Creating Capacity
Creating capacity to give yourself away means opening up margin.
Margin is about
having excess time, energy and money left over at the end of the week, month and
year to use as you wish. Margin enables us to begin to discover the opportunities
around us and to have the resources (emotionally, physically, financially and spiritually)
to address them. Margin enables us to live life at a pace that lets us listen to God’s
calling and direction. In what areas of your life do you need to work at opening
up margin?
There are two steps toward margin: eliminating the low-value things from your life and overlapping the high-value items. Here’s one model to help you eliminate
lesser priority items from you life:
On a single piece of paper, make six columns:
the left one listing the competing activities and roles you play, then four columns
to rank those activities based on how valuable they are to you in terms of Obligation
(are you responsible to do this role?); Heart (do you enjoy it)?; Growth (is it enabling
you to learn and grow?);
Impact (are you making a significant eternal impact in this area?). Rank each activity from 1 to 5 in each of the categories (for example 1= low impact
and 5= high impact).
Now add the scores across and place the total score in the
right hand column. Consider eliminating those activities that score the lowest.
What specific next step could you take to open up margin?
*Excerpts taken by permission
from From Success to Significance: When the pursuit of success isn’t enough(Zondervan
2004)
Below, we've created an online tool for use with this exercise. Just
fill in the information below, and click the "New Activity" link to display as many
lines as you need. When complete, click "Calculate" and the tool
will calculate your scores and redisplay your activities from highest value to lowest.
|