What to do when you don't get your most important things done in a day

Do the Daily Card Challenge: https://www.simplyconvivial.info/daily-card/

What if you made a plan, you picked your real top three priorities for the day, and then you did none of them and you have no excuses. There is no good reason why you didn't do what you ought to do. 

Are we just bad planners or are we just hopeless? No. Neither.

How do we make progress without giving up and without making the same mistakes, again, figuring out the mistakes we made so that we can learn from them. That's the important lesson that we need to talk about and need to figure out.

What if you just didn't do the right thing? What then you are not worthless or helpless or hopeless. You are just normal human, maybe tired, maybe worn out, maybe burnt out. Maybe there's some kind of roadblock preventing you from getting those things done that you haven't identified. There all kinds of reasons that the top priority things don't happen. 

Sometimes we just don't have the energy or attention that we need to make them happen. Sometimes the high priority task actually has to take a back seat to catching up on sleep or maybe doing an exercise program. I know, I know don't shoot the messenger, but the reality is that we need to be sure that the fundamentals, the foundation of our productivity is taken care of before we can have that productivity to work in before we can get some of those big things done, we need to have sleep. 

We need to have energy. We need to have the time available. And sometimes we just don't have those foundational pieces. And so we have to scale back our expectations and focus on building the building blocks of managing life. Before we do the things that give us progress. Sometimes we don't really have any excuse at all, though. 

It happens. It happens to me. And I know it just happens to all of us. We just don't do what we ought to do. No good reason, no excuses. And that just needs to be confessed repented of before God who has given us the time he's given us the responsibility is he has given us the resources. And when we don't use them, when we just get stuck in self-indulgence or a lethargy or acedia, we can turn to repentance, which is not beating ourselves up and feeling bad. 

It's confessing and turning from the sin and asking God for the forgiveness and the grace and the motivation to move forward to obey. And he gives us the ability and the strength when we don't have it ourselves. And sometimes that's the lesson that we need to learn. Sometimes we need to recognize that we were trying to move forward and work in our own strength. 

Sometimes just making decisions or purchasing materials, just little steps that actually have to happen before the big project can move forward before the actual task can get done.

Turn what you think is one task into a project and list out every single step and then identify what is the one next thing that needs to happen out of these various steps. Pick one that's next and break that bigger overwhelming task down into just a getting started task. And a lot of times that is all we need to start seeing traction and getting some momentum. We just haven't broken things down into small enough pieces to actually manage and move forward. 

The daily card is a great way to make that happen because we can just flip it over and use the backside to brain dump, to figure out where you're stuck and why write down a prayer, write down the next, the real next step so that you can figure make a better choice. Tomorrow. The daily card really is the planner that we all need to see some progress in our day to day life.