Practicing Peace

Pastor Joe works at First Baptipresbycostal Church.  He arrives in the office at 8:00am after having had breakfast with a congregant.  Opening his calendar for the day, he sees that he has a meeting at 3:00pm with one of his elders, but, remarkably, the rest of his day is free.  At the top of his calendar is the note, “30 min on speech for denominational meeting.”  He gave himself 10 hours to prepare for this upcoming speech and divided it out over the weeks leading up to it.  He also has several notices about email that he needs to respond to.

Schedule rest first.  Joe adds fifteen minute blocks of rest every hour and a half.  He wants to read some articles and blog posts in Google Reader, so he decides he’ll do it during that time.

Schedule driving second.  Joe knows it usually takes 5 minutes to get the place where he is meeting his elder, so he adds 15 minutes on either side of his appointment for driving.

Schedule maintenance third.  With the hard edges of his day established, Joe starts filling it with his regular maintenance work.  He adds an hour for his maintenance bloc, fifteen minutes for Greek review, two hours for sermon preparation, and thirty minutes for his weekly bulletin piece.

Schedule due dates fourth.  The major due date that Joe has hanging over his head is the speech he is giving at his denomination’s annual meeting.  Since there is already a reminder on his calendar, he simply schedules a block of time to work on it after his maintenance is over.

Schedule important things last.  Joe keeps a complete task list of the things that neither fit into maintenance or due dates.  He decides to mark the rest of his work time for “important” things and to work off that list when the time comes.

After he has spent the ten minutes scheduling his day, he has this on his calendar or on a sheet of paper that he’ll carry around with him for the day:

8:00-9:00              Maintenance Bloc

9:00-9:15              Greek Review (Keep an eye out for a post on this!)

9:15-9:30              Sermon prep

9:30-9:45              Rest

9:45-10:15            Sermon prep

10:15-10:30         Rest

10:30-45              Sermon prep

10:45-11:15          Bulletin piece

11:15-45              Denominational Meeting Prep

11:45-12:00        Important things

12:00-1:00          Lunch

1:00-2:30            Important things

2:30-45                Rest

2:45-3:00            Drive/Work

3:00-4:30            Appointment with Elder

4:30-4:45             Drive/Rest

4:45-6:00             Important Work/Work shutdown

This ministry day starts out peacefully– Joe is getting everything he needs to do and more done.  IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE that things rarely work according to plan.  What happens when a distraught parishioner comes knocking on his office door?  Something will have to give.

The question is, what component of Joe’s day needs to move first?

I would suggest that Joe moves in reverse order.  In Joe’s day, he has almost three hours of “wiggle room” in which he has planned to work on “important” things.  If an upset parishioner comes in, and Joe needs to spend thirty minutes with him or her, then he should take the thirty minutes out of the important work in the afternoon and move everything back.  Remember, “important” work, while significant, should never be more important than due dates, and due dates, especially if you’re working on them like I suggest, will never be as important as your maintenance.  If you are faithful in the little things, you will be given opportunity to be faithful in the big ones.  Taking care of a parishioner is much more important than most of the “important” work we set ourselves.  By reversing the order in which you scheduled your day, you can know what work needs to give way first.

I’ve been encouraging us to distinguish between three types of work: maintenance, due, and important.  Maintenance is what has to get done so we keep our soul, sanity, and salary.  Due dates are those things that will take less than 10 hours that have to be done by a certain time for a certain person.  What kind of work does that leave?  Important work.

Important work is that work we have decided to do that is neither maintenance nor due dates. In my to-do list, these things range from the mundane (“Upload photos to computer”) to the exciting (“Brainstorm ministry initiatives for the Spring”).  Neither of these things are maintenance or due.  They are just promises I have made to myself about what I would like to get done at some point, when I have the time.  Very often these items are future-oriented, breaking new ground on a project or researching new ministry possibilities.

If we are not careful, we will find that “important” work screams at us, demanding our full attention.  It keeps us from focusing on the dinner conversation.  It keeps us awake in the middle of the night.  If we have no way to deal with the demands of this kind of work, the stress eats our stomach linings, erodes our relationships, and destroys our peace.

The reason that “important” work screams at us is that, very often, it is new and novel.  It’s just common sense that our minds gravitate to these things and attach great significance and meaning to them.  I have known many pastors who flit from new program to new program, not ever being able to rest in their work.  They are driven by these novel “important” things instead of being faithful to their commitments to God, their ministries, and themselves.

While we sometimes tend to overcommit our time to these novel tasks, “important” things are actually still important.  We have made the promise, at least to ourselves, to pursue these things.  So, when do we do them?  I suggest that we schedule time each day for pursuing “important” things and projects only after making time for work on maintenance and due dates.

Believe it or not, scheduling important things last really does solve the problem of screaming work.  By saving this work for last, you insure that you can pursue it with the utmost focus and energy, since you are no longer worried about the details of your ministry life because maintenance and due dates are already taken care of!  Depending on your ministry environment, you should have a solid two to six hours per week to work on important things, and those hours will be two to three times more productive than important work would have been in the past.

If you don’t have any time left over in your weeks for important work, then you are probably more in debt to your work than you realize.  Any number of factors could be contributing to the problem, including an unhelpful job description, lack of clear boundaries, and out-of-touch leadership.  To get more time for “important” work in your week, you need to have a liveable job description and the ability to say “No.”  Soon, I want to do a series on ministry job descriptions.  Please help me out by sending me a copy of yours!

This is the next to last installment in the Five Steps to a Peaceful Ministry Day.  Next week, we will work through a case study that will bring it all together.