Today’s Mission

Day 9

Balcony Day

Admitting the Existence of Normal

Everybody has a plan until

they get punched in the face.

MIKE TYSON

I don’t know about you, but I’m often thrown off track by normal—by things I could have anticipated if I had looked into the details of my week before I started it. Things such as

an all-day staff meeting

a funeral and a wedding

in-laws in town

my daughter’s dance recital

The truth is that most weeks we anticipate a predictable, calm “normal.” In ministry, though (and in most “normal” lives), chaos, interruptions and the unpredictable are the real normal. After doing lots of weekly coaching with youth pastors, I have come to expect most clients to describe their past and current weeks as “abnormal.”

They say things like,

“We had this retreat last weekend and . . .”

“The baby was up almost all night the last three nights with the flu . . .”

“We’ve got this big, annual campaign going on at church with tons of extra meetings.”

Yes, these things are peculiar. But having something peculiar is all part of a normal week. So let’s admit the existence of normal crazy weeks, but let’s take time to prepare for navigating the inevitable chaos we’ll be sailing through.

How? Today is your balcony day. Today you will take a couple of hours to work on your ministry. Today you move into the stance of being prepared for whatever is coming, while at the same time keeping on track with your most important priorities.

Today’s Mission

Make the decision to give up the illusion that there will ever be a time in your life when you just naturally and regularly get everything on your daily task list done.

Make a master list of all those who have said yes to specific roles. Print out that list, including the role that each person has agreed to, and display it prominently in your office.

Take a look at your task list for the week (or create one, if this is not a natural part of the rhythm of your life yet). Identify your top priorities for the week. You are looking here for things that will make your life and ministry more the way you’d like them to be a year from now (not the screaming, urgent demands on your time). Your top priorities might include

deliberate time with your family,
time for specific spiritual disciplines
and (of course) during these thirty days, two hours daily focused on building your volunteer team.

Complete your calendar for the week, including all currently scheduled appointments (such as meetings, programs and any other commitments). Now make appointments with yourself for the top priorities you identified in step two.

You may very well find that when you add your currently scheduled commitments and your top priorities, you are already out of time for the week (and you still have a few urgent things you’ve got to get to, not to mention returning emails and responding to voicemail). On some weeks this is normal. If this is the case for you this week, you’ve got some problem solving to do. Here’s a start:

Corral your emails and phone calls into a specific time block for each day. If your week is packed, you simply don’t have time to be immediately available this week. Plan on taking a break from Facebook and Twitter as well.
Determine what you will need to cut from your schedule, being careful not to cut any of your top priorities (those things that have the potential to make your life and ministry different a year from now). You may need to reschedule a meeting or two or delegate or simply live with the possibility that there may be some part of your life that is less excellent this week. If this feels foreign to you, remember that this is something you actually do every week already. It’s just that you do it on the fly, later in the week, and (if you’re like most of us) you wind up sacrificing your most important priorities.
Keep working on the filtering process until you have a schedule for the week that allows time for your most important priorities, time for current appointments and a few hours of margin.

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