‘Value Adding’ Time – Toward Real & Lasting Peace

There’s a key task we all have in life. It is to ensure our time is maximised by doing as many worthwhile value adding things as we can in the time we get.

In quality management circles (recall it was all the rage in business back in the 1990s) the term ‘value adding’ was synonymous for what you sought as indicating what stayed, and what was promoted as ‘quality.’ Business generally sought to raise the percentage of value adding work they did to the lessening of work that didn’t add value. As a result, much work was ‘outsourced.’ Contractors become popular and whole business units were sold off.

There’s a relationship between how modern business is arranged and our personal lives.

People these days have often taken value adding too far regarding their time as they cram in there all sorts of ‘good’ activities; but sometimes it’s simply too much.

As a result, there’s a lack of peace in the overly busy ‘quality’ life. And there’s also the distinct possibility, in our derision, we can be moved far off our track in life, succumbing to more waste than ever.

We can easily take value adding activities too far, can’t we? This is acknowledging that balance is more difficult to achieve than we’d like it to be; especially these days.

Somehow we must redefine quality regarding its meaning in our lives. And if we come back to the definition we’ll quickly define core work and jettison the rest i.e. outsource it by discontinuing it, getting someone else to do it, or by doing it, or getting it done, in a different way.

A quality life could be defined by the compilation of a good many things, all in balance, with tensions between activities reduced such that we are achieving our purpose(s) whilst gaining fulfilment of that fact.

We can’t have life all ways. The more we cram in the more we will distance ourselves from true peace and shalom. There’s no use or sense in doing an enjoyable thing if we can’t do it peacefully. Sometimes these so-called good things create turmoil.

And true peace and shalom is accepting that we’ll never have it all, and we’ll never reconcile ourselves to the ultimate peace, apart from God.

This is about really focusing and directing our lives--taking personal responsibility for “us.”

Many times less is more. The more you can survive on less, the more peace you will get.

It really is that simple.

Copyright © 2009, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved.