The human vocation is twofold: to love and to work.
We spend a significant part of our lives working.
In many ways, work appears to be at the center of our lives.
We begin our education as children with a view to helping us enter the world of work.
We step into that world and carry on with a job and a career, hopefully with steadiness and success.
Finally, we retire to spend the autumn of life doing—well, doing something other than the work we’ve spent our careers doing.
Work occupies the central and longest span of our lives.
Work is both important and necessarily, limited; therefore, it’s on us to spend that time wisely.
Our Christian patrimony hands down to us a helpful phrase, taken from the Greek philosopher Aristotle: it is proper to the wise man to order.
Wisdom “orders all things well” (Wisdom of Solomon 8:1), including time.
Living and working wisely requires ordering our time well.
Ordering time requires an active, rather than passive, posture.
When it comes to work, this means arranging our time proactively rather than reactively.
We’re all familiar with a reactive approach: taking the day as it comes, taking messages as they pop up, phone calls as they come in, etc.
While almost every job will require this sort of approach to some things, it is common, especially with the technology that surrounds us, for us to be almost exclusively reactive.
Instead, wisdom encourages proactivity; it formulates a plan by which time and our efforts will be used for priorities and excellence.
Those tasks which require a response, a “reaction,” will certainly find their place in a schedule, but most moments in the day must be spent on our larger and more important professional goals.
For many of us, the enemy here is subtle and common: distraction. Work very often requires careful and prolonged attention, whether the work is manual labor, intellectual work, service-related, or another type.
But this type of attention and diligence is arduous; it has a toilsome character, a consequence of the fall (see Genesis 3:17).
When the going gets tough, distractions tend to afflict us.
Dealing with distractions requires both immediate willpower and long-term planning.
By ordering our time wisely, planning, and setting reasonable goals, we structure our lives and time to take away some of the typical footholds that distraction finds in our day.
As you enter into prayer, reflect on your typical work day in the presence of Jesus.
He labored with Joseph in the workshop at Nazareth.
Ask him for the wisdom to arrange your work in a way that counteracts distractions and interruptions.
When they come anyway, ask for the strength to overcome them both manfully and gracefully.
