The Moral Virtue of Prudence: 4 Steps to Regaining Control

Busyness is the dangerous trap we all fall prey to. Our true problem is being overloaded and lacking margin. We are too busy to live. The solution to these challenges is the moral virtue of prudence, which leads us to focus our lives on what is really important. So let’s start taking a closer look at the solution. I am going to offer you a step-by-step procedure for starting the process of taking back your time.

Step 1: Set goals that align yourself to your priorities.

At the end of the last article, you were positioned to create a list of priorities to focus your life on. But if we want these priorities to be more than meaningless, airy ideals, we need to align our lives to them in a very real way.

Most people know about setting goals, but very few actually do it.

This is the purpose of goal setting. I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea. But were you aware of the purpose of setting goals? Goals are meant to create a bridge between your priorities and your everyday life.

Right now I am working on this set of goals

1. Pray morning prayer every morning and at least one decade of the Rosary before beginning my afternoon work
2. Dedicate every Sunday to being with my wife and children (second only to Mass and prayer)
3. Write one article each week for this Catholic Time Management series
4. Write one article each week for my parish education website’s “Learner Identity” series
5. Edit one video each week for my online membership program
6. Follow an eating plan that will help me make healthier eating choices and lead to weight loss

Notice that while I have five goals in this set, the first one is not time intensive – it’s just a matter of establishing a habit of prayer – and neither is the last one – though ideally it would include an hour of exercise each day in addition to calorie counting. Only three of them really require a large amount of dedicated time. That’s ideal for one set. Don’t try to do everything at once. Create a set of manageable goals and focus yourself on them. You can always add goals to your list as you establish habits with these or accomplish your goal’s end (like losing a certain amount of weight, for example).

Step 2: Schedule the tasks into your day

OK, so now your goals are your primary focus for your day. The next step is to actually schedule these activities into your day. This is the place where I struggle the most. My days never seem to go as I have planned them. But after a few months of habit, it is getting easier. Traditional wisdom says to use of the same hour each day for a particular task. This works for me sometimes.

So, I pray morning prayer during my first cup of coffee each morning. I try to dedicate an hour in the morning to writing.

But for the most part my days aren’t predictable enough for this to work for me. If your daily schedule is fairly stable, assigning a task to a specific time of the day may work for you.

An alternative that I have found works better is to assign a goal to a particular day of the week. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire day is dedicated to the goal. To make my goal a priority I dedicate myself to making measurable progress in each day’s goal. However, keep in mind that I work at home so many of my goals are related to productivity in the apostolate, which is my work.

• So Monday is my administration day when I take care of all of those things that could distract me the rest of the week (paying bills, making deposits, answering emails, etc.)
• Tuesday is dedicated to article writing
• Wednesday is the day to work on lesson planning for the online education programs
• Thursday I set aside for shooting and editing videos for the online education programs
• Friday is dedicated to video editing and website work
• Sunday is dedicated to God and family

Specifying an objective to each day keeps me from wasting time trying to figure out what to do each day. It also helps me balance out my time among my goals.

Step 3: Get rid of what Dean Jackson calls the “reactive activators” – assign a specific time of the day or week to handle them.

OK, so you have your goals scheduled and you’re about to sit down and work on them. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you really have to focus on the self-discipline part of prudence.

It is so easy to get distracted from the task on hand. I have the really bad habit of opening multiple browser windows and flipping among them.

Dean Jackson warns us against “reactive activators,” those little things in our lives that draw our attention by causing us to react spontaneously. We get an email, we feel we have to respond immediately. Our cell phone rings and we must answer it. We feel we need to keep up with our social media feeds. People come to us demanding our attention – sometimes for important things, sometimes for trivial. All of these are examples of “reactive activators.” All of these are thieves that steal control over our time.

There is a time and a place for all of these things. But to tame the reactive activators, we need to be proactive toward them rather than reactive. That means scheduling them into our day. Assign one hour (or half an hour) each day for email, and another hour (or half an hour) for social media. Or you can do what I do and assign a day for all of that kind of activity, then keep it to a minimum the other days of the week. When someone interrupts a work period, politely ask if you can get back to him or her and schedule a time.

Not that you can never be spontaneous. But if you’re going to spontaneously allow your children to interrupt your work, let it be a free choice rather than a begrudged reaction to their demands. You will bless them much more with your total presence than with distracted, begrudging attention.

So again, the message here is to strategically schedule your goals, and to focus on what you have scheduled.

Step 4: Persevere in your goals until they are complete before moving on to the next set of goals.

The other way we sometimes waste our time (and I’m guilty of this one as well) is that we get tired of working on one set of goals and we become tempted to move on to a fresh set. So we move on before the current set is completed. Then we get sick of the new set of objectives and move on again. We therefore fritter away our time without actually accomplishing anything (Did I really just say “fritter”? What does that mean, anyway?).

The virtue needed here is perseverance. We need to stick with a single objective until we have seen it through to completion. Finish the entire objective set before moving on to the next or making any changes to the current set (with rare exceptions that allow for flexibility).

This simple four step process will help you to focus. Focus will allow you to take control of your time and to most effectively apply yourself to what is most important. That’s the goal of Catholic time management. In the next article, we’ll go back to the idea of focusing on what is most important to find true happiness.

Step 5: Practice the Moral Virtue of Prudence in Other Areas of Life

The cool thing about a moral virtue is that it acts a lot like muscles. The more you use them the stronger they get, and it doesn’t matter overly much which exercises you do. Get into the habit of making goals and planning how to meet them. If you do this in areas that are easy, you’ll find it easier to do it in areas that are more difficult. The same is true for every moral virtue.

Bonus Tip: The key to changing any behavior – including bringing more order to your chaotic life – is to systematize your behavior into habit formation. From the Abbey teaches how to form key spiritual habits in five areas of the Catholic spiritual life. If you’d like help building these spiritual virtues, I want to invite you to get more involved in From the Abbey by taking advantage of the opportunity I chose for you below. 

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