No sluggard need aspire to leadership. There are passive persons who are content to go through life getting lifts from people; who wait until action is forced upon them. They are not of leadership material.
Most people spend time like they do money. They spend until suddenly they run short; then they seek a way to compensate.
The best approach, of course, is a disciplined lifestyle that prevents time (or money) from slipping away in the first place. This is what most time management books teach: Adopt a philosophy, implement it, and then maintain it as a way of life.
But most people will never be that disciplined. What they need is an emergency checklist to gain a few hours in the week—something to ease the frantic pace, to get them through the crunch.
Occasionally a worn-out pastor comes to me, and I say, “You’re under the gun, aren’t you? How much time would it take for you to catch up?”
He usually says something like “If I just had five more hours a week!” If he is working fifty hours a week, that’s ten percent to loosen him up.
Here is a way to pick up five hours from any week you choose. It provides immediate and effective relief for those who are swamped. But it is for emergency use only. As in dieting or spending money, the long-range answer is a better lifestyle that doesn’t require temporary bailouts. Mine is a battle plan, not a war plan. You shouldn’t continue this emergency plan for longer than, say, four to six weeks.
Most pastors, however, can walk into a pulpit and say, “Folks, you’re not going to see as much of me for the next six weeks as you have. I’ve gotten behind in some very important things I should be doing, because I’ve been doing other things that were needful. I’m going to need your understanding for the next month while I catch up.”
People will identify with this and be very cooperative. Of course, if they hear that instead of working and praying, you’re out playing golf, they will think you’re pulling their leg. When you declare an emergency, it’s got to be legitimate.
Here is my twenty-point checklist for saving time in emergencies.
1. Clean off the desk. To start the battle, sweep away everything you won’t be using in the next six weeks. When I diet, I don’t leave food lying around the house to tantalize me. Unfinished work tempts me, makes me want to look at it, pick it up, finish it. I feel guilty about it. So the first step is to clean off my desk.
I tell executives that the most productive week of their lives is the week before they go on vacation. They all laugh, because they know I’m exactly right. In that week they clear the decks, make decisions, delegate. They accomplish a lot because they quit messing around. If I’m going to quit messing around for a period of intense battle, I must remove from sight the intimidating stuff I’m not going to use.
2. Stop reading the newspaper. I can pick up three and one-half hours a week right there, and if I only need five hours, that’s a pretty good start.
One of the finest Christian leaders I know analyzed his life and decided he was better off without a newspaper. But I also have a lawyer friend who won’t leave his office without buying a paper for fear “someone may ask me if I’ve read something I haven’t.”
What a tremendous amount of reading time! How much easier to reply, “No, I didn’t see that. What did it say?” The person can tell you in two or three minutes.
When not pressed for time, I can read the Sunday New York Times and get all the newspaper reading I need for the whole week. The thing I say to myself is What am I getting out of the newspaper that’s worth making my life frantic?
The same principle applies to television. Break the habit of turning on the set without first checking the listings. Make TV watching a planned occurrence.
3. Get up fifteen minutes earlier. I do this more as an exercise of the will than to gain the extra minutes.
I know I can’t lift a two-hundred-pound cement sack; it would overload my body. I must be just as careful not to overload my will. We often make resolutions with insufficient will power to carry them out. Then we get disillusioned and mad at ourselves when we fail. The truth is, we have weak wills.
Our wills may support getting up fifteen minutes earlier, but they won’t support getting up an hour earlier. We say, “But I should be able to.” That’s fantasy. We’ve got to be objective about what kind of resolution we have.
Fifteen minutes each morning gives me an added hour and three quarters a week. Add that to the previous three and one-half hours, and the goal of five extra hours is already reached.
4. Delay unnecessary reading. I would postpone all reading that does not directly contribute to what I am doing during this emergency period.
Personally, I don’t dare pick up a book at random. The other night I spent the whole evening in a fascinating book about the will, but if I were in an emergency period, I wouldn’t dare pick it up. Otherwise, I’d be stuck with it. I won’t starve myself for the rest of my life, but for a period of time I cannot permit myself to read randomly.
5. Read only parts of books. I’m surprised at how many people feel they have to read a book cover to cover.
If I’m in a hurry, I skim the table of contents, find the subjects I need to know about immediately, and read those chapters. I’m a firm believer in not eating the whole pie. One piece gives plenty of ideas.
6. Work on the majors only. Some people have the unfortunate habit—and it is a habit—of listing each thing they have to do as if it were equal with all the others. I listened to a college group spend two hours debating a question that didn’t deserve thirty minutes. But because they wanted consensus, and because everybody wanted to talk, they confused a major with a minor.
Not everything in life is of equal importance.
If I were a pastor, I would make a hierarchy of priorities to keep me from allowing emergencies to top the list. First I’d go with my personal spiritual vitality. What keeps me spiritually vital as a person? That’s my number one job.
Second, how do I keep a good, productive relationship with my family? And what about my prayer life? My studying? These four priorities are usually the first to get shorted by people who have trouble with time. Perhaps these things are harder to evaluate than if I attended a Rotary meeting or solved an emergency.
For instance, if you belong to Kiwanis or some other civic group, skip one out of four meetings and take your wife to lunch instead. When people say, “I missed you,” say, “You know, my wife is more important than the club.” Don’t go out calling. Make sure your family is the beneficiary on the days you give up the club. Wives appreciate that kind of statement.
During time battles, I ought to be able to write down the two, three, or four major things I simply cannot slight, and be sure only to work on them. These are my current majors, the items of greatest importance today. Everything else has to be pushed aside to work on the majors.
When the battle is over and I return to the routine war against time, I may have a completely different set of majors. I try to guide my life so my majors are consistently given importance.
7. Make no radical changes. I want to be very careful during an emergency period not to make any radical shifts, because they require a lot of time to implement. The object of the battle plan is to pick up time, not to change. For example, I wouldn’t try to review my habits for spending time. These are my reflexes, and it takes too much effort to change them. I wouldn’t attempt to rework the organization or correct others’ mistakes or get people mad at me and have to go back and apologize. I call these kinds of things “rework.” I save the rework for the general war and concentrate on winning the present battle.
8. Avoid the wood-hay-and-stubble activities. Things that flatter my ego, satisfy my human ambition, make me liked—social affairs—are wood, hay, and stubble. If I have time for them, they’re perfectly all right, but they are not eternal. And they can drain a lot of time.
I try to examine my life and ask, “What are the wood-hay-and-stubble activities?” Praying at the football game is not really a major thing if I’m pressed for time. It’s a good ego boost. But if I’m in an emergency to recapture control of my time, I can’t do it.
A pastor should list those church meetings he can stay away from comfortably. Lunch with the Women’s Missionary Society every time it meets is not mandatory. There are many such meetings.
Under emergency procedures, I might even walk into a staff meeting and say, “Folks, I’m pressed for time. I’m going to have to ask your indulgence. Give me fifteen minutes to cover my subjects. You talk them out after I’m gone and then write me a memo on what our plan should be.” Remember, that’s for an emergency. They might let me do it for as long as six weeks, but I would be neglecting my responsibilities if I tried it every time. I have to decide what is wood, hay, and stubble at the present moment.
9. Know my limitations. A fellow called the other day who wanted to come by and talk. A part of Christian responsibility, I feel, is to see anybody who asks me—once. Beyond that, I am not bound, because it becomes an intellectual responsibility. If I can help him, I owe it to him; if I can’t help him, I owe him nothing.
Because I was busy, I asked the fellow, “What do you want to see me about?”
When he told me, I knew I had no ability to help him at all. So I didn’t see him. I didn’t need to sit and talk to him thirty minutes, and then disappoint him. I told him very quickly by phone, without being brutal.
When I am pressed for time, I must pinpoint the counseling situations where I can uniquely help and then push the others to somebody else. But a lot of times, we will see someone out of curiosity (particularly if it’s a woman) just to find out the story. An attractive, affluent woman recently asked me to spend a couple of lunches a month with her to mentor her. I said very frankly, “I cannot help you do what you want to do. What you need is real, but you need somebody besides me.” We broke it off right there. There’s no reason, just because she was pretty and had money, that I should spend time with her.
10. Ask permission to say no. When I need to decline something, I want to say no as simply and graciously as I can. When I ask for permission to decline, people generally give it to me. I don’t say, “If you only knew how busy I am, you wouldn’t ask!” I just say, “Let me ask a favor. May I say no?”
I do this with speaking invitations. I say, “You know, that would interfere with a section of time I really want to keep discretionary. If I agree to speak for you, it will come right in the middle of those two weeks. Do me a favor: let me say no.” I handle it once, cleanly and clearly, and save a lot of time that way.
11. Distinguish between information and relation. Those who say to answer every letter when you receive it are missing a very important point. Mail and phone calls come in two kinds: information and relation. When I divide them up, I find most of my mail and calls are information. I can handle them once. But I don’t want my habit to cause me to handle relational things that way.
If someone wants to know how much something costs, I can give the price now as easily as later. I won’t handle informational letters twice.
But if somebody asks me a personal question in a counseling situation, I’m not going to say the first thing that pops into my mind. I ask myself, How will this strike this person? I have to think about relational questions, so during emergencies I postpone them if I can.
12. Utilize a secretary for informational things. I can handmark a whole stack of items where just information is needed, and my secretary knows how to handle them. She attaches a little note: “Mr. Smith is out of the office and wanted you to have this immediately. Here it is.” People are glad to get it, and I don’t have to touch it at all.
On the other hand, I don’t ask my secretary to handle relational things. If there is anything that irritates me, it is for somebody else’s secretary to call and say, “Mr. Jones would like to speak with you.” Then I have to sit there and hold the line until he gets on. That’s a relational matter, and he should be on the line when I pick up the phone.
13. Deal only with the “driving wheels.” I mentioned in chapter 3 that every organization has some people whose thinking and action control everyone else’s thinking and action. In order to save time during a period of emergency, I only deal with these driving wheels. They may not be the title people. But if we know our organizations, we can identify the driving wheels and the people I call the “idling gears.” Many times a key secretary is the most important person in the whole organization. I never slight my relationship with her.
If I’m in a hurry, I spend time only with the people who make things happen, who form the opinions. I put the other relationships on hold for a while.
14. Protect personal energy. Since I work so much more efficiently when alert, I must protect my energy when time is scarce. One of the dangers of becoming harassed and time-pressured is that it cuts down energy and alertness. When that happens, effectiveness suffers. So during an emergency period, I don’t want to do anything that dissipates vital energy.
I find it very important during such a time to eat less and exercise more. If I had three wishes for pastor friends, it would be for more money, less food, and extra hours in the day. I can write articles about two of these, but pastors have to handle the food themselves. Cutting down on food, particularly sweets, is important. People eat sweets for sudden energy, but nearly all the research says they don’t get that at all. Also, too much coffee interferes with sleep. We especially need to take care of our bodies in an emergency period.
My office is on the thirteenth floor. When I feel fuzzy, I go down to the eighth floor and climb the steps back up. It takes about two or three minutes, and by the time I get back I’m breathing hard, taking in a lot of oxygen. I don’t attempt a cross-country run, but a little exercise revitalizes me. I can increase my energy and work a little longer because of it.
But I must also remember not to try to accomplish more by overworking. What I can do in fifteen hours is not three times what I can accomplish in five. Industrial research has shown that if employees work too long in a week, their productivity goes down the last several hours. A person has only a certain number of productive hours. I find I can work productively about ten hours a day. I can’t handle twelve hours, so I shouldn’t try.
15. Schedule work according to productive hours. For me, the first few hours of the day are worth more than all the rest. I can accomplish more getting up at five and working till seven than I can in any other four hours. So I schedule the really creative, productive things for those early hours. If I don’t, I end up postponing work all week and patching together a last-minute job that looks exactly like it.
16. Compile a list of second-wind jobs. These actually refresh me. If I had to read the Wall Street Journal right after lunch, I’d be sound asleep in fifteen minutes. So I like to do something exciting that I’ve really been waiting to work on—jobs that give me my second wind. They increase my utilization of time. Many times I’ll call a friend after lunch and just sit and talk. By the time I get through with the conversation, I’m higher than a kite.
If I don’t have anything exciting to do, I will do something routine. For example, I always walk through the plant after lunch because it is hard to fall asleep on my feet. Maybe I’ll get my hair cut or go to the bank. But if I’m in an emergency and must shorten those downtimes, then I will use a job from my list. Second-wind jobs kill downtime and get me going.
17. Discipline self-talk. All of us talk to ourselves. This morning in the car I talked to myself about this chapter. If I hadn’t had this concern, I might have thought about investments, golf, or half a dozen other things.
During an emergency, I can’t afford that. I have to discipline the details—even my self-talk—to pick up time.
The basic difference between fast golfers and slow golfers is planning. The fast golfer thinks about what he’s going to do with the ball before he gets to it. He can step up and hit it in a hurry. The slow golfer doesn’t think ahead about the shot.
Going to a meeting, I say to myself, What do I want to come out of the meeting with? It’s clear in my mind if I have talked it over with myself. I walk into the meeting with my agenda set and don’t waste time.
18. Put curiosity on hold. When I am strapped for time, I have to swallow my curiosity and not ask questions. I make statements. Normally in good human relations, we ask questions. But if we want to save time, we don’t.
If we ask, “How’s your mother-in-law?” it often takes some time to hear the whole sad story. It’s just as warm to say, “Hey, I’m glad to see you,” and keep going. Curiosity costs a lot of time.
Let’s say I see a group in the hallway, and I wonder what’s going on there. If I enter the conversation, I’ll stay and talk—and there goes my time.
19. Stay out of sight. During a period of emergency I work at home, lay low. The last thing I would do as a pastor is wander through the church, because somebody will surely stop me and want to talk. Some pastors think that wherever two or three are gathered together, there they should be—knowing what’s going on.
I try to curb my exposure during a time of emergency. If I stay out of people’s sight, I don’t have to offend them with my hurry.
20. Leave meetings first. I’ve had some fun with executives on this point. I tell them the most important person in the meeting leaves it first. Once I finish my speech, that remark empties the hall faster than anything I’ve ever used before.
Actually, it’s true: the most productive people leave a meeting first. They don’t stand around shaking hands and swapping stories. A friend of mine sat on a corporate board with me. At the conclusion of one meeting after he had retired, he leaned back in his chair and told a joke. It was the first time in forty-three years! I thought to myself, He has definitely retired.
People hang around a meeting to be liked, not to accomplish anything. The business is done; only the social frills are left. A pastor may not be like a salesman who pours drinks until the wee hours of the night to make a sale, but he may hang around a meeting being the nice guy, talking to everybody, trying to get to know everybody, and using too much time for too little profit. Busy people using a time battle plan can’t afford the leisure.
That’s the checklist for waging the battle.
Don’t get me wrong. This plan is not at all about how to speed up. Pastors are already going fast enough. What I’m getting at is how to gain some time. I don’t care if you loaf in your new-found time. In fact, you ought to use part of it for loafing. If you’re already panicky, harried, frantic, and worn out from the pressure, don’t spend your new time doing more work, or you’ll be right back in the same problem.
I asked a friend one time, “What’s a living wage for you?”
He replied, “A little bit more than I’m making now.” If I gave him that much more, three months later he’d probably say the same thing again, because he would raise his standard of living to whatever he earns.
If you treat your time like that, you will never be out from under the pressure. If every time you get an hour, you fill it up, you’ll have no concept of what a normal lifestyle is.
Our responsibility, our talent, and our time are all given by God. If he can’t balance these, who can? One of the most unstressing things I ever discovered was that God could exist after I died! That was most revealing. Why should I feel all this pressure? After all, what would change between the moment I’m doing all this work and the moment I’m dead? Nothing as far as God is concerned. So I don’t have to fret; he didn’t intend me to live with all this pressure.
A man I know, a very successful professional, paid fifty thousand dollars—money on the table—to go to an alcoholism clinic. One of the most discerning things I’ve ever heard came from a psychiatrist there. He said:
“For a long time people couldn’t understand how a man could be an alcoholic, sober up, stay sober for ten years, and then go back to drinking. Surely he knew all the problems he had as a drunk. Why go back?
“They found out why. People who give up alcohol but remain only abstainers can be back to drinking at any time. Those who move from abstaining to the joy of sobriety seldom return. But until they make that transition from abstaining to sobriety, they are vulnerable.”
There is a theological truth here. If all I have in life is work and more work, without assurance of God’s sovereignty, I may well give up the Christian warfare. But if ever I taste the joy of grace, as Paul did, I will see life as a challenge, not a threat. No one could ever sell Paul again on works. He had come out of law to the joy of grace.
In respect to time, we need to move beyond fighting battles, losing them, fighting again, losing again, and fighting once more. We must move to a new way of life. Waging a battle is certainly better than not winning at all. But battles remain second-best to achieving a lifestyle where we stop worrying about time control. It has become so ingrained, so natural and effective—even so joyful—that we wouldn’t give it up for anything.
I’ve provided a battle plan. It will work in a pinch. How much better to win the war.
Copyright © 1986 by Christianity Today
