If you don’t manage your life, your life will manage you.

If you’ve taken Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University course (which I have and highly recommend), you’ll know that one of Dave’s sayings is that if you don’t control your money, it will control you.  I was thinking recently that this overall principle applies to life as well:  if you don’t manage your life, your life will manage you.

We all know someone with a chaotic life.  The person is always stressed, always catching up, always overworked, always looking for misplaced things, forgetting things, and trying to squeeze things in.  Maybe the person is usually able to get all of their work done, but they’ve expended a lot of energy to make it happen.  Meanwhile, there are other people who seem to be able to cross everything off their list without breaking much, if any, of a sweat.

If you’re directing a lot of your mental energy every day just trying to stay on top of things, it’s going to be hard for you to move forward.  You’re just expending too much time and energy inefficiently.  You only have so much gas in the tank, and you might not have enough left at the end of the day to devote to doing the things you need to get ahead.  Life doesn’t roll out the red carpet for you, and the sooner you structure your life according to this fact, the better off you’ll be both now and in the long run.