12 More Than Planning: The Essential Systems of Chaos Management
More Than Planning
The Essential Systems of
Chaos Management
Success is no longer related to the volume of tasks you complete but rather the Significance of them. As Peter Drucker once said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
We’re not saying that the whirlwind is bad. It isn’t. It keeps your organization alive and you can’t ignore it. If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.
THE FOUR DISCIPLINES OF EXECUTION
Because we have so many different “jobs,” it is easy for some of them to get ignored. And because the urgent things scream so loudly, we usually put off the most strategic, foundational things, at least until they become urgent! How many well-intended days have been hijacked by an unintended ministry surprise? The surprises caused me to abandon my plans for the day, which of course, only led to more things falling through the cracks.
Usually those surprises weren’t really surprises. They were just tasks that had been overlooked so long that they eventually became urgent. Week after week, the cycle would continue. And week after week I would feel more buried under the weight of things I had to do right now!
So in this chapter I want to share with you a few hard-won tricks of the trade for managing the urgent while preparing for the future. Whether you’re struggling like I was or you’re an organizational savant, these tips might help you get enough altitude to tend to the things that matter most.
Balcony Time
In “the balcony,” you take a step back from this week’s or this month’s tasks and look at the bigger picture of the ministry from a higher level. This is time for you to invest in the future of the ministry by strategizing, refining processes, and planning for the next few months or the next year. This is a time when you don’t answer your phone or email, or work on this week’s lessons or volunteers list. The result of your time will be clarity about not only where you want to go but which tasks deserve your attention this week and in what order. As I introduce you to the idea of balcony time, I want you to know two things.
No single practice will affect the long-term impact of your ministry (and your own sanity) quite like making time each week for balcony time. When we look at our massive list of things to do, almost every task spends our time, while balcony time invests and multiplies it.
Balcony time is so hard to build into most people’s routine that it is practiced by only a fraction of people in ministry. Remember: if we want results that normal people don’t get, we’ll need to do things that normal people don’t do.
Before you think balcony time is just one more thing to add to your task list, you need to know that we’ve never found anything that comes close to freeing us from urgency addiction and perpetually chasing our tails. Balcony time helps us tend first to the tasks that will have the most long-term impact while at the same time making sure that none of the urgent things gets dropped. If that promise sounds like a dream come true, keep reading.
Approximately 80 percent of your time should be spent on the operation of your ministry. We hear some time management experts tout the importance of taking time for strategic things as if strategic work should somehow replace operational work. Balcony time just makes operational work more productive and so much less unnerving.
That being said, it is mighty easy to get lost in the daily tasks that make ministry run. And as a result, most of us spend little time working on the ministry (focusing on the big picture and looking ahead), not just in it (the tasks of ministry). Working in the ministry involves 80 percent of your time—making Sundays happen, recruiting, and pulling off amazing events (also known as last-minute miracles). Working on our ministries—balcony time—helps us identify our top priorities and sequence them one at a time.
If balcony time sounds like a luxury you can’t afford, think again. Avoiding balcony time because you’re too busy is like not putting gas in your car’s empty tank because you’re in a hurry. If you want to stay in this ministry game for the long haul, it’s absolutely essential.
Yes, it will feel like a sacrifice in the beginning. Yes, you will have to face the anxiety for a few hours when you leave the ground floor with tasks still undone. Trust me, those tasks aren’t going anywhere. They’ll be right where you left them when you step back from balcony time!
Balcony time is a high-yield investment instrument, but it can feel like starting a savings habit when you’ve been used to spending every penny every month. It might pinch a little at first.
Once you’re in the rhythm, you’ll want to spend four hours or so a week in balcony time if you’re full-time. (If you are not full-time, try to get to about 10 percent of your work hours each week.) If you need to start with just an hour or less, do it. Here’s a punch list I like to use during balcony time:
1.I start by reviewing all the roles in my life. (Balcony time is not just about thinking intentionally about your ministry; it’s also thinking intentionally about your life.) The following are mine:
⚪ Christian
⚪ wife
⚪ mom
⚪ children’s ministry worker
⚪ consultant
⚪ coach
⚪ writer
⚪ athlete
⚪ household manager
⚪ money manager
⚪ family member
⚪ friend
For each role, I want to identify the most important task I can work on this week in that role. As a wife, it may be as simple as making sure that whenever my husband comes home, I stop what I’m doing and greet him. As a coach, I may want to order a book on coaching that’s been recommended to me.
How many marriages fall apart because neither spouse take the time to deliberately improve their marriage? And the same could be said for our ministries. Tending to each of these roles every week means that at least once a week I’m doing more than reacting to what is coming at me in each of these roles.
2.Next, I review my calendar, looking ahead at least two weeks and looking back at least a week. This simple exercise prompts me to add more than a few tasks to my master task list.
3.Speaking of the master task list, it comes next. This is when I take time to update my master list of all the tasks I have pending. You may use an app for your task list or a legal pad or something in between, but the rule of thumb is that you only want one master list. During balcony time, you’ll take all the stray Post-it Notes and reminders scribbled on your bulletin and drop them into a single list.
4.If you work this process for a month, you might be amazed by how many tasks make it onto your list. It’s not unusual to have one hundred or more at any given time. But a list of one hundred is hardly actionable, and most of the time it’s paralyzing. So the next step is to pull this week’s tasks from your master list and put your master list away until next week’s balcony time. We’ll now call this your intentional procrastination list, since you will have given yourself permission to ignore it for the coming week (phew!).
5.Once you’ve got this week’s task list in front of you, drop anything into the calendar that you need to put there. If you have a shifting sabbath day, this is the time to lock that day in for the coming week. This is also when you identify the times you’ll be unplugged from work. Ordinarily, in addition to your sabbath day, we recommend you carve out three additional slots (morning, afternoon, or evening) as off time.
If there are appointments you need to make or confirm, you can do it here. Warning: a calendar is for appointments (with yourself or someone else). If you’re using your calendar as your task list, you’ll be wasting too much time—like using a screwdriver as a hammer. We’ve all done it before, but it ain’t smart.
6.Once you get all the urgent tasks under control, you can turn your attention to a big-picture project, such as
⚪ your volunteer recruitment or training plan
⚪ your one-year calendar
⚪ making your database more nimble so you can more effectively reach out to new and MIA families
⚪ updating one or more game plans, such as hospitality, parent ministry, communication, or rites of passage
⚪ tending to your preventative maintenance calendar
⚪ strategies for engaging more families
You may quickly discover, as I did, that as soon as you schedule your balcony time, the universe will conspire to interrupt you. You may decide that you’ll need an extension office—like Starbucks or Panera—to give you more than five minutes of uninterrupted time in the balcony.
Rhythmic Week
In 
As I lay out my week, I like to start with naming my sabbath day. With the unpredictability of ministry, it’s sometimes tough to have your sabbath on the same day every week, but it’s good to have one set into your rhythmic week template to keep you from scheduling things seven days a week.
After you’ve blocked off your sabbath day, find a slot (morning, afternoon, or evening) for balcony time. Then you’ll want to identify the program times that you’re committed to each week (like Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights). You don’t need to add all your meetings into your rhythmic week template. You just want your major blocks identified so you can have intentional rhythms of being fully on and fully off, and a few times that are somewhere in between. A rhythmic week for a full-time children’s director may end up looking something like 
Table 12.1. A sample rhythmic week for a full-time children’s ministry director
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Morning
Program
On
On
On
On
Balcony
Sabbath
Afternoon
Flex
On
On
On
On
Off
Sabbath
Evening
Flex
Flex
Off
Program
Flex
Off
Sabbath
We’ve already talked about all the slots except “On” and “Flex,” so here’s a little explanation for those two. “On” time is simple. This is when you are on task, handling the many operational tasks on this week’s to-do list, including more than a few meetings, I’m sure.
The “Flex” time is a bit more nuanced. Flex slots are when you are off, but you are also available should you need to respond to emails or have a meeting. We consider these to be porous time off, fully interruptible. If you are taking care to protect your “off” and “sabbath” time, you won’t feel taken advantage of when one of your flex slots gets spoken for each week.
One key: because our schedules can shift so much from week to week, the rhythmic week will almost never work until you take balcony time, and some of it is used to recalibrate your rhythmic week for the coming week. If, for example, you’ve been asked to speak at the church women’s retreat on Friday night and Saturday, you’ll need to move your sabbath to a different day.
If you find yourself saying, “I haven’t had a day off in two months,” it’s likely because you haven’t taken your balcony time and have chosen to play whack-a-mole with your task list rather than take responsibility for managing it. If your schedule is out of control, you’re usually not a victim—you’re a volunteer.
The Daily Six
In 1918, Charles Schwab was running a very successful steel company when he reached out to productivity consultant Ivy Lee. Lee said that he could increase Schwab’s executives’ productivity after spending only fifteen minutes with each executive. In that fifteen minutes, he explained his method to them. When Schwab asked him how much the consultations would cost, Lee said, “Nothing, unless it works.”
After three months, Schwab wrote Lee a check for $25,000, the equivalent of $400,000 or so today. Here’s his method:
1.At the end of the day, make a list of the six most important things to accomplish the next day.
2.Put them in the order of importance.
3.The next day, start with the first item, and only work on one item at a time.
4.If any items are left at the end of the day, put them on your list of six for the next day.
5.Do this every workday.
I wonder how much this single habit could transform the impact of ministries around the country. Try it, and I’ll bet you’ll discover that we all tend to put off the unpleasant tasks, even if they are the most important. It’s easy for the most important tasks to get buried in a list of 30, 50, or 100 items on our list, and for us to ignore the steps that can have the most impact on our ministries.
I love the way my daily-six list forces me to make that difficult phone call or order new bulbs for the projector when I would much rather check my email (not answer it, mind you, just check it). I think you’ll find a huge adrenaline boost after completing every challenging task, putting more wind in your sails for the next one.
Sunday Monkey Management
You walk down one hall on Sunday morning and the number of monkeys you collect can be astounding. Janet asks you to pray for her mom in the hospital, which you promise to do. Little Levi asks if you’ll be calling to sing happy birthday to him on Tuesday, which, of course, you’re thrilled to do. One of your teachers reminds you that all the ink is out of the markers for their whiteboard; you’ll get right on it. The children’s choir director asks you to announce the rehearsal time has shifted from 3:00 to 2:30 today, and asks you to distribute a flier to all the teachers. One of your volunteers who is going through a divorce asks if the two of you could get coffee this week.
Sound familiar? We call this challenge the fine art of monkey management. Every task that gets handed to you on a Sunday morning is another monkey climbing on your back. Here’s how we define a “monkey” in this metaphor: a monkey is the responsibility to take the next step. Church hallways are an astounding place for monkey transfers. A person comes to church carrying the monkey (the responsibility to take the next step) and asks you to speak at Bible study next Tuesday. They ask, and instantly, the monkey jumps from their back to yours.
There is nothing sinister about this kind of monkey transfer, but if you’re a monkey-management neophyte, the whole process can be a recipe for frustration and disappointment. Of course, you can carry a notepad (either paper or electronic) and jot down the monkeys as they come. You can integrate these into your task list on Monday morning. I’ve found this to be pretty difficult, so here’s what I try to do: Unless the monkey giver is my boss, I ask the person to please send me an email or text reminding me. I say something like, “I love that idea! Could you send me a quick text or email about it? I want to make sure I don’t forget in the flurry of the morning.” I have communicated that what they have brought is important to me, so important, in fact, that I need their help to keep it in front of me. But I have left the monkey with them.
Preventative Maintenance Calendar
There are so many things to be tended to in the ongoing maintenance of a healthy children’s ministry. Once a year, we need to do a thorough update of the database. Once a year, we need to revisit and revise our curriculum template and select curriculum resources for the upcoming year. Once a year, we need to update our hospitality plan, our attendance tracking system, our visitor and MIA follow-up plan.
A preventative maintenance calendar, just like you might use for your home (in April clean out the gutters, change the HVAC filters quarterly, etc.) helps your schedule when you tend to the larger, foundational components of your ministry. I’ve included a sample children’s ministry preventative maintenance calendar in appendix F.
Once your preventative calendar is drafted, you can add those prompts into your regular calendar. If you’re using an electronic calendar, you can set an annual reminder for the first day of the appropriate month to tend to that month’s preventative maintenance tasks. If I know, for example, that I need to begin preparing for the Advent Fair two months ahead of time, I will set up a reminder on my calendar for October 1.
You can even add to your preventative maintenance calendar tasks that occur at regular intervals throughout the year, like checking attendance reports for MIA kids. In this case, you add “Run MIA attendance reports” to each month on the preventative maintenance calendar, then add it, say, to the first Tuesday of every month throughout the year.
These tasks are never urgent and, without this tool, often get overlooked, resulting in an increasingly unstable foundation for your entire ministry. Reviewing and updating your preventative maintenance calendar is a great task to add to your regular balcony time punch list.
Putting It into Practice
Every ministry is different, and each of us has different organizational tendencies—some, unlike me, are naturally organized, and others are not. Regardless of your natural bent, we are responsible for stewarding well the hours God has given us.
So before you turn the page to the next chapter, get out your journal (or phone) and write down three things you’d like to incorporate into your own organizational system. They can be things you’ve read in this chapter or something else you’ve wanted to try. But choose just three.
I’m easily excited, so I could see myself reading this chapter and wanting to jump into a complete organizational overhaul— tomorrow. Let’s start with a few small changes that will stick, and build from there.
Give yourself a date about three months out to evaluate your new system. Go ahead and schedule that appointment with yourself in your calendar. If you feel like you’re developing a good rhythm, continue what you are doing and add one new habit. If you don’t, come back to this chapter and pick another idea or two to try until they become habits.
By now you’ve probably realized my conviction that trying to do multiple ministry projects at the same time seldom saves time. But we can do a different kind of multitasking—we can multiply the amount of work we get done by focusing deliberately on one identified priority at a time.