Seedplots

I’ve written several postings this month on planning one’s daily schedule.  Many of the suggestions I cited were from secular writers.

While these contain wise and useful advice, another dimension exists.  A person who leads God’s people needs to factor in the spiritual dimension of daily planning.

I was challenged by the way theologian Wayne Grudem integrated these two dimensions when asked,

What single bit of counsel has made the most significant difference in your effective use of time?

He answered,

I find the most helpful thing I do regarding use of time is to spend time in prayer each morning bringing my plans and my “to do” list before the Lord and seeking his direction.

As far as human advice and counsel, I have found the system described in Getting Things Done by David Allen to be very helpful… I should add that I find effective use of time to be a continual challenge and I keep making small modifications here and there…

Several verses of Scripture also have influenced me in this regard. Paul said, “It is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy (or “faithful,” Greek pistos)” (1 Corinthians 4:2) and that has made me seek to be faithful to God in the way I use all of my time.

Here’s the original interview link.

con’t from last Friday…

5. Keep a SHORT to-do list for each day – four items, max
I used to weight down my to-do list with way too many things to do. At the end of the day, though, I would not only feel as though I rushed through stuff, I’d feel like I hadn’t really accomplished too much because there was always stuff left on my list.

The solution is pretty simple. Your to-do list should have at most four items on it. Naturally, your day routine will have several other tasks that you do as part of a routine (checking and responding to emails, maintenance tasks, regular meetings, and so on) – don’t include these on your to-do list. Instead, those routine items should be used to fill in the gaps between the big items on your to-do list. Finish off each day with the routine of ensuring your to-do list for tomorrow is ready, but you can/should be assembling it throughout the day.

Construct those items carefully so that they can be done with about fifty minutes of truly focused work. This way, you can complete a task on your to-do list with a single block of focused time (as in tip #1, above). If you need to fit in more work than that on your to-do list, add it to the one for the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.

How I Do It: I just add items throughout the day to my lists, then at the end of the day, I fill up tomorrow’s list to four items with tasks that always need done – drafting posts, researching a particular angle, and so on. Each day, I live by this list. I close out distractions and focus on one item on the list until it’s done. Then, I do all of my routine tasks in the gaps between these big jobs. If things go well, I might steal an item from the next day’s to-do list if I have time for a fifth thing.

6. Check email only twice a day
Email is almost always a major time sink. It’s rarely a simple matter of just reading messages. Many messages demand responses, and some messages demand follow-up tasks. Leaving that email window open throughout the day ensures only one thing – your concentration will be interrupted constantly by messages that come in that need responses.  My solution is to simply close the program. Open it only two times a day or so and do an email session, where you deal with everything in your inbox. Then, close the program completely (including notifications) and move onto something else. If it’s truly urgent, someone will come directly to you, so don’t worry about missing out on something vital.

How I Do It: I check my email twice a day. I often do one email session while eating lunch, then a second session just before finishing up tomorrow’s to-do list and quitting for the day (on occasion, I’ll do a third one in the morning before the kids wake up, but this one is often interrupted). My goal with each session is to clear out my inbox – I deal with every message immediately unless it involves a task that’s going to take more than five minutes or so.

7. File things once a day
This is actually a pretty recent addition to my routine. I had to add it simply because I had a giant pile of things that didn’t need immediate action, but needed to hang around for future reference: statements, prospectuses, post ideas, receipts, magazine articles, and so on. My pile of such items eventually came to dominate my desk and it was often impossible to find anything in there.

To take care of this, I started a very simple filing system in a box that I keep next to my desk. This keeps my desk clear most of the time (giving me space to work on things at hand), plus it enables me to find stuff quickly when I want to find it. The best part? Once the system is in place, it doesn’t take much effort to maintain it – maybe a minute a day. Considering I’d often burn ten minutes digging through the pile finding things, this is a huge time saver for me.

8. Start your day with your major creative or thought-intensive task
When I start my day, I have a choice of the four items on my to-do list. Which one will I tackle first? I’ve usually had breakfast and a shower and prepared the kids for their day, so I’m wide awake and my brain is running. I’ve found, time and time again, that starting your day with your most thought-intensive task sets the tone for the whole day. It forces you into prime thinking early on and you can ride that wave throughout most of the day. If I do a major thought-intensive task after several hours of work, my brain turns to mush for the rest of the day. Finishing the day with my easiest task leaves me pretty fresh for my evening activities with my family.

How I Do It: Whenever I look at the day’s to-do list, I always choose the item that seems to be the most thought intensive. That means I do my heaviest thinking earlier in the day, usually ending with an afternoon task or two that doesn’t require nearly as much active thought. I’ll do creative work in the mornings and things like interviews in the afternoon, for example.

9. Take lots of micro breaks (or at least switch to very different tasks regularly)
One of the biggest enemies in a workday is lethargy. It’s easy to find yourself in a low-energy period, sitting there having trouble keeping your eyes open or concentrating on anything. Once you’re there, it’s often very hard to pull yourself out of it – you’re running on low energy for the rest of the day, even if you do rebound a bit.  The best way to combat it is to never let your energy level get that low. That means not sitting at your desk or your work area for long periods. Get up and move on a regular basis. Instead of eating a big, heavy lunch, eat smaller snacks throughout the day. Stretch. Drink water. Do this as often as you can – bookend task sessions with a micro break where you do these things.

How I Do It: Whenever I finish an isolated block, I take a five minute break. I get up from my desk, walk downstairs, get a drink of water, use the bathroom, stretch a bit, and maybe grab a very small snack (like a granola bar or a piece of fruit).  Doing this has basically eliminated the mid-afternoon energy lull I used to have – around two, I would basically hit a wall and not be productive for the rest of the day. Now, I can keep going until … well, read the next tip.

10. Don’t overwork
Sure, once in a while, you have to put in some extra hours in order to really do your job well. It’s also important to note that different people have different energy levels for their day.  Given that, though, the worst mistake you can make is to overwork. If you’re nearing the end of the day and you just can’t seem to get anything done, don’t push it. Time and time again, I’ve found that pushing myself to get just a little bit more done at the end of the day has long term negative ramifications. I have a harder time getting going the next morning, for example, and if I do it consistently, my overall productivity slows to a crawl.

How I Do It: If I feel myself starting to slip at the end of a day, I stop. I finish up my day and move on to something else. Burning myself out with regards to my work is incredibly dangerous and something I take great pains to avoid. Stopping early might slightly reduce my productivity for that given day, but it doesn’t drag down my long-term productivity at all – if anything, it does the opposite, because I’m not burnt out the next day.

Here’s the Original Link

Here’s another list of suggestions for daily work, again from a secular writer (Trent Hamm). 

This article is fairly long, so I’ll break it up into two postings – this Friday and next Friday.

Ten things that work for me

Over the last few years, I’ve read a ton of time management books and tried out literally hundreds of systems and standalone ideas for maximizing the effectiveness of my time, particularly in terms of my work… Here’s the problem with productivity tips… Most of them don’t work.

I’ve tried many, many productivity ideas, yet I keep coming back to the same handful in the end. These tips work for me… I think most of them will work well for you – at the very least, they’re worth trying.

1. Avoid multitasking like the plague
Every time I attempt to multitask, I wind up doing each task with a lower level of quality than I would have if I had focused on just that task. My concentration isn’t fully sustained on any of the tasks I juggle, so I wind up using only a slice of my brain for each task. That simply results in lower quality work… In the end, I’m left with tasks done in a mediocre fashion and, quite often, no time saved at all. That, to me, is a lose-lose.

Here’s the way to solve it: focus on only one task at a time. Let the rest slide. Work on that one task in bursts – at most an hour in length. Then stop and catch up on any incoming messages you need to deal with, take a break, and so on.

How I Do It: When I begin a big task, I shut off everything. I turn off my cell phone and the ringer on our home phone. I close my email program. I shut my office door. I choose music (or similar audio) that’s conducive to concentration. I set the clock to an hour or so. Then I bear down. I do the research. I write the article. I let everything else go. After about five minutes, I usually get into some sort of flow where I fail to even notice what time it is until my clock alerts me that the time is up. When I stop and step back, I usually realize that I’ve completed what seems like a lot of work, far more than I would have achieved with interruptions.

2. Keep a notebook with you and write down your thoughts
We all have lots of good ideas float through our heads throughout the day: things we need to do, ideas for future directions, facts we need to look up. In an average day, I usually have twenty or twenty five of these little things bubble up from my sub consciousness.  Many people try to just trap these in their conscious mind until they can do them, but doing that makes it harder to concentrate and really bear down on an important task. Instead of doing this, keep a pocket notebook or a PDA with you at all times to jot down any small things that pop into your head. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good idea or not – just get it down on paper and deal with it later.

3. Keep an “inbox” and process it once or twice a day
So, what do you do with all of those jotted down notes – and with all of the other things that come your way in a given day, like mail, miscellaneous tasks people send to you by email, and so on? It’s pretty simple – once or twice a day, process all of it. Take some sort of action on all of those stored-up items – toss them in the trash, file them away, take care of the task, pencil it in on your calendar, or so on.  The goal needs to be eliminating everything in your inbox. You should strive to get to “empty” once a day, with everything in there dealt with in some capacity. If you let it build up, it will grow out of control.

How I Do It: I usually keep two separate “inboxes” – one on the computer and one on the left side of my desk. I pick through each of these at least once a day, usually at the end of the day. Usually I spend time adding to my idea file, taking care of little tasks, adding things to tomorrow’s to-do list, updating my calendar, updating my grocery list, and so on. The biggest challenge I had to work through with this was not simply making another pile out of things that needed filing and things that need further reading (like notes for a future post). I’ve recently solved that problem (see #7).

4. Keep a project list – and focus on it at least an hour a day
We all have a lot of projects that we’d like to work on – projects that aren’t really essential to what we’re doing, but would go a long way towards making life easier once they’re complete. Things like reorganizing the pantry, cleaning out the garage, sorting through all of our kids’ clothes and putting up everything that isn’t at least 3T in size, doing a small marketing project, writing something intriguing but complex, and so on – they vary widely from person to person… Of course, a project list is useless if you don’t use it. Set aside one hour each day where your focus is on one of the projects on your list. Pick one out and make some progress.

How I Do It: I keep a “to-do” list that is a maximum of thirty items long for such projects. I order it by the day that I add a task to the list, so that the oldest one is always at the top of the list. If the list has thirty projects on it and I want to add another one, I simply delete the one on top of the list. When I want to work on something, I start at the top of the list and go down the list until I find one that’s compelling for me to work on at the moment.  This works amazingly well for me. If a task reaches the top of the list and I haven’t taken significant action on it, it’s because on some level I’ve realized that I’m not really that interested in the project. It also keeps my “project list” from getting impossibly big, making it feel like a realistic thing to manage.

Here’s the Original Link

In an earlier posting on “Projects, concentration and multitasking” I commented on the problem of interruptions and how they affect our concentration.

I mentioned the importance of having a “both-and” mentality.  Interruptions are not necessarily bad, they just need to be managed wisely.  The following comments, which I ran across last week, highlight the flip side of the picture,

It’s not possible to schedule all of our lives (nor should we try). And so there is no misunderstanding: I’m not dependent upon my schedule. My dependence rests upon God himself.
The unexpected will arise each day, needs will emerge that we did not anticipate, and situations that we could not foresee will require our attention.
We should not be surprised by apparent interruptions to our schedule. These are part of God’s purpose and plan for our lives. As C.S. Lewis so wisely noted:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time (The Quotable Lewis (Wheaton, IL.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1989), 335.)

Here’s a simple checklist that can help a person use their time well.  Paste it up near your desk or in your planner and use on a daily basis!

1. Rise early
2. Start with the most important tasks
3. Do not multi-task (unless the nature of the task is to multi-task)
4. Prevent interruptions (but make time for people)
5. Organize your time into the largest continuous blocks possible
6. Actually do what you need to do

From Matt Perman’s blog, What’s Best Next

We all seem to have a common problem – not enough time to get everything done.

Here are some helpful hints Doug Wilson posted last fall on “getting things done” over the long hall…
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First, I believe in plodding

Productivity is more a matter of diligent, long-distance hiking than it is one-hundred-yard dashing. Doing a little bit now is far better than hoping to do a lot on the morrow. So redeem the fifteen minute spaces. Chip away at it. For example, I have a stack of six books that I am working through most weekday mornings — a page or two of each every time I sit down to read. I do the same thing with writing — if you have time for a little bit, then do a little bit.

Second, maintain boundaries for everything, boundaries that suit the circumstance

When the kids were little and still at home, the daily routine was completely different than it is now that they have families of their own. Generally, pastors need to set boundaries to keep their work from spilling into family time, and not the other way around. So, for example, when we were first married… I would be home with the family a minimum of four nights a week… As my responsibilities grew I had to figure out ways to be more fruitful in those allotted times. When an extra load developed, the idea was to have it land on me and not on the family…

In the evenings, Nancy and I hang out with the kids and grandkids who come over frequently, I play the guitar, read, and so on. It is a full and busy life, but we work hard at preventing it from becoming frenetic. I hate frenetic, which returns us to the previous point on the fruitfulness of plodding. Living this way, we have found that it adds up.

Third, measure progress by the extended video, not the snapshot

Set goals for getting things done, but have the time for measuring the goals be extended enough to allow for daily or weekly fluctuations. For example, when I first began to work as a minister I set a goal for my weekly reading, as measured by the month. I wanted to read on average 1-2 books a week, calculated by how many I finished in a month, which would be somewhere between four to eight books.

Set hard but reasonable goals, and measure them in reasonably extended time units.

Fourth, use and reuse everything

I know that my blogging pace sometimes creates the illusion that I do little other than sit here typing like a madman, but that is really not the way it is at all. Prepare things with an eye on reusing them in the future, and make sure to use (any useful) work from the past. This is how former Credenda articles are shaped into books, sermon outlines are shaped into books, Bible study outlines from fifteen years ago are lightly edited into continuous prose and turned into blog posts and may one day find their way into a book, and interesting quotations from books I have read are posted here with a view to using them as the research background on future books.

Posted by Douglas Wilson – 7/1/2008 Here’s the original link.

Many in positions of Christian leadership do not have a typical 9-5 type job.  Since their day is not structured for them, they need to structure it themselves.  For many, this is not as easy as it sounds.  Matt Perman’s article on the “Four Things You Need to Do Every Day” (Routines, Office tasks, Projects and People related activities) provides some helpful suggestions for doing this.

I introduced these four things in an earlier posting. In
this article, I want to discuss the first item: Daily Routines.

Daily workflow routines refers to those tasks we do each day, such as cleaning up our work space, planning our day, processing our e-mail, etc.  Perman suggests we ought to 1) take these routines seriously and 2) spend an hour or less on doing them, in a batch, right at the start of the day. “They will only get in your way if you don’t nail them out immediately” he argues.

I have found Perman’s suggestion extremely helpful.  I experimented with several approaches and finally settled on using a daily checklist covered with plastic.  When I complete an item on this list, I simply cross it off with a dry erase felt marker.  At the start of the next day, I erase the list and start over.  If I don’t finish everything on the list in an hour, I simply leave it for the next day.  Somehow the satisfaction of crossing things off the list helps motivate me.

As I began to implement this habit, I realized that in my own life I actually had three different sets of routines:

• Daily Spiritual disciplines related to my walk with God
• Daily household tasks
• Daily office tasks at the start of each day

Eventually I ended with three checklists of daily routines.  Here is a photo of the daily routine checklists I’m currently using.  A person needs to find what works best for him/her – this system is working great for me.

Practicing this habit has help me get these routines out of the way at the start of each day and freed me to concentrate my attention and energy on projects later in the day.

In an earlier post I introduced Matt Perman’s list “Four Things You Need to Do Every Day” (Routines, Office tasks, Projects and People related activities).  I’ve already written about “Routines.”

Here are Perman’s suggestions for the other three activities:

Office tasks

After doing your routines, take maybe 30 minutes to an hour to clear out non-project actions. These are basically the “next actions” in the GTD system. If you clear some out every day, you can keep up. Again, knock these out in a concentrated batch early in the day, before the phone starts to ring and new email starts to come in.

Projects

After your routines and releases are out of the way, turn to concentrated time on your priority projects for the day.  Interruptions are going to start, but that’s OK.  If you got your routines and small office tasks out of the way, you’ll be able to handle interruptions better without getting too side-tracked.  The amount of time spent concentrating on projects will vary with your job.  I’m thinking that it might be best to divide up weekly time in this way:

70% on core projects: Things that execute and improve those things that are right at the heart of your business / ministry / nonprofit model.
20% on progress projects: Things that will generate entirely new growth and approaches that did not exist before.
10% on learning projects: Developing your skills and knowledge. Do this “on the clock,” so to speak. It’s too important to only leave to evenings and free time….

The principle behind designating time to both core projects and progressive projects is: “preserve the core, stimulate progress” (Jim Collins).  Be doing both.

People

I don’t have a time recommendation here. This could be the rest of your day, depending on the nature of your job. As long as you got in time to get rid of your routines and some standard action items, along with some concentrated focus on projects, you’re doing well and should be able to focus the way you ought in regard to meetings and interacting over your work.

Free

The core principle behind my above thoughts is to get routine stuff out of the way at the start of the day and then make some progress on your small office tasks.  Then you can work in more small office tasks between meetings and project work and be more discretionary in how you use your time. In other words, be disciplined so that you can be spontaneous. If you aren’t keeping up with at least some baseline of progress at the very beginning of each day, the spontaneous time will never feel like it comes. You will always be trying to “keep up.”

If you want to be able to spend 70% of your project time on core projects and 30% of your time on advancement and learning projects, you need to be able to group your work into some type of “categories.” If you don’t, it will be harder to single out your project time from other time.

Simply doing projects, and even next actions, “whenever they work during the day” has never worked for me. In order to have the “whenever it works” time, I need to also have some designated time for them as well.

Here’s link to the complete article.

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.