Choosing between Better and Best

Every day, we’re bombarded with hundreds of ways we could spend our time. In the midst of all the options in front of us, how do we choose which ones will get our investment and which ones won’t?

It’s often been said that the way to make the best use of our time is to disengage from unproductive activities and engage in productive activities. This approach can give us a good start, but it fails to give us enough propulsion to reach the finish line. What happens when we’ve eliminated all the unproductive activities, yet we still don’t have time for all the productive activities set before us?

This is where I propose adding another approach into the mix which I call choosing between better and best. I strategically chose these two terms rather than the more common leadership terms good and great. Good and great are absolute terms whereas better and best are relative terms. Since we’re dealing with a competition here, where hundreds of activities are competing with one another for our time, an approach which employs absolute terms, like choosing productive over unproductive, will fail to offer us a holistic solution every time. The only way to fully address this challenge is to address it with relative terms. Therefore, my proposed approach, which I’ll be discussing more in depth throughout this article, is to choose the best activity over the better activities.

Recognizing a Good Activity

Here’s a paradox for you: I just got done explaining why I chose not to use the terms good and great, but then I chose to start my discussion using the term good. I believe it’s necessary to start here because we first need to recognize a good activity from a bad one.

So what is a good activity? It depends. What is your objective in life? The answer to this simple, yet challenging, question is going to help guide your answer to the first question. Any activity which supports your life objective is a good activity.

Here’s an example. Let’s say my objective in life is to become a millionaire. A good activity for me would be to spend lots of time working a job that pays a good salary. Another good activity would be to spend time learning how to invest my money wisely so that my investments can grow. A bad activity would be to go shopping at Easton Town Center. Another bad activity would be to go on a two week cruise in Hawaii.

All of these activities, by themselves, are neither good nor bad. They only become good or bad if they support or oppose our objectives. In this way of thinking, an activity which may be good for one person may be bad for another and vice versa.

Recognizing a Better Activity

Have you ever had a situation where you’ve done a thorough analysis of all your daily activities and found that all of them support your objective? Yet, you still don’t have enough time to do all of them. In these situations, we need to be able to choose the better activities.

How do we know which activities are better? Honestly, it’s all one huge experiment. But we can make informed hypotheses about which activities will be better than others. What I’ve found works well is to weigh the alternatives side by side and ask which one will support your life objective more. That’s the “better” activity.

In order to make an informed guess, you may need to gather more data. That’s fine. Gather as much data as you need before making a decision. But also don’t put off making the decision so long that you miss out on the opportunity.

Recognizing the Best Activity

When I was younger, I had one best friend at a time. For me, the term “best” has always implied one. There’s only one best hockey player. There’s only one best employee. I think you get the picture. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized some people think they have 20 best friends, or 20 best hockey players, or 20 best employees. Regardless of how many bests you think you can have, for the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to define “best” as one. What is the best activity?

This question cannot be answered lightly because your answer will greatly influence the direction of your life. This is why I’d encourage you to take a few steps to get there. First, I’d encourage you to list out the places and ways where God is currently and has previously invited you into his work. Second, I’d encourage you to ask God where he’s calling you to participate with him in his work in the future. Third, I’d encourage you to weigh all your options side by side and make a list of the ways in which each one will support and oppose your life objective. These steps will hopefully at least start you in the right direction towards finding the best activity in your life.

Example from My Life

It’s one thing to talk about all this stuff. But it’s another to apply it in your life and watch it work. Here’s how Amy and I have applied these steps in our lives.

First, we created a mission statement which reads: To glorify God by worshiping him through love, obedience, and discipleship. Sound a bit broad? We purposely made it broad so that it won’t limit the work God wants to do through us. At the same time, such a broad mission statement can be unhelpful. As you set your own mission statement, go for one that’s broad enough to not be too restricting, but narrow enough to still be helpful. The last thing we want to do is find ourselves throwing darts in the air hoping they land on a target.

Second, we eliminated all the activities from our lives which weren’t supporting our mission statement. One of the things I did was to cut way back on the time I was putting into our financial investments. But the biggest thing we did was make the intentional decision for me to not seek out a full-time job after I left my previous full-time job. This was a very hard decision with all the pressure we feel from our culture for me to have a full-time job, but we decided that our mission statement would be best supported in other ways. And God has continued to affirm that decision by shutting doors for full-time job opportunities that would’ve usually been open for me.

Third, we weighed our good activities side by side to determine which ones were “better.” This part of the process was very challenging because we had to make an intentional decision to stop doing some activities we enjoyed doing and supported our mission statement. However, by eliminating these activities, we reduced our stress levels and have been able to dedicate the necessary resources to the activities which are better supporting our mission statement.

Fourth, we decided which activity was our best activity. To say it another way, we made a priority list giving each activity a specific level of importance. The absolute best activity, number one on our list, is spending time with God. No matter how many other activities I have in my day, I always make it a priority to spend time with God by reading a few chapters of the Bible and communicating with him throughout the day. Since we look to God to set our priorities for the day, some of our other priorities can change on a daily basis, but if he’s not calling us to invest our time in something specific that day, we stick to the rest of our priority list. Our second-best activity is spending time with each other. Third is spending time in the mission fields in which he’s placed us such as with our friends, families, work-places, neighbors, and my recreational hockey league. That doesn’t mean we don’t allot time for eating, sleeping, reading, video games, etc. Those activities are necessary to refresh us so that we have the energy to do the better activities; we just make sure we don’t get carried away with spending too much time there.

Last, we regularly evaluate our activities to determine whether we’re still staying true to our mission statement. When certain activities don’t seem to be supporting our mission statement as much as we thought they would, or when another activity begins to support it better, we won’t hesitate to drop an activity. For example, I gave up my leadership role in Backyard Mission Trip a couple years ago because it wasn’t supporting our mission statement as much as other activities. And when my term on Habitat for Humanity’s board expires at the end of the month, I will be giving up that activity. Both of those activities are good activities, but they aren’t supporting our mission statement as much as other activities. Regularly evaluating our activities can be frustrating at times, but it’s necessary to keep us focused on our end goal.

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As you chew on the contents of this article, I’d encourage you to think about how you prioritize the activities in your life. What is your life objective? Have you written it down in a simple, memorable statement? Do the activities you’re currently doing support or oppose your objective? Are there other activities which might support it more than the ones you’re currently doing?