Your Calendar Tells The Truth About What You Value

Ever feel busy yet strangely absent from your own life? We put language to that ache—time drift—and walk straight at it with clarity, compassion, and practical steps. Our conversation starts by tracing how days slip from intention to reaction, why busyness can look impressive while hollowing out our inner life, and how a theology of time reframes everything. Time isn’t an enemy to fight; it’s a God-made arena where love, obedience, and wisdom take shape in ordinary hours.

We unpack six clear signs that your calendar no longer reflects your values: “I’m busy” as an identity, schedules that own us, chronic scarcity for what matters, the feeling of being behind despite doing a lot, the loss of sacred anchors like prayer and rest, and screens eating every in‑between moment. Underneath are deeper roots—over-availability fueled by fear, staying busy to avoid pain, hustle-shaped worth, vague priorities, and the pull of digital discipleship. Naming these drivers brings relief and honesty, opening space for a different way.

Then we get practical. You’ll learn a simple 24-hour audit to tell the truth about where your time actually goes, followed by the Rule of Three: one daily rhythm with God, one with people, and one for growth, health, or calling. We show how to set specific, season-wise commitments, anticipate blockers like late-night scrolling and last-minute requests, and protect presence without becoming a productivity machine. Along the way we anchor in Scripture, a short prayer, and a concise affirmation you can carry into your day. Drift happens by default. Design happens by decision. Start with one honest audit, one Rule of Three, and one re-aimed hour—and watch purpose, peace, and presence return. If this helps, subscribe, share with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to support the show.

Scriptures References: 

Psalm 90:12 So teach us to consider our mortality, so that we might live wisely. 

Biblical Studies Press. 2019. The NET Bible. Second Edition. Denmark: Thomas Nelson.

Ephesians 5:16-17: Therefore consider carefully how you live—not as unwise but as wise,  taking advantage of every opportunity, because the days are evil. For this reason do not be foolish, but be wise by understanding what the Lord’s will is.

 Biblical Studies Press. 2019. The NET Bible. Second Edition. Denmark: Thomas Nelson.

Reference to: Atomic Habits, by James Clear https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits-workbook

Truth Be Told Project Podcast introduction

Transcript

From Community Drift To Time Drift

SPEAKER_00 0:23

In the last episode, we talked about community drift. We name what happens when you shift from belonging to just attending. You're in the room, but not really in relationship. You're around God's people, but nobody really knows what you what's going on with you. You became what I called a Sunday ghost. Present physically, absent relationally. We said you were never meant to follow Jesus alone, that the Christian life was designed for one another rhythms. This is where you're bearing burdens of each other, confessing to one another, encouraging one another, not just consuming content, but there's another layer that quietly sabotages community, it sabotages our health, it sabotages our walk with God. Even when our intentions are good, it's not always sin in the obvious sense. It doesn't always feel dark. In fact, a lot of people will praise you for it. I'm talking about time drift. When your days stop reflecting what you say you value, and unbusy quietly becomes your identity. Community can be healthy, your theology can be solid, your desire for God can be real. But if your time is constantly fragmented, overcommitted, hijacked by urgency, swallowed by distraction, everything else will eventually drift. So in this episode, we're going to talk about time drift. What happens when your minutes and hours slowly slide out of alignment with God's design for your life and what it looks like to come back on purpose? Let me take you into a familiar scene. It's Sunday night. Maybe scrolling your phone, maybe half watching something. For a moment, you glance at the clock and then at the calendar on your phone. Monday through Sunday. Gone. You think, man, where did my week go? You can kind of reconstruct it. You got work, your commute, your errands, kids' activities, church service, maybe a hangout or two, a lot of scrolling, a handful of late nights. But when you ask, where did my best energy go? What did I actually invest myself in spiritually, relationally, and meaningfully? Things get quiet. You realize you didn't really pray except for those quick little crisis prayers. You didn't really slow down to listen to God through scripture reading. You didn't really get to listen to God. You you had things on your heart you wanted to create and start or repair, but they stayed in your head. You meant to call that friend, but the day got away from you. You meant to spend quality time with your spouse and kids, but you kept saying maybe tomorrow. You feel the ache, not just tiredness. You there's a sense of waste. Like I was busy, but I don't know if I was alive. You shrug it off, you tell yourself, next week will be different, but next week often looks like last week. That's time drift. That's time drift. Let's put a sentence on it. From a discipleship lens, I'd define it like this. Time drift is what happened when your days slowly move from being intentionally stewarded around God's presence, around his priorities, around your calling, to being mostly consumed by reaction, by distraction, and survival. It's not just that you're doing only bad things. Most of the time you're doing necessary things. Sometimes it's even good things. They're just unexamined things. And over time your life becomes shaped by whatever is loudest, whatever is urgent, whatever is in front of your face, instead of what is deepest, what God is inviting you into, and what truly matters. Time drift is subtle because being busy looks impressive. Being hurried looks productive. Being always available looks generous, but you can be extremely busy yet deeply avoidant. Constantly available, yet profoundly absent. Always in motion, yet spiritually stuck. Time drift is not about scheduling. Before we get too practical, we need a theology moment. Time is not an enemy that we're fighting. Time is not a random accident that we're trapped in. Time is created. It is God made. God made days and nights. God made seasons. God made rhythms for of work and rest. He tied human life to rhythm on purpose. Scripture tells us in Psalm 90, verse 12, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. And then it also says, in I believe it's Ephesians, it says, look carefully then how you walk, making the best use of the time because the days are evil. God knows that days are limited. He knows that our energy is finite. He knows that our attention is valuable. So time isn't just a background detail. Time is the arena in which we follow Jesus. It's the canvas on which our obedience is painted. It's the currency we spend to show what we truly value. Most of us will say, God is important. My soul is important. My marriage is important. My calling matters. My health matters. My community matters. But if someone could watch how we spend our mornings, our evenings, our weekends, or in-between moments, would they see that? Time drift is when the answer is, I believe those things, but my time doesn't show it. Let's get concrete. As we walk through these, don't just listen for information. Listen for that little sting of recognition. That's where the spirit is already talking. And these are signs. Be mindful that these are not in chronological order. Not all of them may apply to you. There may be one or two or few or all of them may apply to you. And they do not have to follow in the order that I'm giving them. There's no chronological order to this list or these signs. Sign number one, I'm busy has become our default answer. When people ask, How are you? Our reflexive answer is, you know, I'm tired. I'm busy. You know, I'm just out here grinding, and we wear it like a badge, even when there's nothing specific going on. We just feel the need to be busy because stillness feels suspicious. Free time feels lazy. Saying I rested sometimes feels wrong. You you we can't imagine a life with margin on purpose. That's drift. Sign number two. Your schedule owns you. You don't own it. Your days feel like this. Constantly putting out fires, always behind, always reacting to other people's emergencies. You're always reacting to their messages and expectations. You're rarely choosing proactively what matters before the day starts. You wake up and the day just kind of happens. Notifications shape your path more than prayer does. Other people's urgencies drive your schedule more than God's invitations. And by the end of the day, you feel used by time, not trusted with it. Sign number three there's always no time for what matters most? If I sat down with your calendar and you sat down with mine, where does time with God show up? Where does time with your spouse or your kids show up? Unhurried? Where does rest show up? Where does making progress on the things you say God has put on your heart show up? And your honest answer is, you know, I don't know. There's no time. That's time drift. A hard truth, there's no time often means I've always spent my time on other things. It's not that you never have time, it's that your time is already pledged to patterns you stop questioning. Sign number four, you constantly feel behind even when you've done a lot. You go to bed exhausted, empty, but wearily unsatisfied. You did tasks, you answered calls, you answered emails, you had conversations, you multitasked, but there's this nagging sense. I didn't touch the things that matter most. You feel both overworked and underfulfilled, like you're running on a treadmill. There's a ton of movement, but no real ground covered. And that restlessness, time drift. You have little to no sacred rhythms. If I asked, what are your anchors in the week? The time set apart for God, time set apart for rest, for reflection, for community, would you say, uh, you know, brother, I I go to church on Sunday if I can make it. When I find time, I read the Bible and I pray a little bit, and I and I'll rest when everything else gets done. Time drift erases your anchors. Everything is negotiable, devotion is negotiable, rest is negotiable, community is negotiable. The only non-negotiables are deadlines and demands. Sign number six. Your phone or screen eats your in-between moments. Look at your screen time. Android and Apple both have apps in which you can check your screen time and look at the analytics of how you spend your time. Scrolling your phone. It has how many times you pick up your phone. It has how many times how long you've spent scrolling on certain apps. It gives you the whole rundown of everything you do on your phone. Look at your screen time. Notice how often you reach for your phone in any moment of boredom or pause. How many hours a day go to scrolling, watching, and looking at rabbit holes on YouTube and TikTok? How often does five minutes become 45 minutes? Again, not all of that is evil, but time drift loves unexamined scrolling. It loves your best mental energy. And your best mental energy gets spent on consuming content, leaving fumes for scripture, prayer, or reflection. Time drift is not just I need a planner. Planners can help, but there are deep roots, let's name a few. Some of us are overbooked because we are over-available. We say yes too much. We say yes when we're overloaded. We say yes to avoid letting people down, feeling guilty, being seen as selfish. Your time is split into a thousand little pieces by a thousand small yeses. And you never ask God about it. Underneath is a belief that if I say no, I'll be rejected or lose value. So your schedule is not shaped by calling, it's shaped by fear. Route number two, avoidance of pain or honesty. Sometimes we stay busy so we don't have to feel. If I slow down, I might feel lonely. If I slow down, I might have to face my marriage. If I slow down, my regrets might surface. If I slow down, I might have to deal with God about things I've been carrying and things I've been doing. So we stay in motion, we overwork, we over-schedule, we overcommit. Busy becomes a socially acceptable way to avoid inner work. Underneath this, silence is dangerous, stillness is scary. Route number three is a distorted view of value. You may have been taught explicitly or implicitly that your worth is in what you produce. If you're not grinding, you're falling behind. You know, rest is laziness, margin is for the weak. Grind, grind, grind, push, push, push, do, do, do, commit, commit, commit. You know, you could do that for a paycheck, and then people will force you to do it for Jesus. Grinding ministry, grinding everything. So you we live and you live as if I'm not busy, or if I'm not busy, I'm not valuable. You can preach grace, you could believe the gospel, and still be discipled by hustle culture. Route number four there is no clear sense of calling or priorities. If you're not clear on what God is asking you to do in this season, who God has specifically entrusted to you, or what your lane is, you will try to do a little of everything. Be everything to everyone, respond to everything that pops up. Time drift thrives in vagueness. If you don't know your God-shaped priorities, every request looks equally urgent. Fifth route is digital discipleship. Let's be real. Most of us are being discipled more by our phones than by our Bibles. Every app is designed to keep you engaged, scrolling and checking and refreshing. And you know, I just learned this. You know, I'm thinking, you know, that I'm just gonna pick my phone up and put it down. But notifications pop up, people pop up that I've engaged with in the past, and you start seeing their posts and things happen to where the app encourages you to stay engaged and keep scrolling and keep checking and keep refreshing. But that's more for another episode. But we are more discipled by our phones. We don't have to decide to drift in time, we just have to let our default notifications set the pace. Throughout this series, I have developed, oh, I haven't developed, but I've discovered a concept. We are composed as a unity of soul, mind, body, community, and time. And this is a saying that I've I've uh kind of come up with. Mind is what we use to dwell on things and imagine things and rehearse things. We are also composed of a body. This is our nervous system, our energy, and our habits. We are a part of a community. This is the people who we walk with. And we all live in time. This is the environment where all of that plays out. The soul, mind, body, community. All plays out in time. And time drift touches all of it. It touches our soul when our time is dominated by noise. It touches our soul when our love for God grows distracted. And when we lose our appetite for fellowship with Him and communion with Him and a desire for His presence. Time drift touches our mind when we're where constant hurry fragments our attention and we feel too tired to think about deeper things, especially the deeper things of God. It touches our mind when reflection becomes rare and reaction becomes normal. Time drift also touches our body. Overcommitment and lack of rest keep our bodies in survival mode. Our sleep suffers. Stress lives in our shoulders, in our chest, and in our stomach. And time drift also affects our community. We don't have time for real conversations. We don't have time for relationships. We skim relationships instead of sinking into them. And we bail on rhythms that require showing up consistently. Everything we've covered health, community, calling, money, identity, is influenced by this. How are you spending the hours you've been given? So let's put it in the language of the truth be told project. You know that the truth be told project has this saying of don't just live by default, live by design. I want to keep that saying going. So Tom by default says, I'll do whatever's in front of me. If it feels urgent, it must be important. If I have time, after everything else, I'll pray, I'll rest or connect with people. My schedule is whatever other people need for me. It looks like no real Sabbath. And by the way, Sabbath is not a day here. I'm not talking about a day, talking about a concept. Sabbath means rest. It doesn't matter which day of the week you take a Sabbath or rest, a Sabbath rest. Time by default says there's no margin, there's constant low grade anxiety. Rest feeling like collapse, meaning that you got no other choice but to collapse and fall. Your body will make you rest sometimes. Time by default says there's it gives you this sense that you're behind on life. But time by design, God's design says, My hours are not random. There's something entrusted to me. Tom by design, God's design says, I want my calendar to reflect my calling, not just my compulsions. Tom by design says, I will make space for God, I'll make space for rest, and I'll make space for relationships on purpose. Time by design also says that not every request is my assignment. Sometimes obedience looks like saying a powerful word, one of the shortest words in the English language, and that is the word no. Sometimes obedience looks like saying no. Noah is so powerful it could save you from destroying your health, physical and mental health. It could help you save your relationships, your marriage. No is such a powerful word that we need to learn to use more, especially with regard to how we spend our time. Design doesn't mean you become a productivity machine. It doesn't mean that every day looks perfect, it doesn't mean that you control every variable. Design means I will respond to what I can control in a way that honors God and aligns with who He's called me to be. Here's where we get practical. We'll call this the 24-hour audit and the rule of three. The goal is not to shame you with numbers, but to tell the truth about your time and make a small concrete shift. I learned this concept, not verbatim, not the 24-hour audit, but the idea of making small changes from a book called Atomic Habits, written by a man by the name of James Clare. I will leave a link to where you could purchase the book in the show notes and or description. Here's the 24-hour audit I want you to do. If you can do this with a pen and paper or a notes app, pick a normal weekday, not a vacation, not a crisis day, just an average without complicating it to answer in the last 24 hours. Where did my time actually go? Estimate in 30 minute or one hour blocks inside those blocks, right? Commute, sleep, meals, family time, TV or streaming, social media or scrolling, games, chores, or errands, time with God, time with community, quiet or reflection. Be honest. If you don't know, check your screen time report in your in your Android phone or your iPhone. They have apps that'll give you highly detailed analytics of how you spend your time on your phone, and it will it will tell you with lots of detail. Now once you sketched it out, ask these questions. Question number one. What surprised me? Did social media take more than I realized? Did I did just one episode become three hours? Where do I see clear drift? Little to no time with God, no intentional time with my loved ones, no real rest. I only collapsed after my body couldn't take anymore. Question number three if this last 24 hours repeated for the next 365 days, who would I become? That question alone can be sobering. There's no shame, just truth. God works with truth. Now that you've seen your current pattern, we're not going to try to fix your entire life in one week. We're going to reaim it. And I want you to adopt what I'll call the rule of three. Simple idea, small, simple steps. And each day identify three things that matter most in light of our in light of your walk with God and protect them. Not 20 things, not 10 things, three. These three should be specific, they should be realistic for this season, and they should be tied to what you say you value. For example, with God, you will say something like, I'll spend at least 15 focused minutes with God in scripture and prayer before I scroll my phone. You'll say, with people, I will be fully present with my spouse or my kids or a close friend for 20 or 30 minutes today with no screens. When I say no screens, I'm talking about not taking selfies. So you could put it on the highlight reel on social media, but take 20 or 30 minutes without touching your phone. Absolutely no screens unless there is an emergency call or something. But be fully present, to be fully present for 20 or 30 minutes with a loved one. Or with your calling or your health or time you want to take towards growth, I will spend 30 minutes on my body, on my craft, or my calling, or my next step, even if the rest of the day is crazy. And write them down like this. My rule of three is with God to do blank, with people to do blank. With my calling or my health or my growth, I will do blank. This is the rule of three. Then ask what usually gets in the way of you of you being committed to those three things. Is it late nights of mind that's scrolling? Is it unnecessary errands? Is it saying yes to last minute stuff you could say no to? You're not trying to control everything. You're deciding on most days, these three will happen before I give the rest of my time away. Over weeks and months, your life shifts. Not because you did something huge once, but because you did something small on purpose and you did it consistently. You also know from listening to this podcast, if you visited or downloaded or listened to any other episodes, we have some design check-in questions for this episode. These are our reflection questions. And here are some reflection questions I want you to ask. There's typically seven of them. Question number one, what does my last week of time honestly say I value most? Not what I claim to value, what my hours actually reveal? Question number two, where am I hiding behind I'm busy to avoid? Is it God? Is there a hard conversation you need to have with someone? Is it facing myself? Question three, who or what gets the first and best of my energy? Is it your job? Is it your phone? Is it entertainment? Is it God? Is it people? Question number four, what am I always too tired or too busy to do that I know deep down is part of God's call for me? Question number five, what would a rule of three look like in my life? One rhythm with God, one with people, one with growth, health, and calling in mind. Question six, if my life stayed exactly like this for the next five years, would I be okay with the person I'm becoming? Question seven is our final question. What's one small block of time I could reclaim this week and re-aim toward something that aligns with God's design for me? Here's a word to live by this week, and it comes from a scripture I referred to earlier in this episode is Psalm 90, verse 12. And it says, Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. And it also comes from a scripture in Ephesians to be careful how you live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of your time because the days are evil. I want you to realize this: that your time is not an accident, your days are not disposable. And pray this prayer with me. Lord, teach me to see my hours the way you see them and to use them the way you design. I will not let hurry write my story. By your grace, I will make the most of my time, not just by being busy, but by being faithful. In Jesus' name I pray. Here's an affirmation I want you to repeat. My time is a trust, not a toy. I will live this day on purpose. Should weaken our affirmation? As we close this time drift episode, think about where we've been. We've we talked about drifting in your spiritual life, your first love. We talked about drifting in your emotions and your marriage. We talked about drifting into numbing and addiction. We talked about drifting intellectually. We talked about drifting in your work and calling. We talked about drifting in your health and your body, keeping the score. We talked about drifting from community, still in the room, but not in relationship. And now we've talked about drifting in your time, your days getting written by everything, but the designer. Because God hasn't just given you breath, days, relationships, He's giving you gifts, He's giving you abilities, He's giving you a voice, He's giving you creative wiring, He's given you ways to show up in the world that are not random. And when time drifts, those gifts often end up buried, unused, or misused. So in the next episode, we're going to talk about what happens when the things God put in you get buried under fear, comparison, busyness, and drift. But before we go there, I want you to sit with this. You may feel behind, you may feel scattered, you may feel like your schedule is chaos, but if you're still breathing, you are not out of time for God to rewrite how you live your days. You don't have to overhaul your life overnight. You can start with one honest audit, one rule of three, one reaimed hour. Those might feel small, but small, faithful shifts in how you use time will over time reshape your life. Because at the end of the day, drift happens by default. Design happens by decision. And as always, don't just live by default, live by design. God's design. Peace.