We hope you enjoy this re-post from February 14, 2015. Be blessed! The Today’s Quote From God Team

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. – Genesis 22:3, KJV

There are so many amazing things about Abraham. One of them has to do with his promptness in action.

In Genesis 22:1-3, Abraham immediately obeyed the Lord, wasting no time before obeying the command to sacrifice Isaac. Unlike Abraham, many (if not most) of us DON’T obey the Lord immediately when He tells us to do something, causing us to waste tremendous amounts of the precious time He has given us. Oftentimes we waste God’s time because we don’t want to do what He has told us to do. Other times we waste God’s time because we fear to do what He has told us to do. But sometimes, it is neither selfishness nor fear which stops us from obeying. Two other culprits often stop us from obeying God, and those two other culprits are analysis paralysis and distraction.

Sometimes we delay in obeying because we have so much to do that we don’t know what to do next. The process of trying to figure out what next to do with our day could end up wasting time and, in some instances, prompt us to do nothing for awhile. Also, once we finally do get moving for God, distractions of all sorts often interrupt our workflow, slowing us down as we attempt to perform God’s work.

The other day, I ran across an article entitled The 10-Minute Rule: It Seems Crazy, But it Will Revolutionize Your Productivity by Michelle L Bryant. I highly recommend reading the entire article by clicking here, but below is an excerpt that will show how this tool can help us get God’s work done:

My “10-minute rule” is pretty straightforward: Every task on your to-do list should take no more than 10 minutes to complete. If it takes longer than 10 minutes, then you should have broken it down into smaller tasks or delegated it to someone else. The key to this rule is in enforcing it, which means setting the timer on your phone to go off at the 10-minute mark. The level of speed and focus that this brings to your day is nothing short of astounding…

One of my favorite examples of this rule in action occurred a few years ago when a team I was working on received the dreaded 4 PM phone call from a client redirecting the work that we would be presenting the following morning. Ugh, so much for a relaxing evening!

There were two big pieces of work involved, so we split our team of four in half. Each of our two sub-teams had about the same number of PowerPoint slides to revamp, with similar amounts of analysis, so it should have taken us about the same amount of time to complete.

I said to my teammate that I really wanted to finish by 6 PM so we could go get dinner, and he agreed but was doubtful about our ability to get it done. So, we tallied up the pages, divided by the two hours left in the day, and found that if we could achieve a rate of 10 minutes per page, we would have enough time to complete it—plus a buffer for anything that proved to be particularly tricky. Reenergized, we split up the pages, set the timer, and started cranking. To make a game out of it, we kept a tally on the whiteboard of how many pages each of us completed under or over the 10-minute mark.

By 6 PM, we were finished—and feeling really good about it. The other team who didn’t use the 10-minute rule? They finished around 9.

How does the 10-minute rule combat analysis paralysis and distraction? It helps combat analysis paralysis by helping us understand that, by starting the next task, we won’t be eating up the rest of the day. Oftentimes, it’s worry over whether a task will take too much time that prevents us from deciding which task to spend time on. Committing only 10 minutes to tackle something isn’t much of a commitment, so limiting our tasks to 10-minute increments keeps us from worrying about whether or not the next thing we do is worthy of our time.

The 10-minute rule helps combat distraction because it’s not hard to make people or to-do items wait for 10 minutes before you address them. If someone calls you on the phone while you are in the middle of drafting a report, let the call go to voicemail rather than letting it interrupt your creative juices. Unless it is truly an emergency, the caller CAN wait for 10 minutes for you to call back. If an email pops up while you are brainstorming your next move in an urgent project, put it off for 10 minutes. It can wait. Very few things are so urgent that they can’t wait for 10 minutes, and by making them wait, you can accomplish so much more.

If analysis paralysis and distraction are keeping you from God’s work, try incorporating the 10-minute rule into your life. You just might find that with a simple 10-minute deadline hanging over your head, you’ll better spend this life’s time impacting the eternal lives of those around you.