Seedplots

Scheduling one’s day can be a challenge for those who lead God’s people.  They don’t have an “8-5″ job nor, in many cases, a boss telling them what to do hour by hour.  Demands on their time pour in from all sides, yet books and messages exhort them to spend more time with God, pray more or study the Bible more.  Have you every thrown up your hands and wondered – “Why does it have to be so complicated?”

In the secular world, two basic approaches to Managing your time / managing your life have won the respect of many leaders (actually they command a cult-like following among many):

• David Allen’s Getting Things Done [GTD]
• Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits

Both are helpful, both have their strengths and weaknesses.  GTD is based on tasks to accomplish in specific contexts, Covey’s is based on Roles in a person’s life and weekly deciding what is most strategic in each role.

Matt Perman, building on both approaches, made some very practical suggestions in a blog posting last month that I found extremely helpful. I have tried putting these suggestions into practice in my own life and commend them to you:

I believe in having a general framework from which you approach your day… a basic schedule of sorts that gives some behind-the-scenes guidance for how to slot things in your day. This template is not something you literally put on your calendar, but is more of a mindset.

The Four Things You Need to Do Each Day

It seems to me that there are four types of things you need to carve out time for in any given day:  Routines, Office tasks [he terms this Releases, I have renamed it], Projects and People.

• Routines means your daily workflow routines, such as processing email and your physical inbox.
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• Office tasks are small actions that are not project related. GTD has you put these on your next actions list. I found that doing so actually ruined my next action list because I would always end up with six trillion mosquito tasks staring at me all day long. I’d want to do things just to get them off my list, and not because it was the most strategic use of time.  Now I group all of these mosquito tasks together into a project of their own, which I keep outside of my next action list.
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• Projects are any unique initiatives you are working on which have a beginning and an end.
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• People means interaction, networking, general management stuff, meetings, stuff on your calendar, and so forth.

Suggestions on how to do this will follow in a later posting.  Here’s the link to the complete article.