Power of a Focused Life

Mike Bickle

This blog post is dedicated to a podcast/sermon I listened to in the Fall 2013 semester by Mike Bickle, the Founder of the International House of Prayer (IHOP-KC). His sermon is called the Power of a Focused Life, which is a sermon series about how you can manage your time and have a vision to live your life to the fullest.

One of the basic premises of the sermon is that many people waste their time and do not have a plan for their weekly or daily schedules. He based the sermon off of Proverbs 29:18 (KJV):

"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."

Most often we end up spending our free time on things that we do not want to do in actuality. Mike Bickle recommended making a weekly schedule where every hour, half an hour, or 15 minutes is scheduled. Because my personality like detailed plans, I chose to make a schedule with 15 minute segments.

As I mentioned in my first post, I am working a full time job at American Express on the graveyard shift. Without exaggeration, a full-time 3rd shift job while taking 12 credits hours a semester for my MPA program is very difficult to accomplish. For any person who works 3rd shift, they know it's hard to sleep in general let alone when you have other responsibilities to manage.



Here is just a section of my Sunday to Saturday schedule from 4:00 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.

I knew that this podcast series was very applicable and after two semesters of customizing my schedule, I see positive results. Having a vision for your life in both the short term (weekly schedule) and the long term (years from now) is very important.

I found that with a planned weekly schedule I was not wasting time nearly as much and I generally stuck to the plan about 70% to 80% of the time. Mike Bickle in the series states that if you're able to keep your schedule 80% of the time, that is like an A grade. Even the best micromanager will not keep to a schedule 100% of the time. That's just not how life works.

I highly recommend listening to at least the first podcast in the link above. This series revolutionized the way I approach my goals and my schedule. If you get nothing else from this blog post, remember to continually ask yourself this: am I spending my time in a way that I want to use my time?