sunsetI’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.