I know what you’re thinking: ”I work well under pressure.” Or “when I’m under the gun it helps me to focus my thoughts.” I know because I used to have similar ideas. In the past I never intended to leave things for the last minute, but I often did. I would always finish things on time, but it would be in a mad rush that left my nerves quite frazzled in the end. Why did all this happen? Because I never had systems and intentional strategies in place to help me to finish things early.

I recently wrote a post called “How To Maximize Your Schedule,” but I realized that I still didn’t end up making the strongest case as to why things should be finished early. I’d like to do that now.

So here are three reasons why you should finish your projects early:

1. It helps you to be more creative
I thought that leaving things for the last minute actually helped me to be more creative, because it “forced” me to focus the little time I had. But since I’ve been working on finishing things early, I’ve noticed that I actually have much more creativity. This is for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it gives my mind more time to think about the finished product. I can come back to it later, seeing the big picture, and seeing little areas that might need to be tweaked and could be made better. Scientists agree that while you sleep your mind continues processing and thinking about a project. Often times I’ll go to sleep not knowing how to go about a project, but realizing in the morning that it’s become clear.

Secondly, I have more creativity because I have more time to be creative. I can finish a project or sermon, and then be thinking about things that are yet to come in the future, giving myself even more time to process and marinate the ideas.

2. Gives you more freedom to respond to emergencies
When you finish things early, you’re creating margin in your life that helps your to be prepared for emergencies. As a pastor, the biggest “project” I have every week is writing a sermon. If you’ve never prepared a sermon before, it usually takes 15-20 hours of study and concentration. My sermons are generally about 8 pages in length and 2500 words. It’s like writing a research paper every week. I’ve created a system in place in my schedule whereby I devote two days to the process of sermon writing. On Tuesdays I work on research and creating an outline of the message with a title and main idea. On Wednesday, I actually write the sermon out and streamline it. Once I’m done with that project, it means that I still have two more days in my week to devote to other important, but not necessarily urgent matters. If an emergency happens, I can address it with confidence knowing that my message is already done.

3. Allows you to be emotionally present
When you finish things early, it also allows you to live a much more relaxed and balanced life. I can spend more time with my family. I can be emotionally present with people in a meeting. More importantly, I can be emotionally present with my family. I can spend time with my wife without worrying about some project that needs to be finished. I can enjoy playing catch with my little son or enjoy watching him bang away on a piano because I know that things are already done.

I push myself hard in the beginning of the week with the urgent and important matters, so that by Thursday I can focus on those things that are still important, but not necessarily urgent.

What about you? What works for you?

[image by zoutedrop]

If you’ve ever wished you could carry around classic Christian hymns on your iPhone, you’re going to get really excited about this new iPhone app. It’s called I.Praise and it basically has catalogued all of the hymns in the Seventh-day Adventist church hymnal, which by the way, are almost all the same hymns that any other Methodist, Baptist, any many other church hymnals use. Just saying.

So we’re now officially about one month to go before we arrive at the biggest church-going day of the year: easter. Which naturally begs the question, “what are you doing?” There’s lots of different things that many churches do, but I thought I’d share on a few resources that have come up so that you can sharpen your planning.

1. One resource is called PlanningEaster.com. It’s put together by Shawn Wood of Seacoast Church and they want to use that site as a resource to share what’s been working for easter programs.

From the site:

“Instead of live feeds at scheduled times, over the next four weeks, we’ll have different blog, video, and picture posts constantly being uploaded.  We will be hearing from leaders from different churches around the country on how they are creatively planning Easter weekend events.  Got an idea?  Submit it on the “Share” page.”

Of note, they’ve also started using the hashtag of #planningeaster on Twitter, so you could easily do a search with that hashtag and see some blurbs of what people are planning. I have to say that I really commend the spirit of such sites. Everyone realizes that it’s a big day, so why hold the most effective methods to yourself? Share it!

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For the past few years I’ve been experimenting with different things in order to maximize my schedule and to be more effective. Some time ago my friend Pastor Billy Gager recommended a book called “Making Room For Life,” by Randee Frazee, in which the author presents what he calls a “Hebrew day planner.”

In essence, it’s quite simple. God created one major thing every day, and he makes a case that we work better as well when we can focus on one major event per day. This is not quite possible for all jobs out there, but I’ve been practicing and honing this for a few years now, and wanted to share how I’ve been doing and what my schedule is like.

Continue Reading…

A few weeks ago Rick Warren held a conference called Radicalis. I was really interested in seeing the live stream of Andy Stanley speaking. They gave him a section to speak on preaching.

I missed it, but here and here are two blogs posts that wrote about it that are quite helpful. And if you never read the blog post where I reviewed and fleshed out his system you can click here.

During the month of March there will be two church growth conferences sponsored by NEXT Coaching Networks. Dr. Ed Stetzer will be speaking at both of them.

One will be held in Warner Robins, GA on March 1, 2010. For more information and to register for this one click here.

The other conference will be held in Kissimmee, Fl on March 12, 2010. For more information and to register for this one click here.

I think they should be good!

You may or may not be aware of the discussions taking place related to the book Pagan Christianity. I wrote a blog post a little over a year ago called My Problem With Pagan Christianity. In fact, I recently found out that if you google “Pagan Christianity Book Review,” my blog comes up with the top hit, which explains why I’ve been getting a lot more traffic lately.

Well, Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, and one of the leading voices in the church world recently decided to take on what they view as being inaccuracies and weaknesses in much of the book.

You can read the whole post here. I’d recommend downloading the pdf here, though, because it includes all the footnotes which can be quite valuable.

Here’s a preview of some of his conclusions, though:

Even with these qualifications and points of agreement this book as a whole is not recommended, and many of its arguments are to be outright rejected. The tone of the book itself is problematic, because the authors are so sure of themselves. When one finds that their biblical and historical claims, which were carried with such confidence, are not all historically and biblically viable, their certainties become almost comical. Suddenly the authors warning at the beginning of the book (“If you are unwilling to have your Christianity seriously examined, do not read beyond this page”) doesn’t sound so ominous anymore.

I encourage you to make up your mind for yourself, though.


[image by bkingr]