Do you ever feel like you don’t have the time to do everything you need to?
On the All In podcast, Gary Crittenden, a successful financial manager, says that he felt this way 35 years ago. When people asked him back then how he balanced his time, he realized he didn’t have a great answer—the truth was that he wasn’t doing it well.
But then he came across Stephen Covey’s book First Things First. In it, Gary learned about a life-changing practice he still does today: each Sunday night, he reminds himself of what things are most important to him, and he makes a plan to improve his connections to those things in the upcoming week.
First, Determine What’s Most Important to You
“You need to decide what’s the most important thing for you to accomplish in your life,” Gary says. “Because if you don’t really have a sense of what you’re trying to achieve, you don’t know how to spend your time.”
For Gary, his love for the Savior and his love for his family are what’s most important. His lifetime goal is to do a better job of focusing time and attention on them.
Second, Put It on Your Calendar
Gary acknowledges that it’s daunting to set out to achieve a lifetime goal. But breaking that big goal into smaller weekly goals is much more manageable.
For example, a question Gary often asks himself is, “What could I do this week so that my wife will think that I love her?”
After coming up with something he knows will make his wife feel loved by him, he puts it in his schedule. Because Gary follows through with the other items on his calendar, he expects himself to follow through with these weekly goals too.
Before his parents passed away, another weekly goal of Gary’s was to help his mother and father feel loved and appreciated. One week in 2013, he scheduled a time to go four-wheeling with his father.
“It was in September, and it was a beautiful, clear, cool day,” Gary says. “We got to the bottom of the hill, and [Dad] stopped next to me, and he turned and said, ‘This is one of the best days of my life.’”
That evening, Gary’s father slipped in his bathroom and passed away.
“I can’t remember exactly how I found an afternoon to go four-wheeling with him,” Gary says. “But obviously, ... one of the most important decisions that I ever made was to be with my dad on that particular day.”
Third, Be Consistent
Gary points out that these weekly goals don’t always have to be big. It wasn’t one day of four-wheeling that bonded him with his father—it was consistent acts of love over a very, very long time.
Of this weekly practice, Gary says, “In the beginning, it has almost no impact. But I’ve been blessed to see over the 35 years that I’ve been doing this … that there’s sort of a compounding effect of showing those little snippets of love.”
Ultimately, he’s realized that his weekly goals have helped him on his path to becoming a disciple of Christ.
“I could be better than I am,” he says. “But it’s been a great blessing to me to have these as the things that I’m really focused on in my life.”
Learn more from Gary on the full All In episode, which is available on all major podcast streaming platforms.
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