut it down to a size that is manageable.
Speaker 2:And I think that there's a biblical principle here, with the Pareto principle of 20% of the things we do produce 80% of the results. So in Psalm 90, verse 12, the writer says so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Just this idea that our time here, time here, is valuable. It is short and we need to make the best use of our time. And that's verse 2 in Ephesians 5, verse 15, that we're told to make the best use of our time, and so turning 39 has made me number my days like I never have before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about Ephesians 5.
Speaker 1:Yeah 15 to 16. Just making the best use of your days yeah, timing as fleeting as possible, yeah, my kids are old enough that having different types of conversations with them these days and trying to create better habits and generally around their attitude about things. And so we did some resolutions and we all chose three things we wanted to improve upon or do better this year, and then we chose one for each of us. I just kind of passed the papers around and my family just wanted more time for me this year, and it was kind of daunting because everyone's answer was the same right, which, if it's. You know, one person wants one thing, another one's another thing, but they all want the same thing.
Speaker 1:You're starting to realize, okay, well, what am I doing with my time? Or maybe they just love me that much and you know they got a lot of dad. They want more. It's probably not that, but it's probably okay. Making more, um, more time and that's the thing too is sometimes we can focus on what we want to achieve, and all the things we want to achieve, yeah, it was really good to um hand that off to the people I love the most and care about the most and want my time to be meaningful to them.
Speaker 1:And so knowing what they would want from me and that was nice too, because at that point, if I'm measuring how much I've achieved this year, next year, knowing that maybe I made their lives better, you know, and achieved something that was valuable to them, I think that will feel a lot more satisfaction than checking five or ten things off of a checklist that I felt maybe had some value. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to that and you know it's a work in progress, as resolutions and those things are. I think it's just the first year into it, so we'll see how it goes. But they're not asking for too much, you know, from me Well, you bring up an interesting point.
Speaker 2:You're kind of talking about the value of your time, yeah, and teaching economics. We in my class we often get to the time versus money debate, and one of the things that was taught to me a few years ago is that it's not time versus money, it's life versus money, because when you are giving your time to something that's literally your life, the time that you spend is the life that you spend, and so I've started talking with my students about when you're trading time for dollars, you're not trading just your time, you're trading your life for those dollars. So what are you going to do with that? Because that's obviously important, so it's like your life is worth what.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like you're going to spend your time in that median job for that much time where you're gonna find your way to make your life more valuable because so you can spend the same but make more or spend less time making the same money. You know, as an entrepreneur in the past and doing different things, I think I didn't really have a good, healthy mentality about what my my time was worth. Yeah, with kids growing, kids growing older and the whole family you know family of five and I feel like it's a lot easier to see what your time is worth. Yeah, and it's a lot easier to say yes or no to people based upon that time I used to want to say yes to everything.
Speaker 2:So when it comes to, like setting goals for the year, looking ahead to what it is you want to accomplish. How do you guys determine what it is that you want to do?
Speaker 3:I don't do good at setting goals. I think my problem is I think of all these things, I think of the results that I want, but then I fail to make a good plan and I end up just getting overwhelmed because I'm trying to do it all at the same time, like I'm trying to jump over the Grand Canyon in one leap or something.
Speaker 3:And then I just end up failing at goal setting because I haven't made achievable goals and I haven't focused my goals. Nate, it sounds like what you're describing is what my dad always used to tell me, and I didn't understand this as a kid and I'm only just now seeing the value of it. He would always tell me, less is more. And that's what it sounds like you're describing here is that if you focus and maybe if I try focusing my attention on fewer goals three or less and work on actually achieving those goals because three goals that I value above all others, that's an attainable objective, sure, and then I would get a sense of accomplishment and be able to move on to more. So is this kind of a less is more? Is that really the core of this teaching here?
Speaker 2:So I hadn't really thought about that particular phrase, but I think it is very applicable. I think that is applicable here. It's backwards design.
Speaker 1:If this is true, what you realize at the end of the year. Let's say you had some goals for your year. But you realize at the end of the year let's say you had some goals for your year. You've realized at the end of the year, all the things that you achieve that mattered resulted from the smaller or more targeted amount of work in this area here, this 20%. And so this 20%, all my time and effort there, made me the most happy or made me the most connected to people, or maybe the most time focusing on God. So at the end of the day, what is that 20% for everyone? And kind of identifying to shove off the rest of it and focus in on that 20% and do that with more time.
Speaker 1:I mean that's the idea. It's like not keeping it as 20%. It's removing the 80%. That didn't get you right.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not always removing the entire 80%. That's not getting you as much result, because and this is gets kind of confusing with numbers but it says that 20% of your inputs gets you 80% of your results. Well, the 80% of your inputs, that gets you the 20% of your results. That doesn't mean that those are necessarily bad. They're just like eating and sleeping Not as effective. They're just not as effective as all that time I wasted sleeping. Yeah, yeah, I don't know why you did that, john. That's just not as effective as that. You know small 20 and so like I think about the uh, the apostles in acts, chapter six, when the greek-speaking widows were being overlooked, and I think it was Peter who stood up and said we're not going to stop preaching and teaching to take care of this. So you guys pick men from among you who can handle this situation and I look at that as Peter was applying the 80-20 rule or it's really just prioritizing.
Speaker 3:It wasn't to say that feeding the taking care of the widows was an unimportant task and, to be honest, when you look at the qualifications for those seven men, they seem overqualified for that job. You're distributing either money or food to widows, but they needed to be full of the Holy Spirit and I'm thinking well, even they seem overqualified. They should delegate this to someone else. It's a very simple task, but no, it was an important task and they still needed people that were of high quality and high caliber to take care of it, but also as an apostle. There's only 12 of them and they had things that only apostles could do, and they shouldn't be splitting their time doing things that other people could do, because apostles, they can't get someone else to fill in for them as apostles.
Speaker 2:For them, it was going to be a better result if they spent their time focusing on preaching and teaching as opposed to distributing food. I'm not saying that distributing of the food was bad in any way. It just wasn't going to get them the result that the most bang for their buck.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking in terms of evangelism too. Looking at my efforts, the last couple years, I've tried some different things. I paid for a meetup subscription and had some meetups and did get some participation from folks outside of our church, folks from the community, coming into our meetup studies, recurring visits, people that showed a pretty good interest and had some great conversations, some great Bible studies with people. It was at a Starbucks, but that didn't produce a lot of long-term results. That didn't get a lot of people. Um, you know, after a while people would stop coming and maybe someone else would show up and I'd get them for a couple of weeks at a meetup study, but they weren't really interested in um, learning more about going deep. Yeah, yeah, it didn't go very far.
Speaker 3:The most successful studies I've had were people that have visited our church. They already have enough interest that they've taken the step to come visit. They filled out a visitor's card, and so I tend to focus my efforts largely on when I, when I get a visitor's card. When I get someone, either they know someone here, they've been invited or they just happened to to pass by and wanted to visit because they're curious. Yeah, those are the people that already have a little skin in the game and those studies tend to, so I prioritize those. But it doesn't mean I've stopped doing the meetups for now, and you could put that in the same category as, say, door knocking or passing out flyers or things like that. It's not saying it's a waste of time, but if it's taking me away, if I'm too busy doing that and getting no results, that I don't have time to follow up when we get an actual visitor here that shows an interest, then I've missed my priorities. Does that sound like a good application of this concept? That's 100% accurate.
Speaker 2:You are basically saying I did all of these things and it's not that it was a bad thing and maybe it was a good thing and maybe in the long run there will be some sort of effect from that, but it certainly didn't have the result or impact that prioritizing studies with visitors who are coming of their own volition has had. Yeah, that's a perfect application of the 80-20 rule, focusing on what produces the results.
Speaker 3:Now I'm coming into this episode more as a learner. I've heard about this before the 80-20 idea, or what's the official name you gave it.
Speaker 2:It's the Pareto principle and so it comes from an Italian economist in the late 1800s who was studying land distribution and he realized that 20% of the that about 80% of the problems in a business come from 20% of the clientele, and so it kind of got a revival and since then it has been applied to many, many things and you can actually take it and square it where you get 4% of your inputs will get you 64% of your results, and you can square it again 1% of your inputs will get you about 52% of your results.
Speaker 2:It's just the idea that there are certain tasks that are more high yielding than others, and when I think about this, like as far as setting goals for myself for the year, I think about okay, what are those really high result tasks that I can do that are going to make a difference and that are going to get me the things that I really want out of life and that God would really want me to have spiritual things, family things, Nate, that was a little too much math for my brain, but I think a certain segment of our audience will appreciate that you made it statistical like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Let me get back to a biblical principle here. As far as prioritizing goes, I think we can definitely see that principle in the Bible. In Luke, chapter 10, jesus goes to the home of Mary and Martha Now Mary, it says in verse 39, is sitting at the feet of Jesus hearing his word. She's listening intently. Martha, however, it says, was distracted with much serving and she approached Jesus and said Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do the serving alone? And Jesus' answer is Martha. Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things, but one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her. And a really good summary I heard about this text is Martha wasn't making bad choices. Serving your guest is a good thing to do and a right thing to do, but the summary I heard is that the greatest enemy the enemy of the great is the good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's what I meant, okay, so. So this brings up a question how do we remove the 80% of things from our life or or decrease them that aren't getting us the results, if they're not necessarily like bad things?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've always been a work harder, not smarter, and maybe I need to start rethinking that I'm. I'm as I said I'm. I've turned 39. I need to start rethinking that, as I said, I've turned 39. I'm getting close to where I can't be youthful anymore and maybe I do need to start working smarter, useful or youthful Youthful.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, it's just focusing on the tasks and the people and the things that bring the biggest results. You have to first feel self-aware.
Speaker 3:Good self-evaluation.
Speaker 1:That's where it starts right, yeah, a little self-aware, good self-evaluation. That's where it starts, right, yeah, we have to know what that is I mean. And we like to deceive ourselves. We like to place more importance and hindsight bias on things after the fact, because I could be honest about the meetup studies.
Speaker 3:I got a little bit headstrong about that because I know of other churches and other cities where that has worked really well and I think I just stubbornly focused on that and failed to realize I'm just not following up with our visitors here very well. I'm trying to do what works for them in their circumstances. That maybe doesn't work as well here, and so I was just being a little bit stubborn and sticking with something that worked for other people. But I needed to be honest and say it's not really working that well here and we get maybe these other places where meetups work. They don't get foot traffic, but we get visitors here and that works and I need to put my effort there. So I had to do a little bit of honest evaluation on what wasn't working and why.
Speaker 1:So I was reading this book recently Insolvent Cognitive Biases the one that just reminded me of that one is called Survivorship Bias and that is when you make the mistake by focusing on the successful few and ignoring all the fails. And so you see, maybe like a congregation that does really good at meetups and stuff, you overemphasize the value of that because you don't see the fact of when it fails a lot, you know like it fails all the time. So I think that that's one of the things that we need to be wary of when we self-examine and look at you know our life and place the priorities and importances to rightly account. All the fails and all the misses. You know all those things.
Speaker 1:It can also. It can just be. It can be things, but it can also just be um, kind of a rule or a mode, like if, if I set, if one of my 20 things was um, as soon as I get home every day, I do not look at my phone until the next day. That's a small thing in the bucket, but could the yield of that over time and over? You know I won't get a lot of memes from Kyle until the next day, I won't get in real time, but what I would get is maybe more. Maybe my family would feel like I'm more present, and the yield of that would be exponential you know of 80% right, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's just it's finding things like that. That's not necessarily a a time, but a kind of a goal, a rule for yourself. I would get a lot more done.
Speaker 2:Is that the?
Speaker 1:same thing Does that count.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, totally, that's one of those. I did that because my wife said you know you're here, but you're on your phone a lot, and she was just trying to point out hey, here's an area I think you could improve. And so I decided all right, after 6 pm you know, when we sit down to dinner-ish I'm not going to use my phone, and so I leave it in my office. And when that first happened, or when I first decided to do that, I said this is going to be impossible, there's no way I can do that. I have to respond to people. These sorts of things have to happen. And I did it for I don't know, maybe a week or so, and what I realized was the sky hadn't fallen, the world hadn't collapsed, nobody was like Nate. Why are you not getting back to me so quickly? It was just.
Speaker 3:Do you still do that?
Speaker 2:as a policy, not on weekends, but on weekdays.
Speaker 1:It must be hard with the two jobs and honestly, I've gone without social media on my phone for almost a year and I've downloaded Facebook every once in a while when I see that there's like messages and stuff that I'm not responding to for the church website and other things, but for the most part, you know, I haven't had that. And it's a little harder when people send you Instagram memes and I have to go to a web browser to look at it.
Speaker 3:It's the same for me. It's kind of a pain, but or when people send you TikTok and you're not going to get that app, tiktok and I'm like what is this?
Speaker 1:But it gets to the point where once you're over the lack of dopamine and all the other stuff that you get from that, once you get over that, just the satisfaction of not having it and knowing that you've at least purged some aspect of time suck from your life feels so much better.
Speaker 3:And I wouldn't want it back. Less phone means more actual living.
Speaker 1:I would say I mean, that's the equation he's laying out, right, that's the equation he laid out with economics.
Speaker 2:But certainly phone is not the only thing, right? That's just one example and it's not like. It's not that there was a lack of something, and it's not that there was anything bad going on with the phone. It's just the fact that it was not the highest and best use of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you're thinking about my home Bible studies or thinking about your daily reading, or thinking about my home Bible studies, or thinking about your daily reading, or thinking about the podcast efforts and stuff that we might do to you know. Now evaluate them and realize, okay, well, if I'm going to start trimming things out of my life, don't trim the things that have the yield.
Speaker 1:Don't do that. But to do that you still have to identify. So you have to identify what those high yields are. But to do that you still have to identify.
Speaker 2:So you have to identify what those high yields are, and yeah, and that can be really challenging. So one of the things that I did recently was I literally audited my time every 15 minutes for four days. Dude, I had to do that for work?
Speaker 1:Did you really Some odd time ago like?
Speaker 2:years ago and, oh my goodness, like that's not easy. I mean, it's kind of like I had pages of notes because I did it physically.
Speaker 1:How much time am I wasting by just doing that versus-.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that was one of the things that I wrote down, like for this 15 minutes. I spent most of it auditing my time. Yeah, but what it did was it pointed out? Okay, here are the things that you're doing that really are useless. They're not getting any, they're repetitive and they're taking up so much time. Yeah, like checking email, do I need to check?
Speaker 1:email so many times a day. Well, so that's why I started doing. I'll check. I set like times on my calendar for when I check my email and when I first get in the first hour of the day and then after lunch, right?
Speaker 3:And then back I check my. There you go. Kyle doesn't have that problem.
Speaker 2:Do not email Kyle. Kyle doesn't have that problem. Something is important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean, this is a principle that's been used a lot like in business, yeah, but I think that it has applications in our personal life and even in the church. You know, we could probably look at the congregation and go. You know, 80% of the things that get done probably happen from 20% of the people.
Speaker 1:80% of the things that get done probably happen from 20% of the people. If you're starting a new program or process or something like that like groups, group meetings can you measure the effectiveness of those? It's hard because you think of the time that you spent in that, but it's hard to understand everyone else's connection with each other. It's hard to tell if, because of that, someone's life is made so much better because they now know there's two or three other people that are looking out for them and they're caring for them. So it's really hard to quantify some things.
Speaker 1:I think we should always attempt to and try to understand the effectiveness and that's why I know people, I send out surveys or I love surveys and I love that kind of thing and eyes glaze over another survey from John. But I feel like the feedback loop and understanding. I don't want just to assume that people are getting something out of something. I do think you have to ask, you have to check in with people and see if something's effective. We can see how many people listen to this podcast and you might be able to judge it just based upon that one.
Speaker 1:But then you can also base it upon the time that we spend in the Word, preparing for it and thinking about it and socializing with each other and talking about this. You can get lots of different value from these things, and then sometimes the value of this to one person is going to be a lot more than others. Yeah, and is it worth it? Yeah, I don't know. I'd ask you at home is it worth it, please?
Speaker 2:let us know.
Speaker 1:Don't send us on Instagram or email, kyle, but you just comment on the post. Yeah, you won't hear back, right, I feel?
Speaker 3:this is very much like a lot of things in life that maybe you don't understand or you're not familiar with the terminology, but you understand the principle.
Speaker 3:I came into this episode ready to learn about this. I'd heard about it, but I was really curious. I'd never really heard a description of it, but I'm finding myself thinking well, this just sounds like less is more, and so I'm familiar with the concept. I just didn't know the packaging. Much like in an episode we did on schadenfreude it's a word that is puzzling. It's a weird German word that has no English correspondence, but we all know the feeling joy over someone's calamity. Okay, well, I know that, I just didn't know that's what it was called. And I'm getting the same thing here, like when I preach a sermon. I'm preaching through a text and there's a hundred different applications I could make, but no one's going to remember a hundred applications. So I need to focus in. There's all these things I could say about this text, but I need to focus on the 20% that there's the thorns, there's the pathway and then there's the good soil, right.
Speaker 2:Only one of those truly yields results, right, and so it's that's 25%, but one of them looks like it does until it doesn't, I mean. So that's the thing is, you can trick yourself by not being very aware. Examine many different things Our lives, what we do with our time, the church and the efforts that we are doing to evangelize or build up the congregation. Our work, what we're doing at work. It's a framework to view those things and to improve.
Speaker 1:I think that maybe a good. If I were to do a workshop on this one, I would start by having everyone make a flair and make as many goals as possible and make you know, like, basically, you're going for the volume at that point, right, yeah, yeah. And then reflect on your last year, reflect on your time and everything and think about the things that you're glad you achieved, or yeah. And then think about the three goals, the small things that you want to achieve in the next year.
Speaker 1:If you had to wield it down to those and then look at all the other ones and say which ones support this, and then you know, basically churn that down, because I think it's really good to go through the mental process of going what are all the ideas I have and wants and hopes and dreams I have? And then what are the ones that matter? Focus on the. You can only have three, you know at that point. Then you start looking at well, all these ones don't matter, and these ones actually do the same as this. So I think that that's a good exercise to do.
Speaker 2:Excellent, I agree.
Speaker 1:Is that what you?
Speaker 3:did.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's what I did, yeah.
Speaker 3:These ones is not good english, john, and these um did several how did you do that with your wife?
Speaker 1:how did you sit down? Well, did you find out what she wanted from this year? Did you tell her what she wanted from the to?
Speaker 2:uh, to steal something from uh chris emerson podcast, he did one on goal setting and he talked about these five different categories of life faith family, finances, fitness and, I think, friendships, and so we tried to put goals in each of those categories. How many goals did you do? Three and eight we did. It ended up just being kind of like what you said, John. We just made a list of everything we wanted in all those categories.
Speaker 2:Then we took it and said you know, all right, what are the most important ones we want and what are the ones we want to focus on this quarter. It can't be any more than three.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so then we we broke those down and did it like that. Well, I hope that this has provided some value as a framework to examine ourselves, as a framework to examine what we're doing and what we want to accomplish, that there are a small number of things that we do, a small number of people in our life that produce the vast amount of the results that we get, and so it's the Pareto principle. I think we see it in the Bible, and it's something that can help us understand the world around us and ultimately achieve the most important things in life and use our time wisely.
Speaker 3:Well, nate, thanks for that economics lesson but, more importantly, that lesson on prioritization, something I've struggled with but I've put a lot of attention to with my impending new decade coming up in a year when I'll be 40. And so I think, in terms of less is more is kind of my takeaway from this that if we kind of declutter our priorities and focus not all but more of our efforts on the things that really matter, think through our goals and decide which ones will produce the best results and focus the majority of our effort on accomplishing those goals and we will see, that's where we'll get. The more Less clutter with our goals will result in more success in life, kind of my takeaway on that.
Speaker 2:And I think this is just applying Ephesians 5.15. Make the best use of your time.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for listening today. If you listen to a bunch of other podcasts, you're probably all over the place. You should really focus in on the 20% of podcasts that get you the 80% of benefit, and we clearly are one of those. So please subscribe to our channels and tune in every week for new content.
Speaker 2:Thank you, that wasn yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no that wasn't one of them yet.
Speaker 1:We'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah for sure. If you move to the Ranchos, then Luke's going to get eaten by a coyote and.
Speaker 3:Ella's going to marry her cousin.
Speaker 1:If you move to Sanger a gangbanger will be tagging your house, I'll get swallowed up by mattresses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, you don't want to live out by Kyle. You might drive into a canal.
Speaker 3:Hey man, I built a cool fort out of all the furniture and mattresses people left behind. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1:There's too many Mustangs over there. Yeah, right here anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, it's more of a Challenger Dodge Challengers everywhere.
