Free B00CHVIVMY EBOK by Jon Acuff Page A

minutes I was racking up! Write it down. If I was exercising, that was dance time. (That’s what happens when you try to come up with an acronym. At least one of the letters in every acronym is going to be hit with the ugly stick. I promise I auditioned fifty other D-words until I was forced to go with dance .)
    I carried a little notebook around with me, constantly checking off my minutes to make sure I was using the SWORD that would blaze my path to more awesome more often. I wrote multiple, fairly pretentious blog posts about it to tell everyone this amazing plan I had discovered. I was a laser of ridiculousness, regularly asking my wife things like, “Well, I played with the kids outside, which was kind of exercise, so that’s Dance; but I was serving them as well, as their dad. Do you think those six minutes count as Dance or Serve? Should I create a category called SANCE that marries the two?” At which point my wife would slam her head in a drawer a few times.
    I gave up on the whole SWORD system after a month and promptly got right back to wasting all my time. I only had two speeds: waste all my time or try to be impossibly perfect with my time.
    What I learned in that season was that when it comes to time management, or most other ways to accelerate awesome, change has to be simple. Especially new change. It has to be easily manageable, or we’ll fail at it before we even start. We can add on other changes down the road, but when we’re beginning our journey, we just need to get one thing right. One tiny taste of progress. The mountain can wait. It’s been there for years and will still be there tomorrow. We don’t have to scale it all at once. We don’t have to rescue our entire year at the onset of the journey.
    In fact, all we have to do is find thirty minutes in our week. One half hour is all I’m asking you to give at the start. This simple sacrifice was the biggest, most important thing I did to change my career. I can say without a shadow of a doubt if I hadn’t found those thirty minutes, I never would have written four books. I wouldn’t have moved to Nashville for my dream job with Dave Ramsey. And I wouldn’t have made it through the land of Learning. Thirty minutes. That’s all you’re going to rescue, and fortunately, I know where to find yours.
    Be selfish at 5:00 a.m.
    You’re too busy to be awesome right now. Whether it’s a book or a blog or a project at work or a new job, life is probably too full to really work tirelessly on your “thing.”
    You’ve got a lot going on. I do too. And sometimes, when we focus on our dreams and try to take steps down the path of awesome, our wives cry in the kitchen. That’s been my experience, anyway.
    One Tuesday during a holiday break, I spent four hours writing a book idea. My kids were occupied with new Christmas presents and my wife was straightening up the house. At about three in the afternoon, I resurfaced from our home office and talked to my wife in the kitchen.
    Her words were short and quick. I asked her what was wrong and she immediately replied, “I thought we were going to spend the day together.” Then she started crying.
    In that moment and many others, I failed to follow a simple rule of awesomeness. I was selfish at the wrong time of the day. Those hours—in the middle of the day during Christmas vacation—weren’t really mine. When you’re a spouse, parent, or caregiver, your time doesn’t just belong to you. It’s in large part communal property, shared by the entire house.
    But that doesn’t mean you can’t be selfish with some of that time. You just have to know when you can be, which is why I mention 5:00 a.m.
    The mornings I get up and write from 5:00 to 5:30, you’d be surprised at how infrequently my wife tells me I’ve been ignoring her. You’d be shocked at how rarely my oldest daughter wants me to watch her jump rope before the sun breaks the horizon. You may even be mystified at how seldom my youngest