Pastors live lives interrupted.  We start each new week with high aspirations for what we will achieve in the time given to us in the week to come.  Before we know it, the weekend is upon us, our sermon is still in vitro, and Sunday is calling.  We arrive home on Sunday night’s exhausted, only to rise again on Monday for it all to start over again.

Despite all our business we often fail to make headway in the things that really count in ministry.  We spend most of our days achieving others people’s agendas, whilst ours is put on the backburner.  We are often nothing short of help desk staff, available at any moments notice to attend to drop in visitors and drop in phone callers.  Much of the time the church is actually paying a lot of money to employ helpdesk pastors.

When the weekend arrives and the pressure of delivering on Sunday starts pinching, we start ‘pinching’ family time to finish what we should have had time to do during the week, but for the interruptions that we are captive to.  Upon returning from my recent sojourn to Africa I moved into guerilla mode with some new time management and priority principles.

I was greatly helped by two particular books that I purchased whilst on my travels. The first is the easy to read classic from Marcus Buckingham: GO put your Strengths to work.  Marcus is the ‘Strength Movements’ most prominent evangelist.  Put simply, it is about maximizing your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses.  The conventional wisdom is to identify weaknesses and concentrate on improving them.  Marcus writes, “a person or organization will excel only by amplifying strengths, never by simply fixing weaknesses.”

The book details research showing that only a minority of workers spend the largest percentage of their workday playing to their strengths.  The book has got plenty of helpful tools [including online tools] and I am using it to work through each chapter with my colleague.  A helpful one this week was to discuss:

1.  Which activities invigorate us and which deplete us?

2.  How can we manage our work hours so that we do a maximum of the former and a minimum of the latter?

3.  How can we communicate this persuasively to our leadership & staff?

4.  How can we keep our weeks intentionally tilted towards invigorating activities and away from the others.

The theory doesn’t allow for simply doing nothing about our weaknesses but rather shifting attention to the strengths.

The second book was more of a maverick book and I bought it for the brilliant chapters dealing with:

1.  Eliminating time wasters.

2.  The Art of Refusal.

3.  Interrupting Interruptions.

The book is called the Four Hour Work Week.

It’s essentially a guide to combating the ‘life deferred’ model of working your whole life, hopefully saving enough to retire and then belatedly enjoy what you always wanted to.  The author Timothy Ferris has fine tuned systems for automated business systems that have allowed him to travel around the world and do whatever he wants to [and he's done a lot of amazing stuff!].

For me, I was interested in the principles he used to reduce his work hours to a minimum [whilst increasing his income in the opposite direction].  The business systems are neither here nor there for  me, the guerilla time management principles are worth their weight in gold.  Timothy essentially does not believe in time management – “Just a few words about time management: Forget it.  In the strictest sense, you shouldn’t be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type.”

He quotes Pareto’s Law [80%/20%], and Parkinson’s Law which he interprets as: “since we have 8 hours to fill, we fill 8 hours.  If we had 15 we would fill 15.”  He also says “Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in importance and complexity in accordance with the time allotted for its completion.”

Ferris has a website full of resources which you can unlock with secret codes from the book.  The financial information is not all that bad for pastors if they are interested in establishing forms of passive income that require little hands on work.  This may interest many Baptist pastors given our salaries?

So what decisions have I made?

• Persuade our Board to install a new phone system which is digitized and automated [Talkswitch], and only rings in my office when someone is calling me, [rather than every time the phone rings].
• Establish a home office.
• Only check e-mails at 11am, rather than when I first get into the office.
• Only take calls between 11-12, and 3-4 [or other times when needed].
• Give all drop in visitors a strict 5 minutes [unless it is a pastoral emergency].
• Try and ‘meet’ more people on the phone, when a face to face is not necessary.
• Stack the chairs in my office, only to be put out when seeing someone [rather than drop in visitors and staff].
• Always meet staff in their office rather than mine.
• Invest more in 20%’ers.
• Spend time each Friday planning delegation of things which could be done better by others.
• Doing sermon prep away from church office.
• Stay in constant control of the ‘big rocks’, and not allow other agenda’s to unnecessarily divert me [except for important people or pastoral emergency stuff].

What principles do you employ?