9/13 A Time and a Place For Everything In Our Lives and In Our Workplace

When studying the Rule of St. Benedict, one ongoing theme is that there's a time and place for everything in the monastery. Everything as in EVERYTHING. A monks life is pretty set from rising until bedtime. Even sleep is regulated and ordered just so. 

Day follows day, with little variation. Seasons impose some change, but the change is ordered as well. We've seen the times of the practical work of the monastery and the Divine Office be organized differently from summer to winter, changes made during Lent and other Liturgical Seasons. But each has its time and place.

The next entry in the Rule addresses the oratory - the place where the monks gather for prayer, for chanting the Divine Office. While the time for the Office are fixed and relatively short, the oratory must remain strictly a place of prayer:

"Let the oratory be what its name implies, and let nothing else be done or kept there. When the Work of God if finished, let all go out in deep silence, and let reverence for God be observed, so that any brother who may wish to pray privately be not hindered by another's misbehavior...if anyone wish to pray secretly, let him just go in and pray: not in a loud voice, but with tears and fervour of heart..."

While our workplaces may not follow the strict regulation of a monastery, chances are there is at least some organization of times and places. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a productive workplace where people scurry about willy-nilly from this place to that, no set pattern in mind, doing whatever strikes their fancy.

Some organizations impose more structure than others, for better of for worse. For example, a large police department typically organizes work in "tours" - for example, early morning to late afternoon/late afternoon to midnight/midnight to early morning. An officer works a particular tour either permanently or for some stretch of time. Assignments are handed out at the beginning of each tour. These are either regular or, as needed, special assignments.

Corporations, especially larger ones, typically share what for some of us are the bane of the company day: meetings. My years in large corporations found me at weekly, monthly, sometimes even daily meetings. Productive? No comment.

But generally having a time and place for everything makes sense, both in the workplace, and in our lives in general.

You get up at fixed time, start and end the work day, eat at relatively fixed times, get some reasonable amount of sleep. In between, you find time for your family. Weekends may be reserved for domestic chores and recreation. While perhaps not as strictly scheduled as a monastery, like a monastery, one day follows another more or less in the same fashion.

With the wisdom of this in mind, when I started my small business, one of the first things I researched, and thought about was how to structure my day. In short order, I imposed what I thought was a good structure on my days and weeks. My business has some seasonality, so the actual work may vary from one to season to the next, but many of my tasks are repeated week to week. They're typically performed in certain patterns, varying with the five days of the week. I've adjusted that original scheme over time both for the sake of efficient use of time as well as improvement of the work product. But there's always been a time and a place for everything. 

I never understood folks who work "for themselves" having trouble managing their time. There's always much to do. Without structure, working for yourself can be extra stressful even miserable. Why I knew this from the get-go, I'm not sure. I did, though, and quickly surmised that structure in the form of a time and a place for everything would be critical to giving my new business a shot at success.

And having a time and a place for everything not only allows for more productive work time, it also allows for chunks of prayer time. This might be only before work begins, and before bedtime. But it can also be during the workday. In my own business, I began with the former arrangement and have progressed to the latter. I like having time during the day to pray and spend a minute or so in a state of recollection, keeping God present, asking for the help of my Guardian Angel, the patron saints of my business, and other saints with whom I've developed some specific relationship.

As you might imagine, all of this contributes greatly to stability in the workplace - just what we've been looking for in the entries we're posting from the Rule of St. Benedict.

Voilà!