Secrets for Managing Your Time WiselyFive questions for pastors to ask.Peter F. Drucker| Topics: | Boundaries, Delegation, Leadership, Management, Meetings, Mentoring, Priorities, Team building, Teamwork, Time |
| Filters: | Church staff, Discipleship, Elder, Pastor, Shepherd |
| Purpose: | Discipleship |
| References: | Ephesians 5:15 |
| Date Added: | July 12, 2007 |
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Many discussions of a pastor's tasks start with the advice to plan one's work. This sounds eminently plausible. The only thing wrong with it is that it rarely works. The plans remain on paper as good intentions. They seldom turn into achievements.
The first step toward effective pastoral time-management is to record actual time-use. The specific method in which the record is put together need not concern us here. There are pastors who keep such a time log themselves, others have their secretaries do it for them. The important thing is that it gets done and that the record is made in real time; that is, at the time of the event itself, rather than later on from memory.
A good many effective pastors keep such a log continuously and review it every month. At a minimum, effective pastors have the log run on themselves for three to four weeks at a stretch, twice a year or so on a regular schedule. After each such sample, they rethink and rework their schedule. About six months later, they invariably will find they have drifted into wasting their time on trivial matters. Time-use does improve with practice. But only constant efforts at managing time can prevent us from drifting.
Systematic time management is therefore the next step. We have to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if we possibly can. This requires asking a number of diagnostic questions.
- Ask yourself first: "What would happen if this were not done at all?" If the answer is, "Nothing," stop doing it. It is amazing how many things busy pastors do that would never be missed.
- The next question is: "Which of the activities in my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?" Ministers, as a rule, do not know how to delegate. They think delegation means turning something over to somebody else. That's not delegation; that's abdication. In order to delegate, we decide, "What is the job? What are the objectives? What are the minimal standards? What are the needed results?" Then we seek someone else to do it. That's managing.
- The third question is: "Am I wasting my staff members' time?" There is no one symptom for pastors wasting their staff's time. But there is still a simple way to discover if this indeed is occurring: ask other people. Effective pastors have learned to ask systematically and without coyness, "What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?" To ask this question—without being afraid of the truth—is a mark of an effective pastor.
- The fourth question is: "Which time-wasters result from a lack of a system and which from a lack of foresight?" The symptom to look for is the recurrent crisis, the crisis that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again.
A recurrent crisis should always be foreseen. It can therefore either be prevented or dealt with by a routine that staff members or other church workers can manage. The definition of a routine is that it makes unskilled people without judgment capable of doing what it took near-genius to do before; for a routine puts down in systematic step-by-step form what an able person learned in surmounting yesterday's crisis. The recurrent crisis is typically a symptom of laziness.
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