05.05.09 The 7th Practice for Avoiding Negative Gossip : Slate Your Time

Slate your Time

Idlers and meanderers could ferry gossip straight into your ears, your desk or inbox, even when you were not planning to participate in the vice in the first place. That is where managing your time keeps negative gossip at bay, by slotting your activities in a way that leaves no room for idle chats.

For instance, the colleague that conveyed the rumour about the church minister actually called early in the morning and spoke at length. Since I am a ‘morning person’ and therefore most alert during those hours, her call really ‘ate’ into my time. Much as I learnt something from the call, the net was more of a cost than a benefit as I really did not get any returns on the time that I used to listen to that gossip.

Nehemiah is a good example of avoiding gossip by scheduling time. For example, in Nehemiah 6:3, Sanballat and his cohorts wanted to convey false negative gossip and even kill Nehemiah in the process. However, we see that he was too busy to respond to rumours. The verse revealing his precise and time-conscious response is repeated here for emphasis (VOICE): I am in the middle of a great work and cannot be interrupted. I am not coming down to meet with you. What is so important that I should suspend this great workwe are doing to travel to see you?

Looking at JuaLink, Obed should have ‘committed his time’ so as to avoid getting drawn into Lulu’s gossip circle. If he had armed himself with a ‘to-do’ list full of human resource activities for example, where would he have got the time to engage in negative gossip? On the contrary, he would have been so busy monitoring his performance against that list and making sure that his time was yielding its full potential.

For the case of Aaron and the golden calf saga, we see Moses delegating the administrative leadership to Aaron assisted by Hur. That was not a simple matter given the number of people in the camp. As a reminder, and to get a feel of the numbers that Aaron was expected to govern, the bible reveals that six hundred thousand men had left Egypt, not counting the women and children (Exodus 12:37). Since Aaron was standing in for Moses, he should have followed Moses’ model (Exodus 18:13-27) by scheduling time to handle difficult issues that group leaders could not solve such as worries about Moses’s return for instance. Aaron should have then committed time to tell stories that reminded the children of Israel of the great things that Jehovah had done for them and who He was; as well as sharing God's vision for taking them to the land of promise. Such activities would have made Aaron too occupied to entertain negative gossip and molding of a metallic calf, which, by the way, must have taken a considerable amount of time to make. We shall get a deeper exposure of Moses’ people management model in chapter eight of this book.

The point here is, you should write a ‘to do’ list at the beginning of each day then allocate time to each activity. That way, you will not find slots to squeeze gossip into your schedule since all your time will be fully committed to productive activities.