Practicing Peace

Want to get some quick perspective on something in your world?  Fill in the blank: “I’d let anyone else do X, as long as they _______.”

Imagine that you’re getting ready for a new Sunday School class on the book of James.  Feeling like you’re not quite sure where to go?  Fill in the blank: “I’d let anyone else run this Sunday School class, as long as they….”

• Stuck close to the text
• Encouraged class participation
• Built bridges between the biblical world and our world
• Encouraged the class to find application for their own lives
• Didn’t feel rushed or unprepared walking into class on Sunday morning
• Etc.

Can you think of anything else?

The trick of this question is that it makes you objectify some things, what David Allen calls “principles,” at a very high level of focus.  Clarifying these principles enables you to make better decisions about what you’re getting into and even generates ideas or actions that you might not have considered before.  That “didn’t feel rushed” principle: how are you going to do it?  What has to happen so you don’t feel rushed heading into class on Sunday morning?  By filling in the blank, you’ve given yourself an excuse to be a better teacher than you were before.

Now, imagine taking the question onto your church’s board or vestry retreat.  Put it at the top of your whiteboard: “We would let anyone else run this church as long as they….”  Imagine the input you will generate from your leaders (both good and bad).  As you work through these thing together, you will clarify for yourself, and for them, what the church is really about and where it might be heading.  Plus, you get the added benefit of having a reference point for future decision-making in the church (e.g. it will be a lot harder to justify a large, new debt if the whole governing board agreed that “We would let anyone else run this church as long as they were … fiscally responsible”).

Now, take it one step back and apply the question to your life.  “I would let anyone else live my life as long as they….”  It’s amazing the clarity you’ll receive when you imagine someone else stepping into your body and going through your day-to-day interactions.  Not only will you clarify things about the way you handle your maintenance tasks, you’ll also realize the ways in which you would want that person to think, grow, live, and love.  You will be amazed at the new energy it releases for the simple parts of your life, and the balance you’ll feel as you start living the principles you would want someone else to follow in your shoes.

And, here’s the thing.  The person you will be tomorrow WILL BE a different person than you are today.  Your church in six months WILL BE a different church than it was on your leadership retreat.  Why not send those people a letter with some things clarified about how you want your life lived, your church handled, and your Sunday school classes taught?

To this point, I have been offering a number of suggestions for ministers and other practitioners, encouraging each to practice peace by ordering their days in ways that privilege rest and maintenance over due dates and important work.

But, what happens when it doesn’t work?

If you are like me, you will engage in the disciplines discussed in “The Five Steps to a Peaceful Ministry Day” series and experience a week or so of success before the fateful, gigantic, and inevitable crash.  The crash can be caused by a number of factors, the number one being unexpected, pastoral events.  What should you do after you find yourself back in your office exhausted, staring blankly at the computer screen, hoping for your day back?

First, breathe.  Since you were keeping up with your maintenance before the crash, you won’t experience it with the severity you might have otherwise.  Breathe and remember that it could be worse.

Second, clear thirty minutes on your calendar to write your mind.  Pull out a sheet of paper or open your computer screen and write, putting down everything that comes to mind, anything that’s grabbing your attention and causing you stress, keeping at it until that knot in your stomach begins to loosen.

Third, take a walk.

Fourth, go back through each item on the page you wrote, line by line, adding appointments to your calendar (for due items) or items to your to-do list (for important items) until the entire sheet/document is accounted for.

Fifth, wad the paper up and throw it away.

You’re current.  Now you will be able to resume your work confidently, knowing that the next crisis, whatever it is, won’t be because you missed something during this one.

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.

The Five Steps to a Peaceful Ministry Day are:

Schedule:

• Rest first
• Driving second
• Maintenance third
• Due dates fourth
• “Important” things last

We are often in debt to our work, but scheduling maintenance third will go a long way to freeing us to focus on the ministry to which God has called us.  The next step is scheduling due dates.  When we get our upcoming due dates scheduled and out of our minds, we can focus better on the things that are actually in front of us.

Here’s one helpful way to think of due dates: due dates are those things that will take less than ten hours and need to get done by a certain date for a certain person.

Some due dates might include:

• Preparing a talk for a special event
• Pulling together your annual report
• Etc.

It’s probably NOT a due date if:

• It’s a recurring event that requires preparation, such as a staff meeting, bulletin, newsletter, or sermon.  All those things should be scheduled as maintenance.  For example, if your weekly newsletter article is due Wednesday, prep should probably be part of your maintenance on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (depending on how much time you normally spend on it).  If it’s maintenance, you shouldn’t have to think about it – it should just happen.  Always schedule recurring due dates as maintenance.
• It’s a one-time event that will take more than 10 hours to prepare for.  Add items like these to maintenance as wellso that you can work on them for weeks in advance.  For example, if the annual meeting is coming up, and it looks like you’ll need to spend 15 hours putting together a good talk and presentation, schedule 1 hour a day in your maintenance for at least four weeks before the meeting.  You’ll wake up one day (probably early), and it will be done without you having had to worry about it.

Schedule Due Dates Fourth

Here are some basic tips for scheduling due dates fourth.

• Always keep track of due dates on your calendar.  Mark them with a special color so that they stand out.
• When possible, schedule due dates a day or two early. You’ll often forget about the actual due date and will actually get things back to people early, which is always a good thing for anyone trying to practice peace.
• As much as possible, say no to out-of-the-blue due dates.  Resist dramatic “I-need-it-tomorrow” demands from your board or congregation and instead treat the issue as something to be dealt with over the next week or two.  That way, if a genuine crisis arises, you will have the ability to deal with it and then get back to a regular routine more easily.  When scheduling due dates fourth each day, look ahead two weeks and schedule time for the due date that is closest to you on your calendar.  If there is more than one, you can obviously schedule some time for each.

If you make the distinction between maintenance and due dates that I am suggesting, your calendar will suddenly be very due-date light.  You won’t have to worry about due dates because you’ll have so few, and you’ll have the ability to manage them with only a moderate amount of stress.

If you have any comments or question, please send me an email or write in the comments section!

Ministers tend to be in debt to their work.  Many of us live with piles of undifferentiated stuff around our offices, overflowing email inboxes, and unanswered voicemail.  Our overdue or unfinished work screams at us like bill collectors, each item demanding immediate attention.  No wonder so many of us decide workaholism is the only way to keep up.  No wonder others of us develop workaphobia and habitually tune it out.

To get out of debt to our work, that is, to get to a place where our work is no longer screaming at us, we need to distinguish between maintenance work, due work, and “important work.”  These are steps three, four, and five in the…

Five Steps to a Peaceful Ministry Day
Schedule:

• Rest first
• Driving second
• Maintenance third
• Due dates fourth
• “Important” things last

In my last post, I highlighted a few differences between what I am doing here at Practicing Peace and what Stephen Covey does in his First Things First.  Since ministry days are so volatile, and since they rarely follow a 9-5 schedule, it is important to spend a few minutes every day to define your day by scheduling time for driving and rest.  These are the hard edges of the day, and into this container we pour our work.  Covey uses the language of rocks, sand, and water to represent the things that are of first, second, and third importance.  I would like to set aside these categories for now and suggest that it is better to order our work day by putting maintenance first, followed by due dates, and only then giving our attention to the “important” things that are screaming at us.

Maintenance work is the stuff you have to get done to keep your soul, your sanity and your salary.  To find what your maintenance work includes, divide a sheet of paper into three columns under those headings and start brainstorming.

Mine would look something like this:

Yours will probably look very different.  I expect pastors will include things like pastoral visitation and sermon preparation.  Please be sure to share it in the comments!

Schedule maintenance third

Schedule maintenance third by adding a maintenance bloc to your daily schedule.  Make a list of the maintenance you want to do daily. Then, around the hard edges of rest and driving, add the time to your day to do it.  I keep my list in an MS Office note, but a text file or a loose leaf notebook would work just as well.  The important thing is that you have your maintenance work out of your head and in a format you can use easily.

Here is my list:

Daily Maintenance

1. Take your multivitamin
2. Schedule your day
   a. Rest First
   b. Driving second
   c. Maintenance third
   MWF - Daily Maintenance, Empty @Reply, German
   TR - Daily Maintenance, Blog, German
   d. Due dates fourth
   e. “Important” things last
3. Send Daily Update email to my wife
4. Read a chapter of Proverbs
5. Prayed for my prayer list
6. Process email
7. Process inbox
8. Balance checking and savings
9. Mindsweep
10. Schedule any remaining time in my day
11. Brush my teeth

It takes me about an hour to get through this list, which is down from about two hours when I first started it.  The remarkable thing about having a maintenance bloc is that it reduces the yelling voices in my day.  It tricks me into being faithful, and I can keep my promises better without a ton of stress or worry.

You will notice that I have more maintenance than goes in my bloc.  I need to test out of German when I get to Toronto in September, so German prep is part of my daily maintenance.  On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I set aside time to answer email that’s going to take more than a passing amount of thought (Empty @Reply), and on Tuesday and Thursday, I set aside a little bit of time for blog maintenance.  The maintenance bloc prompts me to set aside more time for maintenance during the day.

And, yes, I have to remind myself to brush my teeth.  If I don’t, then I won’t remember.  And, that’s the point of these five steps.  It’s not about remembering more – it’s about giving yourself permission to remember less.  Then your brain will be free to focus on your ministry.

“I have to be at Starbucks in five minutes!”

We’ve all looked up from our work and realized we were late for an appointment, and probably more of us than would want to admit routinely show up fifteen minutes late for scheduled meetings.  This creates a lot of stress for us, and, no matter how gracious the people we meet with are, inevitably they wonder what other promises we have a hard time keeping.

Schedule Driving Second

Remember the five steps:
Schedule:

• Rest first
• Driving second
• Maintenance third
• Due Dates fourth
• “Important” things last

I suggest scheduling driving second because along with the time we set aside for rest it sets the “hard edges” of our day (Allen, Getting Things Done).  Stephen Covey uses the metaphor of filling a container with rocks, sand, and water.  Using the same amount of each, he tries to put them all in a container but can only get them all in when he puts them in rocks first, sand second, and water third.  In any other order, they do not fit.  This is, obviously, a metaphor for putting first things first, which is the title of one of Covey’s books.  I suggest we schedule rest and driving first because, as the hard edges of the day, they are the container we fill with our rocks, sand, and water.

Scheduling driving only takes a minute or so a day and has great benefits.  Here are some guidelines.

• Always add five to ten minutes to your estimate to allow for “getting out the door” time.
• Always allow a minimum of fifteen minutes to get anywhere.  This is true even if the coffee house you’re meeting your senior elder in is just around the block.  It’s better to be ten minutes early than five minutes late.  For driving, I always schedule in fifteen minute blocks.
• If you’re going to be late for some reason, always call at the time that you were supposed to be there if not before.  Say, “I’m so sorry that I am running a few minutes late.  I expect to be there in ___ minutes.”

Often, I will set an alarm on my cell phone for about five minutes before I need to leave an appointment with someone.  I let them know up front that I’m doing it so that I can focus on them instead of being worried about the time.  Only do this if it’s really important to leave at a specific time.

An Example Schedule

Let’s walk through scheduling rest first and driving second.

You walk into your office at 8:00 am and look at your calendar.  You have three appointments:

11:30a – Lunch with a leader in your church
2:00p – Coffee with a new member
6:30p – Dinner at home

You don’t think that you will be going back to the office between lunch and coffee, so this is how (at the moment!) the day looks (this is a lot clearer and does not constitute a separate step if you are using a paper calendar or something like MS Outlook):

8:00-11:30a – Office
11:30-1:00p – Lunch
1:00-2:00p – Out of the Office
2:00-3:15p – Coffee
3:25-6:30 – Office
6:30p – Home for dinner

Schedule rest first.  It’s 8:00 now, and you work best in 90 minute blocks, so you begin to add rest to your schedule.

8:00-9:30 – Work in the office
9:30-9:45 – Rest
9:45-11:15 – Work
11:15-11:30 – Rest
11:30-1:00p – Lunch
1:00-2:00p – Out of the Office
2:00-3:15p – Coffee
3:15-4:45 – Work
4:45-5:00 – Rest
5:00-6:30 – Work
6:30p – Home for dinner

Schedule driving second.  It takes fifteen minutes to get to the diner for lunch, so we will schedule thirty – that will be plenty of time to get unplugged from what we are doing and arrive on time or early.  It is only five minutes from the diner to the coffee house, but allow for fifteen just in case you and your ministry leader take longer than expected.  Allow thirty minutes to get back to the office.  Finally, give yourself plenty of space to get home on time.  Notice how the driving times interact with the work and rest times.

8:00-9:30 – Work in the office
9:30-9:45 – Rest
9:45-11:00 – Work
11:00-11:30 – Drive/Rest
11:30-1:00p – Lunch
1:00-2:00p – Out of the Office (flexible time)
1:45-2:00 – Drive to the coffee house
2:00-3:15p – Coffee
3:15-3:45 – Drive/Work
3:45-4:45 – Work in the office
4:45-5:00 – Rest
5:00-5:45 – Work in the office (shut down for the day, if possible)
5:45-6:30 – Drive/Rest
6:30p – Home for dinner

If you have some Drive/Rest time, enjoy it.  Listen to the radio.  Sing, pray, whatever.  Try to relax a bit.  If you have some Drive/Work time, use it.  Return a phone call.  Drop something off at the Post Office.  Listen to an audio book you are using for continuing education.

Above all, to practice peace, let your staff and everyone else whom it may affect know when you are going to leave during the day.  Stick to it, if possible.  Keeping these little promises during the day goes a long way towards practicing the peace that you preach.