At my last job, my employer had all the employees account for every
15 minute block of the day. While this is a common practice in fields
such as law and accounting, I had never come across it in my line of
business: computer networking. Learning this system was a pain in the
beginning…and in the end and all points in between. I would much
rather have been working on some technical issue beyond my
understanding or with a problematic customer. But nonetheless there was
no getting around it.
During the course of this exercise I was
forced to look critically at what I did during the day at all times.
Naturally it should go without saying that the boss was interested in a
term that I became intimately familiar with–“billable hours.” This was
time that the company was able to charge the customer for work that I
did. With this realization, I quickly came to some conclusions about
the typical work environment.
First was that when someone says
that they are “busy” that does not necessarily mean that they are
“working.” When someone says that they are “working” it does not
necessarily mean that they are being “profitable.” When I was being
micro-managed, I suddenly became accountable for everything that I was
doing for the company and it really made me consider my every action.
As
we come into the Passover season we need to be asking ourselves this
same thing–even more seriously than we have been doing throughout the
past year. If we say that we are busy, are we busy laboring and
striving, not in vain, but according to the good work that God has begun
in us (Philippians 1:6; 2:6 )? If we say that we are working, are we
doing a work which is good and profitable (Titus 3:8)? Only each one of
us individually can answer these questions and we must do so carefully
and prayerfully as we will soon have to give an account (1 Peter 4:5).
