Today’s Mission

Day 16

Balcony Day

Procrastinate Now!

Someone who is busier than you

found time to exercise right now.

SOMETHING I READ ON THE WINDOW OF A GYM

WHILE I WAS ON MY WAY TO LUNCH

I procrastinate every day. And I’m proud of it. I want you to be a procrastinator too.

I’m proud of being a procrastinator. In fact, it’s the key to the 30-Day Change program, even the key to progress in any area of our lives.

If you have never perfected the skill of procrastination, you’ll spend as much time every day on secondary priorities as you do on primary ones. Today (and every day), try procrastinating (guilt free) on any priority that is not the most important thing for you to be doing right now.

Sounds easy, but as you know it can be mighty hard. Most people never take the time each week, then each day, to determine what those things are that will make their lives different a year from now. And as a result, they procrastinate on all the wrong things.

Your balcony time is likely the most important time you’ll spend this week. This is the time you’ll spend triaging everything on your to-do list and selecting those things that are mission critical for your life and future. Your top priorities are not to be confused with your screaming, urgent priorities. Your top priorities are those that move you closer to the life you want by focusing on the right things today.

As a refresher on how this process works, you can look back at day nine. This will help you do a weekly review and identify your most important priorities for the week. During this balcony day, also make time to troubleshoot any challenges you’ve had to doing the most important things first, especially the daily priorities outlined in this project.

Remember, it’s on the days that you fail to procrastinate well that you’ll get into the most trouble. Refuse to just fire up the computer and go after emails without thinking. Decide first what your top priorities will be, and put at least one of those on the top of each day’s to-do list.

Procrastinate on everything else.

Today’s Mission

Make an updated 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 to be confused with 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 (including meetings, programs and any other commitments). Now make appointments with yourself for your top priorities identified in step two.

As was the case last week, you may 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 messages). 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.
Determine what will need to be 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 already do every week. 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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