The Value Of Your Time

The Value of Your Time

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1, NIV

Ever heard of horology? It’s the science of measuring time, and it has been around, well, a long time. It started back in the days of the Babylonians, who came up with the idea for the sixty-second minutes and the sixty-minute hours we use now.

The first time-keeping device was probably a primitive, stick-in-the-ground version of the sundial, with the stick’s shadow moving as the sun moved. Other devices involved bowls of water filled or emptied within a certain period of time, bowls of watermarked candles, oil lamps that would burn a measured amount of oil, or sticks of incense that burned at a measured rate and would drop a thread-suspended metal ball onto a bell. These days, horology is in the hands of scientists who go to great lengths to accurately measure minuscule moments in time: it’s now measured literally in billionths of a second by atomic clocks. Horology has come a long way.

When it comes to measuring time in your marriage, we want to suggest you use a different device. Consider measuring time in terms of its value. In other words, how valuable is the time you spend together? After all, each of us places a different value on the increments of time, as the following popular illustration reveals:

To know the value of one year . . . ask the student who failed the final exam.

To know the value of one month . . . ask the mother of a premature baby.

To know the value of one week . . . ask the editor of a weekly newsmagazine.

To know the value of one day . . . ask the wage earner with six children.

To know the value of one hour . . . ask the lovers waiting to meet.

To know the value of one minute . . . ask the person who missed the plane.

To know the value of one second . . . ask the accident survivor.

To know the value of one millisecond . . . ask the Olympic silver medalist.

When you begin to measure time in terms of its value, rather than how many minutes or hours have passed, it helps you put it into perspective. Rather than thinking about where you can carve out an hour together in your schedules, you can begin to think in terms of what you’d like that hour to accomplish for you. Maybe what you really want is time to share a good laugh, or time to be known, or time to solve a particular problem. And any one of these may take more or less than an hour.

Get the point? Rather than measuring time in increments, try measuring your time in terms of its purpose. You’ll be amazed to find you have more time than you thought.

I learned to tell time and now I’m always late.

—Lily Tomlin