Where Did the Time Go?

What one week of tracking my time taught me about stewardship, competing callings, and the difference between being busy and being faithful.

Aug 14, 2026

Have you ever felt stretched entirely too thin? Of course you have. If you’re not a bot, than you’re a modern human living in the West (and, if you’re in the United States, you live in a culture where productivity is practically a badge of honor).

Well, I’m no different, and over the last several weeks, I’ve felt increasingly conflicted about how my time is being spent. I’m busy (probably the busiest I’ve ever been), but busyness and faithful stewardship aren’t always the same thing, and that has become increasingly clear to me lately.

More than once, I’ve sat down in the bed and just thought, “Where did the time go?”

I knew I was working and completing tasks, but I couldn’t always tell exactly where the hours had gone by the end of the day. Or worse, whether that time was going towards the things that actually deserved them. And, that really started to bother me.

I had a growing suspicion that church work was consuming substantially more of my time than I realized it would when I stepped into the role last October. At the same time, I feel like The Old Forge Press, my writing, and some of my other projects aren’t getting the attention they need. So, I started a mechanism to track my time, because I wondered if my family was getting enough of me.

Enter the Executive Activity Tracker (fancy name for an Excel spreadsheet I created). For the last week, I tracked where my time actually went. And, here were the results:

Corporate Job— 30 hours
Church— 19 hours, 20 minutes
Dust & Glory Media— 19 hours, 15 minutes
The Old Forge Press— 2 hours, 20 minutes
Church’s School (I’m on the Board)— 2 hours, 20 minutes
Authorial Work— 45 minutes (so incredibly sad!)
Personal — 51 hours

125 hours accounted for, which means that I had a total of 43 hours of sleep. That’s not great! Only around 6 hours of sleep each night.

Now, there are some important caveats. This wasn’t a normal workweek for me. I only worked half a day Tuesday at my corporate job and was off Wednesday altogether. Much of that additional time went into building out the podcast studio for Dust & Glory Media, which explains why that number was unusually high.

But, the church number caught my attention! I’m a Lay Elder, which means I’m not currently paid by the church. Yet, this week I spent nearly twenty hours doing church work on top of everything else. And, unlike Dust & Glory Media, I don’t think that number is particularly abnormal at all. In fact, I know that it’s lower than normal because I didn’t have a sermon or teaching to prep last week.

The church I serve in, is in a season where there is simply a tremendous amount to do. We’re growing, new people are coming, and new ministries are blossoming. And that type of growth requires systems, processes, high-level communication, planning/coordinating, and leadership capable of supporting what God may be doing. If we don’t do this right, we’ll pay in the long run. I like it to a city that begins to attract a lot of new people, but can’t design/build housing and roadways quickly enough. Eventually, you start to get bottlenecks and angry drivers and taxpayers. So, what we’re doing right now, is building infrastructure.

Anyway, that has forced me to wrestle with a real question: either I need to step back from some of that work and let someone else do it, so I can properly steward my other responsibilities, or we need to acknowledge that the Executive Pastor role has become substantial enough to warrant compensation. I think we’re increasingly landing on the latter, partly because there just isn’t anyone else to do it right now.

All that said, the church piece isn’t the only reason I’m tracking this. I also want to know whether the feeling that I wasn’t spending enough time with my family is actually true. Ultimately, that’s what interests me most about this experiment. The goal is alignment even more than efficiency.

I don’t need every category of my life to receive equal time. In fact, not only is that implausible, it probably shouldn’t be that way at all. But, I do want the way I spend my hours to reflect the actual priorities God has entrusted to me.

I am a husband, a father, an Elder, an employee, a writer, and a publisher. Each of these callings are good and right, but they compete for the same 168 hours every week.

So, when the week is over, I don’t want to merely say that I was busy. I want to be able to say I was faithful.

One week isn’t enough data to draw many conclusions, but it’s already enough to show me why I needed to start paying attention.

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