Value Your TimeValuing your time means being time-conscious, not time-anxious. This isn’t about cramming every spare moment of the day with an activity. Schedule your days, but schedule in time to relax. Schedule in time to putz around the house. Schedule in time to have dinner with your family. Schedule these kinds of margins into your calendar. Valuing time also means changing some of the mundane things we have to do into something meaningful through creative thinking. For example, use time in the car with your children to ask them a “question of the day.” That way you can turn a mundane activity into a meaningful experience. Here are four questions that will help you learn to value your time:
Is what I’m doing helping me reach my goals? This assumes you have some goals. It goes back to the question, What is important to me? If you can’t answer that question, you won’t have significant goals, and without goals, how you spend your time doesn’t really matter. In Alice in Wonderland, Alice comes to a big crossroads, and she asks the Cheshire Cat sitting on the fencepost, “Which way do I go?” The Cheshire Cat asks, “Well, where do you want to wind up?” And she says, “I don’t know.” And his response is, “Well, then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” Indeed. You’ve got to have goals. And when you do, you need to keep referring back to them to see if you’re on the right path in terms of how you’re spending your time.
Must I do it now? There’s an old saying: “Urgent things are the subtle cloaking of minor projects with major status under the guise of crisis.” We can be governed by the tyranny of the urgent if we’re not careful. As another old saying goes, “Important things are seldom urgent and urgent things are seldom important.”
Is there something more important that I should be doing? This goes back to the principle of setting priorities. Make sure you address your biggest priorities first, and then fill in with the lesser tasks and commitments.
Should someone else be doing it? The principle involved here is delegation. It’s often hard for ministry leaders to give up control of certain projects and details, but it’s vital for proper time management. Plus, it’s important in the development of your volunteers. You might be concerned that volunteers can’t do something as well as you can. It’s true that you need to delegate in different ways to different people based upon their ability. But if you never delegate, then your volunteers will never develop needed skills. Giving your volunteers the ability to do something you normally do— even if they only initially do it 85 percent as well as you could—frees you up to do something else of value to the ministry that only you can do. Let your volunteers learn by experience, and someday they might be doing the task better than you ever did.
Know That Little Things Add Up
So often we try to accomplish too much in one week or one month, and far too little in one year. When we try to accomplish too much in a short period of time, we get discouraged and burned out. It’s easy for a whole year to go by without accomplishing what’s possible in small, steady increments. This principle has tremendous applicability to all arenas of life. Two examples:
— The average reader can read 15 pages in 20 minutes of a normal book. If we took 20 minutes to read 15 pages every day, we could read 5,200 pages a year, or 26 200–page books.
— You can write a small note of affirmation or thanks in about a minute and a half. If you did that three times a week, you’d write 156 notes a year. What an encouragement that would be to your volunteers!
Take Care of Things the First Time
Boost your efficiency by dealing with things the first time around. Here are four ways in which you can take care of things at the beginning:
Decisions. Indecision is a great thief of time. Decision theorists tell us that 80 percent of the decisions we’re confronted with ought to be made right then and there, without delay. You might not have all of the information, but you’ve got enough information to make a good decision. Decision theorists also point out that a wrong decision made early is often better than no decision at all or a delayed decision. If you make an early decision and then realize another strategy would be better, you have time to make adjustments. So, when at all possible, try to make decisions when you’re prompted with the question.
Paper. Here’s your goal: only handle a piece of paper that comes across your desk once. That means you’re not necessarily going to pick it up as soon as it comes. Wait until you know you’ve got a small block of time to take care of it—throw it away if it’s of no value; if you think it would be valuable to someone else, pass it on immediately; and if it has larger implications than you have time for immediately, schedule it on your calendar and file the paper away until you can get to it. People who are not good at this can handle the same piece of paper 20 or 30 times. Try to get as close to once as possible.
E-mails. This goal is similar to that with paper: view it and act. Delete it, forward it, file it, or reply to it. Don’t let your e-mail inbox become full of more things waiting to be done. This means you shouldn’t open e-mail every chance you get. Wait until you have a block of time, maybe in the late afternoon when you have some creative downtime and can focus on whittling down the contents of your inbox.
Projects. If you can, follow a project from start to finish all in one fell swoop. This might require blocking out a significant amount of uninterrupted time from your schedule. That’s hard when you’re involved with ministry and people’s needs. It’s hard to say “I’m busy” to a person who comes to you with a need. But we need these blocks of uninterrupted time to get the important things done—for the sake of people’s needs. If you don’t do a good job planning the next year of the ministry because people are always interrupting you, who’s going to suffer? The people—the kids, the volunteers, and everybody associated with the ministry. So give yourself permission to shut the door and work on a project from start to finish. For some projects, it’s simply impossible to go from start to finish in one push. In those cases, employ “chunking.” Determine what the different parts of the project are, how long those parts will take, and schedule in those smaller blocks of time on your calendar.
Create a Thought Processing System
Our minds are asked to do three things:
1) To shuttle information. We ask our minds to store and retrieve information.
2) To handle incompletions. Things that require action or attention build stress within us. Oh, I’ve got to get that done. I’ve got to remember to do this. I’ve got to follow up on that. There are two things you can do to relieve the stress around incomplete things: — One, get it done. But that’s not always possible. So… — Two, write it down in a place that your mind knows you will not forget (like your calendar). That relieves the mind’s stress.
3) To do creative thinking. You can’t do creative thinking if your mind is loaded with anxiety about incomplete tasks.
Manage Your Time
Take Care of Things the First Time
Boost your efficiency by dealing with things the first time around. Here are four ways in which you can take care of things at the beginning:
Decisions. Indecision is a great thief of time. Decision theorists tell us that 80 percent of the decisions we’re confronted with ought to be made right then and there, without delay. You might not have all of the information, but you’ve got enough information to make a good decision. Decision theorists also point out that a wrong decision made early is often better than no decision at all or a delayed decision. If you make an early decision and then realize another strategy would be better, you have time to make adjustments. So, when at all possible, try to make decisions when you’re prompted with the question.
Paper. Here’s your goal: only handle a piece of paper that comes across your desk once. That means you’re not necessarily going to pick it up as soon as it comes. Wait until you know you’ve got a small block of time to take care of it—throw it away if it’s of no value; if you think it would be valuable to someone else, pass it on immediately; and if it has larger implications than you have time for immediately, schedule it on your calendar and file the paper away until you can get to it. People who are not good at this can handle the same piece of paper 20 or 30 times. Try to get as close to once as possible.
E-mails. This goal is similar to that with paper: view it and act. Delete it, forward it, file it, or reply to it. Don’t let your e-mail inbox become full of more things waiting to be done. This means you shouldn’t open e-mail every chance you get. Wait until you have a block of time, maybe in the late afternoon when you have some creative downtime and can focus on whittling down the contents of your inbox.
Projects. If you can, follow a project from start to finish all in one fell swoop. This might require blocking out a significant amount of uninterrupted time from your schedule. That’s hard when you’re involved with ministry and people’s needs. It’s hard to say “I’m busy” to a person who comes to you with a need. But we need these blocks of uninterrupted time to get the important things done—for the sake of people’s needs. If you don’t do a good job planning the next year of the ministry because people are always interrupting you, who’s going to suffer? The people—the kids, the volunteers, and everybody associated with the ministry. So give yourself permission to shut the door and work on a project from start to finish. For some projects, it’s simply impossible to go from start to finish in one push. In those cases, employ “chunking.” Determine what the different parts of the project are, how long those parts will take, and schedule in those smaller blocks of time on your calendar.
Create a Thought Processing System
Our minds are asked to do three things:
1) To shuttle information. We ask our minds to store and retrieve information.
2) To handle incompletions. Things that require action or attention build stress within us. Oh, I’ve got to get that done. I’ve got to remember to do this. I’ve got to follow up on that. There are two things you can do to relieve the stress around incomplete things: — One, get it done. But that’s not always possible. So… — Two, write it down in a place that your mind knows you will not forget (like your calendar). That relieves the mind’s stress.
3) To do creative thinking. You can’t do creative thinking if your mind is loaded with anxiety about incomplete tasks.
Manage Your Time
To aid your mind in accomplishing the things you ask of it, you can utilize these practical tools of a life management system:
A calendar. You need a place where you can plan for the future and store incomplete tasks so your mind knows you’ll see it. This can be a palm pilot, a paper calendar, a Day-Timer, or whatever works best for you.
A prioritized to-do list. Keep yout to do list with you as you go through the day.
Be aware of the unexpected. Ask yourself where this unexpected thing fits on your to-do list. Is it more important than anything else on the list? If so, write it down and get to it immediately or in due time depending on where it fits among your priorities. Remember, you cannot do better than to do that which is most important. If you conclude that the unexpected event or issue is more important than anything else and it takes you the whole day to deal with it, go home at the end of the day and say, I did that which was most important. Find peace and satisfaction from that. Know that God is a sovereign God and he understands the pressures of daily life.
Seeking to make the most of time is not about time management it is about life management and leadership purpose. May you and I seek to be purposeful with our time for the sake of the Kingdom of God.
this is a powerful statement.
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