Where Does Time Go?

Time is a remarkably equitable gift.
— Steven McKinley

Before my week started, I knew it was going to be one of those weeks. My appointment book told the coming story: worship services, meetings, classes, appointments, counseling sessions were lined up from Sunday morning through Friday afternoon, like soldiers in an unbroken line. Then, on Friday evening, we would begin the annual twenty-four-hour retreat of our governing board, bringing me home early Saturday evening — only to begin that hectic routine again. On top of that, we were in a building program at the time, and every day I anticipated having to iron out wrinkles and answer questions.

Every morning I was out the door by 7:00. I ate lunch at my desk, dashed home for a quick dinner, and then headed out again, making it home in time only to watch the late-night news and fall asleep in my chair during the weather. By midweek I was feeling frazzled and only semi-prepared for the responsibilities in front of me. Wherever I went, I was constantly aware of the time. I turned into a clock watcher.

On Friday evening at the retreat, I excused myself from the rest of the board members at about 10:00 p.m. to retreat to my room. As tempting as the bed looked, I forced myself to sit down at the desk, for the Sunday sermon was still only in the fetal stages. I pulled my Bible out of my attaché case, and I turned to the page marked with a card. I looked at the card.

“Ted Livingston — heart surgery — Wednesday, 9:00 a.m.” it said. I had written myself the note the previous Sunday and stuck it in my Bible. I had forgotten about it until now. There I sat, closeted in a retreat center, having forgotten an essential hospital visit, looking at an unfinished sermon. As busy as I had been all week, I had still missed out on some of the essentials!

Like me, most pastors are busy and frustrated at their inability to get as much done as they would like. They are educated, faithful, loving — they want to be good pastors. But their time is out of control. They are “time bombs.”

After struggling with managing time over several decades of ministry, I have learned a few things that have defused time pressure’s explosive threat.

Realistic Assumptions

We all make certain assumptions about ourselves and our time. Unrealistic assumptions make us feel helpless and under the gun. On the other hand, here are five realistic assumptions that ease the pressure.

• Pastors aren’t the only people working long hours. When tempted to feel sorry for myself, I think of the members of my church council. For the past four months, Harvey, a mechanical engineer, has been directing the start-up of a new machine 150 miles from his home. He leaves home Sunday evening and returns Friday night and assumes he will spend twelve hours a day in the factory.

Todd commutes two hours a day. Mary, a doctor, leaves home at 6 a.m. and considers herself fortunate to get home by 9 p.m. When her beeper goes off during one of our council meetings, she’s out the door. Parish pastors do work long, hard hours, but they aren’t the only ones.

• Work will expand to fill the time you give it. Most jobs require a minimum amount of time to accomplish. At our house, we have an absurdly large yard. Cutting it takes four long hours of riding the mower back and forth, then another hour trimming around the trees and edges with a hand mower. The job can’t be done in less time than that.

But we can take more time. If I stop to chat with a neighbor or drink a glass of tea or polish the mower or sharpen the blade, it can take eight hours to cut the grass. If I allow myself eight hours, it will take eight hours.

Writing a sermon, planning a wedding, and talking on the phone to Mrs. Murgatroyd each take a certain amount of time. But if I allow myself more time, the sermon I usually write in four hours can take six. If I take it upon myself to ensure all wedding details are perfect, even those responsibilities of the bride and groom, I can double my preparation time.

• There is a difference between busyness and accomplishment. Most pastors are notorious activists, glorying in their jam-packed appointment books. If you’re at the local clergy association and agree to lunch sometime with your colleague from St. John’s by the Gas Station, it’s a thrill to pull out your appointment book and discover you don’t have lunch free until three weeks from next Thursday. That filled-up appointment book tells the world you are working hard. Busyness is its own reward.

But you can be busy without getting much done. You can get caught up in trivialities, accept responsibilities that shouldn’t be yours, work in a disorganized fashion, and create unnecessary work for yourself.

Decorating our church for Christmas was the speciality of two families in the congregation. They always did a bang-up job. But one December, Nancy was tied up with a new baby, and Harry didn’t feel like he could leave her. No problem. Emma and Vern would get the job done.

On her way out the door to come to the church to decorate, Emma slipped on the ice, fell, and broke her ankle. Vern called me from the hospital. He told me that I didn’t need to come to the hospital right away, but he also let me know he wasn’t up to decorating the church all by himself. He usually came along, he said, just to provide “muscle.”

An undecorated church, the decorating committee out of commission — sounds like a job for Super Pastor! The next morning I announced to the church staff that we were decorating the church that day. We turned on the answering machine and charged into the sanctuary.

If I do say so myself, we did a pretty good job. But the price we paid was the time of the entire staff for a whole day one week before Christmas. I had not only done myself in, I had done my colleagues in. I took on a responsibility that should not have been mine and made an already hectic season all the worse.

(By the way, when the next Christmas season came, Emma and Nancy said that the church staff had done such a fine job decorating the church the previous Christmas that they were sure the staff would want to do it again! Once you’ve accepted a responsibility, it can be very difficult to get rid of it!)

• You accomplish more than you think. Pastors are notoriously self-critical. We have high expectations for ourselves, and when we don’t meet them, we feel like failures. At the end of the day, we often feel as though we haven’t accomplished anything.

That feeling is rarely accurate. I use a yellow legal pad to plan my day. First thing every morning, I pull out the yellow pad. At the top of the page, I write my appointments. On the left side of the page, I list my things-to-do list. On the right hand side, I note the names of people I need to talk to.

As the day goes by, I cross off what’s done. Each night I can see how much I accomplished by how much has been crossed off, and it’s usually more than I thought.

• You have as much time as anyone. Time is a remarkably equitable gift. Whether you are rich or poor, young or old, white or black, male or female, Christian or Jew, you get the same twenty-four hours a day. Nobody gets more. Nobody gets less. The question is how we will manage those hours.

Where Does Your Time Go?

If at the end of a long day of ministry your spouse asks what you did all day, you may have a tough time answering. You may say, “I don’t exactly know.”

We can’t control what we don’t understand. And I’ve learned that how we spend our time rarely matches how we think we spend it, and it almost never matches how we ought to spend it.

Here are four steps for changing that.

1. Write your priorities. What is most important to you? Preaching? Visitation? Education? Youth ministry? Counseling? Spiritual growth? Study? Family time? Worship? Ecumenical activities? Political action?

Answers to this question will vary based on your personality, gifts, interests, type of congregation you serve, and position. Don’t just think about those priorities. If it is important to you to make twenty home visits each week or to spend one night each week with your family, write it down. In fact, this is an important principle of effective time management: write it down. Don’t trust your memory to hold on to everything you have been told and all of the commitments you have made. Write them down. And then put them in your desk for two weeks.

2. Notice your rhythms. Are you a morning or evening person? When are your up times of the day, and when are your down times? When do you do your best work?

I’m a morning person. I get to my office before the rest of the staff, before the telephone starts to ring, and before people start stopping by. That gives me quiet time for prayer, study, and planning, when my creative juices are flowing. Early in the morning, I like to write sermons, outline classes, and dream great dreams.

I also know I’m likely to drop into a valley after lunch, to feel sluggish. This is the time to take on routine tasks or jobs so stimulating they overcome my drowsiness. It’s time to be moving rather than sitting at my desk. I visit hospitals and shut-ins and make telephone calls in the early afternoon.

Whatever your rhythms, make friends with them.

3. Examine how you actually spend your time. Get your hands on a desk-sized personal planner or a professional appointment book. The little pocket-sized appointment books aren’t big enough. If you cannot afford that, make a chart of each day broken into fifteen-minute blocks. For the next two weeks, fill in each fifteen-minute block with what you did during that period of time.

Be specific. If the chairperson of the Altar Guild phones to discuss the difficulties she’s having scheduling persons to clean up after Communion on Sunday mornings in the summer, write, “Talked with Mrs. Dickinson for thirty minutes about Altar Guild problems,” even if some of the conversation was about the weather or this year’s tomato crop. But be honest. If you spent fifteen minutes chatting with a neighboring pastor about last Saturday’s football game, do not list that as “ecumenical activity.”

While you might not want to stop and record your activity every fifteen minutes, don’t wait too long. Your memory isn’t that good! All this writing might seem like an unnecessary burden, but it’s a necessary step toward getting organized. The result will be an accurate record of how you’re actually spending your time, enabling you to deal with your real schedule problems, not your imagined ones.

4. Compare your priority list with how you are actually spending your time. Pull out of the desk drawer the priorities you developed. Has your schedule been harmonious with your priorities? If visitation is important to you but you only spent two hours in the past two weeks at it, you probably feel frustrated. If preaching is one of your priorities, but you never get around to your sermon until Saturday night, you probably don’t feel good about your ministry. Is the way you spend your time in harmony with the way you believe you should be spending it? If not, you can do one of two things: change your priorities or change your schedule.

Black Holes of Time

Whether or not I decide to change my priorities, I’ve got to look for time wasters. Here are some black holes that suck large quantities of my schedule if I’m not careful.

• Priorities not prioritized. It’s Monday morning. Before the week is over, there’s a sermon to write, an article for the newsletter to compose, the agenda for the board meeting to prepare. Mr. Zabel, who is terminally ill, is hoping for a visit, and you haven’t been to the nursing home to see Mrs. Terwilliger for several weeks. The Anderson wedding is Saturday, the stewardship committee has asked you to suggest names of prospective calls, and several letters on your desk await response. You should meet with the congregational president before the next board meeting. Your daughter has a softball game on Tuesday night and your son a piano recital on Friday night, and you’ve agreed to go out to dinner with your spouse sometime this week.

Where do you start?

It’s time to prioritize. You already have a list of pastoral priorities telling you what’s important to you. Rank the week’s activities accordingly. Then get out a blank time log for the week and assign them appropriate blocks of time.

Be honest in your scheduling. If it always takes you six hours to write a sermon, don’t pencil in only four.

Keep a list of the items that don’t fit into your calendar, because you may be able to squeeze them in gaps during the week. Knock off letters one or two at a time. Leave early for your Wednesday luncheon appointment and visit Mrs. Terwilliger. You will get most things done, but you will have made certain that you will get the most important things done.

• Attending to too many details. I have a thing about burned-out light bulbs — can’t stand them. If I come into the corridor outside the church offices in the morning, switch on the lights, and the bulb blows, my instinct is to go to the janitor’s closet, find the correct light bulb, pull out the ladder, and replace the bulb. Of course, along the way I might remember a burned-out bulb in the thirdgrade Sunday school classroom, so I replace that one, too. And since I’ve already got the ladder out, there is that banner over the entrance to the nave that has gotten off-kilter, so I’ll straighten it. Then, as I put the ladder back, I’ll notice a collection of old bulletins sitting on the shelf in the janitor’s closet, so I’ll throw them away.

Next thing I know I’ve been fiddling around for thirty minutes doing jobs that aren’t mine. A note to the janitor (thirty seconds to write) would have put him on the trail of these projects and saved me thirty minutes.

It’s not that I’m too good to change light bulbs. It’s not my job, not the best use of my time. Far better to delegate that task and see to it that he follows through.

• Staying later and later. I sometimes envy the people on tv beer commercials. They appear to have put in a solid day’s work, but now it’s finished. Now they’re going to sit back with their friends, enjoy a cold one, and relax in the satisfaction that the day’s work is done.

I envy them because I arrive home each night painfully aware of all that didn’t get done. No matter how long or how hard I work, I never feel as if I’m completely done.

In previous times, we used to hear the saying, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.” Neither is a pastor’s. There’s always one more call that should have been made, one more card that should have been sent, one more commentary that should have been consulted. Nonetheless, we run out of hours.

There comes a time to go home, not just to change physical locations but also to leave the day’s work behind, letting “the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” I need to discipline myself to leave the work behind, to enter fully into the life of my family, and to find recreation. On some days quitting time may come at 4:00 p.m. Other days it won’t come until 11:00. But when the time comes, I go home.

• Agreeing to just one more thing. A while back I received a call from Eunice, a woman who is not a member of my congregation. I’ve worked with her on some community projects; I like and respect Eunice.

After a few preliminaries, we got down to the reason for her call. “Would you be willing to serve on the board of the local humane society? It’s just one night a month.”

Being a typical pastor, I didn’t want to hurt Eunice’s feelings. I’ve learned, however, that most one-night-a-month obligations turn out to be more than that. I am away from home too many nights already, and I attend more than enough meetings to satisfy my meeting urges.

I said no. Eunice pressed her plea, but I held my ground.

Our church is a prime spot for requests to do weddings. We have a prominent location. We have worked hard at doing them right. But a well-run wedding requires a significant amount of my time in premarital counseling, rehearsing, and the actual ceremony. Usually that time is on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, two times I prefer to be with my family, enjoy recreation, or prepare for Sunday morning.

I used to say yes to all the wedding requests we could schedule. But sometimes it was a grudging yes, and I came away frustrated and depressed. Now we say no to most non-member weddings, to those folks who are simply looking for a nice place to get married. I feel bad about that sometimes — but I feel good on Friday night and Saturday afternoon! When I do say yes to a wedding, it’s a wholehearted yes.

It’s all right to say no. If we’re going to get on top of managing our time, we need to say no intentionally, not by default.

My board once gave me a parody of a famous prayer. As I consider my schedule week after week, I read this:

“God grant me the serenity to prioritize the things I cannot delegate, the courage to say no when I need to, and the wisdom to know when to go home.”