10 Principles for Treating Time as Treasure

A successful cardiac surgeon once told me he realized he had mastered time when he could perform a life-saving operation with complete focus, then walk into his daughter’s piano recital fully present. He did not carry the operating room’s urgency into the auditorium. “Time,” he said, “is not about doing more. It is about being wholly where you are, when you are there.”

Most of us live quite differently. We check our phones ninety-six times a day and answer emails during dinner; we plan tomorrow’s meeting while pretending to listen to today’s conversation. Physically present, we remain mentally scattered across three time zones—regretting yesterday, managing today, and fearing tomorrow. We have become experts at being everywhere except where we actually are. And we are exhausted.

This exhaustion is not merely physical; it is spiritual. We sense that time is slipping through our fingers—that we are busy but not fruitful, active but not purposeful. We achieve more than any generation in history, yet feel we accomplish less of what matters. We possess more time-saving devices than ever, yet feel more time-poor than our grandparents who had none. What if the problem is not that we have too little time, but that we have forgotten what time is for?

St. Josemaría Escrivá proclaimed a truth that has guided my own understanding of daily life: “Time is a treasure.”[1] For St. Josemaría, time is neither a resource to be managed nor merely money; it is a sacred gift to be received with gratitude and offered back to God through faithful use. Time is “glory”—an opportunity for eternal significance hidden within temporal activities.[2]

After nearly three decades in the demanding world of academia—a universe of relentless deadlines and constant interruptions—I have discovered that the principles of time management rooted in Catholic spirituality actually work. They do not just make us more productive; they make us more human. Here are ten principles that have transformed how I understand and use the treasure of time:

1. Time is a gift that cannot be saved, only spent

Every morning when you wake up, you receive 86,400 seconds—a fresh deposit of time. You cannot save these seconds for tomorrow, invest them to earn more, or transfer them to another. At day’s end, whatever remains unspent vanishes. Tomorrow you will receive another 86,400 seconds, until one day—you will not.

This is the strangest and most precious gift: time that must be spent as it arrives that can never be recovered once passed, that seems infinite when we are young but proves heartbreakingly finite as we age. The Psalmist understood this: “So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). Recognizing our days as numbered is not pessimism; it is the beginning of wisdom.

2. Vocation transforms time management into something meaningful

You cannot use time well without knowing what you are meant to use it for. You cannot prioritize without knowing what matters most. You cannot say no to good things without clarity about the best thing God is calling you to. St. John Henry Newman captured this beautifully: “God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission.”[3]

This understanding of vocation—that each of us has a unique, unrepeatable calling—transforms time management from a secular productivity technique into a spiritual practice. When you understand your calling, time management becomes simpler. Not easy, but simpler. You know what matters most. You gain a criterion for your decisions. You can say “no” to good things because you are saying “yes” to the best thing—what God is actually calling of you.

3. Holiness is found in ordinary time, not by escaping it

For centuries, many Catholics unconsciously believed holiness was for priests and religious, while laypeople aimed lower—avoid mortal sin, fulfill obligations, hope for purgatory. The Second Vatican Council demolished this two-tiered system. St. Josemaría Escrivá proclaimed that holiness is found not by leaving the world but by sanctifying ordinary work, family life, and social relationships. He taught that God “waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work.”[4] The hours we spend at our desks, in meetings, caring for children, or pursuing research are not obstacles to holiness but the very material from which holiness is built.

This conviction that ordinary work can become a path to holiness did not originate with St. Josemaría, though he articulated it with particular clarity and force. A century earlier, Newman preached a sermon titled “Doing Glory to God in Pursuits of the World” that anticipated this teaching. Speaking of those whose duty requires them to remain in worldly occupations, Newman insisted that what such a person “ought to feel is this, that while in it he is to glorify God, not out of it, but in it, and by means of it, according to the Apostle’s direction, ‘not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.’”[5] Newman understood what St. Josemaría would later proclaim to the whole Church: we find God not despite our work but through it. The accountant glorifies God through accounting done well and offered to him. The teacher glorifies God through teaching. The parent glorifies God through the thousand small acts of care that constitute family life.

Consider Sarah, a mother of three. When she realized parenting was her current path to sainthood, her perspective shifted. Night feedings became opportunities for contemplative prayer; toddler tantrums became lessons in patience. She stopped comparing herself to friends at daily Mass, finding her holiness instead in the “sacrament of the moment”—the cheerful response to the hundredth “Mommy!” of the day, in teaching prayers with finger plays, in choosing presence over productivity.

4. The present moment is the only moment we actually have

We live in an age of unprecedented distraction. Not mere occasional interruption, but continuous partial attention: a state where we are always partially focused on multiple streams of information but rarely fully present to any single thing. A college senior told me, “I cannot read books anymore. Not will not—cannot. My brain cannot focus on text for more than a page without feeling almost physical pain, like withdrawal. I am graduating with a degree in literature, and I have barely finished a single novel in four years.”

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, the eighteenth-century Jesuit, taught us to embrace the “sacrament of the present moment.”[6] Each moment, he argued, is a gift through which God comes to us. To miss the present moment through distraction or anxiety about the future is to miss God’s visitation. Our Lord himself taught: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Matt 6:34). The alternative to our scattered lives is not superhuman focus but simple presence: doing one thing at a time, being wholly where you are.

5. The urgent is usually the enemy of the important

St. Josemaría Escrivá offered a teaching that seems, at first, to contradict everything we feel about pressing demands: “The urgent things can wait.” He went further still: “The very urgent things should wait.”[7] This counsel appears startling from a saint who simultaneously insisted that we act “today, now”[8]—who warned that “tomorrow” is often “the adverb of the defeated”[9] and urged his spiritual children never to postpone what should be done.

The resolution lies in distinguishing subjective urgency from objective importance. The feeling of urgency—that pressure demanding immediate response—often originates not from the task’s true significance but from our anxiety, from others’ poor planning, or from the artificial deadlines that modern life manufactures endlessly. When we react impulsively to this felt urgency, we surrender our judgment to circumstance. We become reactive rather than deliberate, driven rather than directing. The truly important deserves our calm consideration, our prayerful reflection, our best thinking—not our panicked reaction.

6. Find the right pace for each task—festina lente

The Latin phrase festina lente—make haste slowly—seems contradictory. How can one make haste and go slowly simultaneously? The paradox resolves when we understand it properly. Festina means working with purpose, energy, and focus. Lente means working with care, patience, and attention to quality. It is not about speed per se, but about finding the right pace for each task—quick enough to maintain momentum, careful enough to maintain excellence.

The Spanish poet Antonio Machado expressed the same wisdom simply: “Slowly shape a good letter: / Making things fine / means more than making them.”[10] St. Josemaría, another Spaniard who understood the dignity of careful work, offered complementary wisdom: “Let me stress this point: it is in the simplicity of your ordinary work, in the monotonous details of each day, that you have to find the secret, which is hidden from so many, of something great and new: Love.”[11] The secret is not speed or even excellence for its own sake, but love expressed through patient attention to the task at hand.

7. Master technology before it masters you

Every technological advance promised to save time. Instead, each has multiplied urgencies. Email, invented to reduce meetings, created the expectation of instant response. Smartphones, designed for convenience, created twenty-four-hour availability. Social media, promising connection, created infinite comparison and fear of missing out.

We need what might be called a digital asceticism—the disciplined use of technology rather than unreflective immersion in it. The key principle is simple: technology should serve vocation—every technology should clearly support your calling or be eliminated. St. Ignatius’ rules for discernment of spirits provide guidance here. Does this technology bear good fruit in my life? Does it increase love, joy, peace, patience? Or does it generate anxiety, comparison, distraction, vice? Do I control this technology, or does it control me?

8. Rest is not optional—it is commanded

We live in a culture that glorifies exhaustion. Being “crazy busy” has become a badge of honor, proof that we matter. “I will sleep when I am dead” is offered as a virtue, not the vice it truly is. Against this cultural pressure, the Christian tradition makes a countercultural claim: rest is essential, not optional. It is not weakness but wisdom, not time wasted but time invested.

Rest is not merely permitted in Scripture—it is commanded. The Sabbath commandment is unique among the Ten Commandments. While other commands prohibit harmful actions, the Sabbath commands cessation from good actions—work, productivity, achievement. Why would God command rest? Because he knew we would not choose it otherwise. Our fallen nature drives us toward endless striving. Josef Pieper reminded us that true leisure is not merely the absence of work but an activity in its own right—the contemplation of beauty, the enjoyment of relationships, the pursuit of learning for its own sake.[12] You cannot give what you do not have. The exhausted scholar cannot teach with enthusiasm. The depleted parent cannot be present to their children. Rest is essential maintenance that allows everything else to function.

9. Remember your death—memento mori

Death is the most certain fact of human existence. More certain than taxes, which some evade. More certain than suffering, which varies in degree. You will die—not might die, not could die, but will die. This is not pessimism; it is realism. And paradoxically, accepting this reality is the beginning of wisdom.

Medieval Christians developed the practice of memento mori—remember you will die. This was not morbid obsession but spiritual discipline. Why this apparent fixation on death? Because remembering death clarifies priorities, strips away pretense, reveals what matters, creates urgency for conversion, fosters detachment from temporary things, and increases gratitude for life. St. Josemaría expressed this with remarkable serenity: “Do not be afraid of death. Accept it, from now on, generously . . . when God wills it . . . as God wills it . . . where God wills it.”[13]

10. Time is glory—live accordingly

St. Josemaría captured the ultimate significance of time with characteristic directness: “Those who are engaged in business say that time is money. That seems little to me: for us who are engaged in affairs of souls, time is . . . glory!”[14] Time is not merely a scarce resource to be managed efficiently. Time is the arena in which we work out our salvation, in which ordinary work becomes extraordinary offering, in which we become who we will be forever. Every moment, rightly used, adds to our eternal glory.

This understanding transforms how we face mortality. We do not need to accomplish something spectacular before we die. We need to be faithful in what has been given to us—our particular work, our particular relationships, our particular circumstances. The mother caring for children, the student preparing for exams, the worker at the factory, the scholar in the library—each, through faithful attention to duty done with love, is seizing the day in the truest sense. Each is preparing for death by living well.

I must admit: I write these principles as much for myself as for anyone else. Last Tuesday, I spent three hours responding to non-urgent emails while my manuscript—the work I claim to prioritize—sat untouched. I checked my phone during dinner with my wife and missed the moment when her eyes stopped sparkling because she knew I was not really listening. I skipped morning prayer because I “did not have time,” then spent forty minutes reading news that added nothing to my life but anxiety.

I do not write from a mountaintop of perfect time management, but from the valley of struggle, where most of us live. However, I have learned that perfection is not the goal—progress is. Every day we begin again. Every hour offers a fresh start. The saints became saints not because they never failed, but because they never stopped trying.

St. John Henry Newman offered the standard by which I now try to measure my days: “He, then, is perfect who does the work of the day perfectly.”[15] Not the work of the year or the work of a lifetime—the work of the day. This is achievable. This is within reach. Today’s faithfulness, today’s presence, today’s love. Tempus breve est—time is short. Let us use it well. For God’s glory and the good of souls. Hodie, nunc—today, now.

Begin.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is adapted from Time as Treasure: Catholic Wisdom for Modern Life (forthcoming). All rights reserved.

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