Time Management and Bologna Sandwiches

Time Management and Bologna Sandwiches

I got home from work and was starving.  My pre-load shift at UPS usually had me home by 10am each day.  I stormed into the kitchen and prepared an exquisite gourmet meal.  Two fried bologna sandwiches consisting of simply four pieces of Oscar Meyer all beef bologna fried nearly to a crisp and four pieces of Butternut wheat bread.

In the living room directly in front of the Lazy Boy was a beat up wooden tv tray desperately waiting for the meal to arrive.  Lying next to the recliner was Abigail, my roommate’s beautiful Rottweiler.

The year was 1993 and I was sharing an apartment on the corner of Washington and 23rd in Chesterton Indiana.  Both roommates, Joe Garavalia and Jerry Splitgerber, worked construction Monday through Friday from around 7am till 3pm.  So Abigail and I would have the place to ourselves from the time I got home from UPS.

I placed the paper plate loaded with delicious sandwiches down on the tv tray and frolicked back into the kitchen for a cold beverage to wash it all down.

Upon my return the horrific scene filled my now grief stricken eyes!  Only one beautiful sandwich remained on the plate.  The other defenseless all beef bologna lovingly prepared sandwich was being murdered before my very eyes by the once sweet and innocent Abigail!!

“Abigail!  No!” I screamed.  But it was too late.  The victim was gone and not a breadcrumb of evidence remained.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.  “You can’t trust a dog to guard your food!”

And while we’re on the subject of trust… you should never trust anyone with your time.  

We all have the same amount of it: 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds in each day.  And yet there are agents out there that sell hundreds of home a year, while most struggle to sell 8 to 10.

In our business, time is the most precious commodity and yet most blatantly wasted, abused, destroyed, and disrespected.  A lot of the time (no pun intended) the perpetrator is you.  

You know what I’m talking about.  You stroll into the office at 10:20am, fire up the computer, scroll through dozens of pointless emails, then click around on Facebook, make a few comments, like even more.  Then Billy stumbles by from two cubicles down and begins to bend your ear about his only pending that is now on the ropes because his buyer charged $1200 worth of furniture from IKEA.

Oh darn, look at the time… who’s hungry for lunch?  Two hours later you’re back in the office just in time to check more emails!  

We must make a pact to guard our time, even from ourselves.  

If a masked marauder donkey kicked your front door open, stormed in and started for your prized possessions like your enormous television, one of your iPads, or God forbid your iPhone… you’d put up a helluva fight!  And these are all easily replaceable possessions.

Time is not replaceable, sadly… at all.  So katy bar the doors to your time!  Keep it guarded!

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” – William Penn