How Technology Help Us Put First Things First
By Chris Denning
We’re in the middle of a series where we’re talking about our priorities and how we can begin to put first things first. Last week we talked about how to do that with our time, and this weekend we’re looking at how we do that with our money.
It might seem overwhelming or even unattainable to try and shift your priorities. How do we put these great ideas into place in our lives? One way that we can do this is by leveraging the technology we already have in our lives to help us put first things first.
I want to share a few ways that we can use technology to truly put the most important things first. See if you can use any of these tips to help you prioritize your life:
1. Send Bible Reading to Your Inbox
When you ask people what keeps them from reading their Bible, a majority of people will say that they just don’t have time to do it. THIS IS CRAZY! We have time to watch Bachelor in Paradise but we can’t take 10 minutes to read our Bibles? Maybe others simply forget to put it before other things. Still a pretty lame excuse.
However, we can get around this issue very easily! By utilizing Bible.com and creating a free account, we can send our Bible reading for the day directly to our inbox every morning. All you need to do is select one of their Bible reading plans and select the option to have the daily reading sent to your inbox. This way, when you go to check your email first thing, you’ll have your Bible reading waiting for you.
This will take 5 MINUTES to set up and you can turn your inbox into your morning devotional.
2. Create a Daily Routine Calendar (With Reminders!)
A lot of people live their lives around their calendars. Meetings, kid’s events, EVERYTHING is programmed into your iCal, Google Calendar or Outlook to make sure you don’t miss anything. How can we take this tool and use it to help us learn healthier routines to make sure our time reflects our priorities?
One thing we can do to create and learn these new routines is use our Calendar apps to create a new Daily Routine Calendar. You can create calendar categories for anything from Family, Meetings, and Free Time, so we can create a category called “Daily Routine” and physically put it into our calendars.
For example, you can create a morning routine that includes reading your Bible, prayer, and eating breakfast with your family. You take those three things and put them into your calendar at the time and length you want to happen. Then, you can add reminders to each event so that you’ll be reminded every morning of your desired morning routine.
Sure, you can ignore it, but at least you’re putting things in place to remind you of the life you want to live and the priorities you want to put first.
3. Use the Echo Prayer App
One way we can make prayer a regular part of our day is by using tools to help us organize our thoughts and remember to actually do it. Enter the Echo Prayer Manager App (Apple, Android).
The Echo Prayer Manager is meant to help you practically pray. It helps you to organize lists of what you want to pray about and then reminds you to pray for those things when life inevitably gets busy. Echo even gives you space to pray by proving a “Pray Now” option that gives you a focused way to pray.
This is a simple app that we can use on a daily basis to focus our minds and to pray without ceasing. Take a few minutes to download the app and give it a shot, because it will help you to make prayer a priority in your life.