Command Your Day

This is the fifth in our series on the 10 C’s to Building Momentum.

It is a brand new year! We have been given a clean slate – a nice blank canvas on which to inscribe our dreams, desires, and goals for the year. This is the magic of January, when everyone has some inner instinct to clear away the clutter and get a fresh start, and that is very good practice. With the clutter gone and the blank canvas in front of us, many of us are able to chart a masterpiece for the year.

The problem is that about a week into the new year, people start to scribble on our masterpiece. Everything hits at once – it’s back to work after the holidays, new initiatives are beginning, school and ministry commitments increase, and everything people put on hold during the last quarter of the year is now activated with a vengeance.

If you are not careful, these things will be splattered all over your masterpiece to a point where you won’t even be able to see what you had painted underneath it all.

Here’s the bottom line: If you don’t command your day, someone else will. If you don’t decide what must be done this year, someone else will decide that for you.

You must protect your masterpiece.

Now I’m not saying you should be inflexible, but I am saying you should determine the main goals you need to accomplish this year and protect those goals at all costs. Allow a buffer for the unexpected opportunities that do make sense for you, but hold to your boundaries on those things that do not fit your focus. Learn just one word: “No” – and use it as needed.

It’s a world of distraction and demands on our time, and if we don’t fiercely protect those things that are important to us and to our mission, we will be sidetracked into oblivion in very short order.

You have a choice: Chart the course of your year and command it day by day…or allow someone else to decide the course of your life for you.