As we have pushed forward into the information age, ministry has followed suit in many ways. . . ministry work has evolved so that it isn’t strictly about counseling, facilitating discipleship, teaching on a one-to-one or one-to-some basis. Sophistication in communication resources has allowed growth-oriented ministries to find themselves planning, producing & presenting more content, running more outreach programs, serving more people by collaborating in teams and more.

This has changed the daily routine of ministry work a bit for some.

Have you ever had meetings to plan volunteer training, or leadership lunches, or ministry team retreats?

I’m sure you have at some point, if its not already a regular occurrence in your work.

Are you aware that you’ve gotten to the point where you are meeting about meetings?

Today is a Monday, and it’s typically a meeting-heavy day here.  I already know not to schedule any meaningful calls or meetings with new people on Mondays because I’ll be consumed with various standing meetings.   In the end, Monday’s are not really a day where I “get work done.”  Have you ever felt the same thing?

How do you change this? At least for the people you manage and interact with?

Before you figure it out, here’s a great TED talk where Jason Fried discusses “Why work doesn’t happen at work?” to put it into context:

One of my colleagues at work, Rich Birch, has offered up this response:

The author, Al Pittampalli, is trying to dig one layer deeper than usual to figure out how to radically change our work habits around meeting and productivity.

Rich has arranged an opportunity for us to sit down internally with Al this coming January, and I’m excited to read his book, READ THIS BEFORE YOUR NEXT MEETING — and then interact with him to see how I can activate some of the insights for my own praxis in year ahead.

I definitely want to ramp up productivity in the next year, what about you?

QUESTION: Are you sick of meetings? What do you do *during* your inefficient meetings? Got any tips to make meetings radically useful to everyone that comes? Share your rant or tip below in the comments. I’m looking forward to hearing all of it!

Whether you are in a ministry situation where you are a solo pastor, team-based ministry or non-profit organization, there’s one thing everyone surely shares in common: tons of stuff to do on your plate.

Overworked, burned out ministry leaders are everywhere. You can see them a mile away – they are ineffective, impersonal, rough on the edges and just plain old not fun to be around.

One of the key success factors for a vibrant personal ministry is not taught in seminary: Adapting your own personal workflow so that you become more productive over and over again.

Here is one method that I find very helpful when coaching others that are seeking a way out from the overwhelming demands put on them(selves) in their vocational roles: (more…)

Part of effective ministry work is learning how to maximize your efficiency.

There’s tons of angles on this topic, but one of them is to find the right tools that help you be your best.   As someone who wears the technologist hat at times, I am asked quite often about which iPhone apps people should download and utilize.

While I’d normally post this kind of content over on my personal technology tips blog, I’m going to try and share a selection of technology tools and resources I personally reply upon here on Godvertiser.com.  The hope is that you begin to reconsider your own workflow processes as you do your ministry work and strive to find iterative ways of improving your personal productivity.

So here goes, first in a series of posts sharing what works for me. . .

When you’re constantly on the go, it’s imperative to find ways to be productive when and where you can.  Being able to block out the world and focus on a task right in front of you is key.  Location is key.  But sometimes, you don’t have much of a choice.  Even Starbucks can become a party zone with chatter that distracts beyond belief — not the conceptual “break time” place you were hoping for when you walked in the door.

I’ve been using a white noise generator app on my iPhone for awhile now, and it’s one of my most used utilities.  In fact, I turn to it almost on a daily basis because it really helps me mentally drown out all environmental distractions and just focus.

The paid version is awesome with 40 different sounds and mixing capablities, but White Noise LITE is good enough with 10 free background noises.  You can adjust pitch, volume, balance, etc.

If you need some zzz’s and are using the white noise app to zone out completely, you can set a sleep timer to shut off automatically after a period of time.

There’s even a digital clock that you can put on the screen while you are listening so that you have a clue as to how long you’ve been in another world.

They have versions for the other major mobile platforms in addition to the iPhone/iPad iOS – Android, Crackberry, Palm, and Window Mobile. Here’s a video that gives you a peek at the app directly:

I personally find the Crashing Waves and Rain sounds the best for my own use, but others like Airplane and Fan are good ones too.  There are 10 to try out and adjust.

At my desk, I’m running it right now through my iPhone dock sound system.  It really has upped my game when I want to sit down and work.

QUESTIONS:

(1) Have you ever used a white noise generator?

(2) What do you do or use to get focused when you sit down to work?

Please share your comments and suggestions below!

It’s FRIDAY!

Yup, another week gone by.

Like most Friday’s, it is a time for a pause and break from the weekly grind, for sure.  Today, I am asking myself some questions which I bring up periodically:

• The year is almost 1/4 over, how have you grown so far?
• Where are you on your New Year’s Resolutions?
• What are you doing differently today than 1 year ago today?

Personally, if I’m not careful with how I live out my daily or weekly life, time flies by like a blur and all of a sudden I realize that I’m in a never ending pattern.  Although it can be a healthy one, most of the time, it can be realized as a rut.

Doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again…and with the sense of purpose lost in the air somewhere back there in the distant past.

So one of my most sacred praxis that I keep is a randomization ritual.  Each month I carve out some time on my calendar and purposefully mix it all up.  Do something different.

We all need some randomness in our lives.   Otherwise, there’s a method to our madness madness to our [repetitious] methods.

Here’s some ideas for what I personally have considered for my own randomization rituals:

• Go out to lunch at a restaurant alone and bring nothing else — No cell phones, no dedicated Twitter devices, no people, no books, no reports, no nothing. Nada. Nunca.  EXCEPT a pad and pen. I eat slowly and observe.  People watch.  Listen carefully to the environment.  And I jot down random observations, thoughts, axioms etc.  I try to avoid at all costs task lists, reminders, to-do’s, etc.  This is a time of reflection & brainstorming.  And oh yeah, don’t order anything you’ve ordered before on that menu.

• Go the library and walk into the non-fiction stacks and start perusing books in a category I have no experience with.  Perhaps it is knitting, aerospace, crock-pot cooking, music genres I don’t normally listen to.  You’ll be amazed how curious your mind becomes when you set it in front of volumes of books just waiting to be picked-up and discovered.  It is not about reading books cover to cover, but browsing, investigating, being inspired not about the technical aspects of the category — I’m not so concerned about remembering the 12 different knitting pattern techniques, but rather more about planting seeds in my head about the creative aspects of the genre.

• Call  and talk to 3 people you have not talked to in 6 months or more.  These conversations are casual, non-intensive, but more importantly, they jog your brain about subjects, themes, interests, and ideas that were alive in me in the past.  Some of those ideas should stay dead and buried of course! but more times than not, these talks ignite old ideas reincarnated to help you with your future.

• Write a thank you note.  Yup, this is so old school that some of you readers might get offended.  Just to be clear, I am in fact suggesting that you use a physical writing instrument and get a note card out (for some, that means you’ll have to physically go out and buy some at the stationery store, but you have to do it!) to share the blessings you’ve received from someone else’s actions, words, or presence.  The easy way out is to send it to someone you know closely.  Here, I challenge you to write a thank you note to those who are in your sphere of influence, but to people would never in a million years expect something in the mail from you.  If you want to go a step further, write to someone who doesn’t know you personally – like a public figure, a speaker you heard at a conference, or guest speaker at church.  How about the head of a company regarding a recent positive experience with one of their employees?  You would think that writing a thank you note to someone who is technically a stranger is the easiest of the categories, but it’s not.  Your brain actually works harder to think about who to write, what to write and how to say it.  In the end though, this is more for you than for the recipient.  Going through this process reverses so much of the hard-wired processes we use on a daily basis.  It will loosen up that sludge in your brain and get your creativity going.  I promise you.  Plus I have never heard of someone getting offended for receiving a thank you note.  Have you? WARNING: thank you emails, text messages or tweets don’t count!
  

As you can see, they don’t need to be time intensive or cost intensive at all.  But you can bet that the benefits will be intensive changes to your life as you continue to infuse randomization rituals into your weekly or monthly routines.

What other ideas do you have for randomization rituals? Please share some new ideas with me so I can try them out in my own life! Leave one or two ideas in the comments below.

It’s a new year, and you undoubtedly have a shiny new list of objectives to tackle this coming year. You’ve envisioned how you’re going to make it all happen, how you’re going to engage, how you’re supposed to conduct yourself…but is BEING RUTHLESS on your list? It should be. And oh yes, it’s still going to be a great year.

According to Harvard Business School, one of the big ideas is that how you prioritize your time and energy against your projects and tasks is critical to your potential successs. How true it is.

You have to be RUTHLESS in your prioritization – which means including one more dimension of consideration in your planning: One of the key tips from the HSB article is kind of eye opening for me… Instead of writing down all the stuff you have to do and then do the usual sort, kill and delegate, they recommend including another perspective.

Figure out how much total time you have first to work — treat your time available to work as a limited resource and then you can allocate that accordingly against the priorities you’ve set ruthlessly.

When you figure out exactly where you’re spending your time currently, you’ll mostly likely be surprised. This is what I call the Quicken Effect. When people start using Quicken on the computer to track ALL their spending, and see the graphs and charts showing them exactly where their money is going, they go into utter shock. The spending habits are clearly not in line with their conceptual ones. The same thing goes with where you are spending your time. You are most probably NOT spending your time where you THINK you are.

The suggestion is to take the highest priority tasks and knock those out first taking into consideration how much time you actually have available to work today, this week, this month, etc.

If you take the time to be ruthless first, you’ll have the time and energy to be accomodating in the end.

What other time management tactics do you use to help you make the most of your schedule? Please share one with us in the comment section below!