Book Corner: Time Management for Catholics by Dave Durand
I know Davey’s mommy has mentioned this book before. I recently finished rereading it (sometimes it takes me a few reads to really absorb things.)
I have found this book very helpful, even when I apply Durand’s suggestions in in the most haphazard way. His approach is simple and intuitive: examine how you’re spending your time now, make a mission statement, set out priorities according to your mission statement, and plan your day accordingly.
The book is clearly written and easy to use — with short chapters — without being dumbed down. It’s even literally easy to read, in the usual graceful style of Sophia Institute Press. This simplicity is one of the things I most appreciate about the book: it teaches principles that you can apply in any situation and according to your own preferences, instead of using an author’s pre-fab system. I have found other books on Time Management to be pretty useless (especially the Franklin-Covey system) with their elaborate, multi-page calendars, busy diagrams that require another diagram to understand, and useless suggestions. (The main thing I brought away from Covey’s book, for example, is “delegate it!” Which didn’t help me, since I had nobody to delegate to and had plenty of people delegating things to me.)
It is full of observations and suggestions of the “oh how obvious, why didn’t I think of that before?” variety (my favorite: the to-do-tomorrow list) and discusses ten “time bombs.” There are chapters dedicated to personal prayer, spiritual reading, meditation (a very helpful chapter) and family prayer. There is also a mini-prayer book in the Appendix.
The Appendix also includes a discussion of why “Catholic time management” is better:
[It] emphasizes self-knowledge [instead of self-esteem].
I am a steward of my God-given goods, including time.
Sin is…a waste of time…
Time is a mystery and a gift.
Good time management is ordered to eternal life.
Even Hambet likes this book. When I first got it I had to constantly hide it from him, since he was (and still is) fond of removing the dust jacket and cooing at the picture of the baby on the cover.