To come up with a daily to-do list that keeps your peace and joy intact, consult God. When you take on too much, you set yourself up for failure – and stress. If you’re wise, you won’t schedule more than one or two ‘majors’ in a day. Life doesn’t run smoothly, no matter how badly you want it to. So, build in time for interruptions, traffic jams, lost keys, slow-moving people, etc. And be careful about multi-tasking. Studies have connected high-stress multi-tasking to short-term memory loss. Experts have concluded that multi-tasking makes you less efficient because it decreases the brainpower needed to execute each task. So, make yourself finish one task before beginning another. To be productive, you must be focused. And one more thought – a very important one: solitude is essential to success! Before Jesus picked His disciples, fed the multitude, and calmed the storm, He took time to be alone with God in prayer. He did, but we don’t, and it shows up in the results we get! We pick the wrong people, lack the necessary resources to meet the need, and the storms of life overwhelm us. The great thing about prayer is that you can do it anywhere – in a traffic commute, in the checkout line at the supermarket, on your lunch break, or when your eyes first open in the morning. Bottom line: since God ‘delights in each step’ of your life, begin to involve Him more.

© 2024. Written by Bob and Debby Gass. Used by permission under licence from UCB International.