Articles
Time Management
Hopefully today’s message will be an encouragement for all of us to consider how we manage our time.
You may have seen this recently, and it's one of those things that we accept at face value and assume to be true. Even if it's not totally true, we know we can use it to provoke some thought at least.
A teacher, I can only assume high school because so many students had phones, allowed her students to keep their phones on for 4th period the other day, and each time their phone "did something" they recorded it on a big chart.
The photo of the chart allowed me to get close to counting the number of marks, and assuming the class was the usual 50 minutes to 1 hour in length, and 22 or so students, here is a guestimation of the number of times this class used their phone in one class period.
Facebook, 99
Text Messages, about 360
Twitter, about 110, some may have been text messages
Snapchat, 71
E-mail, about 60
Instagram, about 215
GroupMe, 60
Other, about 190
And last but not least, good old fashioned phone calls, 32
Now assuming I did the math, the average number of times the phone was used by each student in the class (at 22 students) was 54 times in a period, assuming one hour.
So basically, in the middle of a school day mind you, these kids were sending or receiving at least one thing on their phones every single minute.
I'll leave you to speculate how much time they spend on their phones at home when not at school. I'll leave you to speculate as to how this is affecting education, jobs, families, churches, and intimate time with God. I'll leave you to speculate how much time is left for other things, like the rest of life! How much family conversation is there? How much homework time? How much if any Bible study time? How about even prayer time? In addition to the amount of time spent, how much control do parents have concerning the content of such conversations?
Now I know this example and opportunity for these kids to participate in this class project was probably the extreme end of the spectrum. It doesn't paint the picture of people's behavior every waking hour, and for certain I know it doesn't describe all kids, especially those being raised by concerned caring parents, but it does paint a disturbing picture.
Oh, and it's not just our kids either!
How much time is left for everything else in life?
