I’ve recently come out of one of the busiest seasons of my life. Here is what has gone on in the past few months.
- Written a curriculum series
- Writing for 2 preteen blogs in addition to this one
- Written more posts on my blog in the past 2 months than in awhile
- Leading a much larger volunteer base
- 5 month old kid who is starting to roll over
- Planning and pulling off monthly events
- Leadership has greatly increased
Now there is a ton that I haven’t done in the time period too. But I’ve looked at my time management techniques over the past few months and there are a few things that I have done much differently than ever before. You will never have enough time to accomplish everything in your wildest dreams. But if you continually get better at time management, you can hope to accomplish more and more.
1. Delegation
Giving things to others is something that I’ve never been good at. I’m a little control freak and a little helper. I want certain things all to myself and I also want to help others by not giving them tasks when they have too much on their plate. But in a leadership role, it’s not only ok to delegate, but people really want to help you. And we must equip the saints for ministry. They can’t be equipped with nothing to do.
- Giving more to my administrative assistant
- Making more people responsible for decisions
- Thinking thru giving tasks to others rather than doing them on my own
2. Refining Processes
We’ve always had quite a few processes in our ministry but not too many of them were defined. Here are some of the ones we’ve put on paper lately:
- Band auditions and expectations
- Tech Team training and expectations
- C-Group Sign ups
- Event Templates
- Job Descriptions (still working through those)
What is great about these processes is that it allows me to hand things off and people feel equipped to take them on. I’m so happy about my growth when it comes to laying and thinking through a long term process. The big process currently being talked about. Our Adventure Week weekly event in the Summer. Large, Large event. Can’t wait to think through this.
3. Technology tips
I’ve been using some new technology lately to help me think through how I’m using my time. It’s been a huge help. You might know of some of these things, but if not I’d love to share them.
- Flag emails – your email systems has a way to mark for later. I do that and then filter through what I flag and hammer out my emails twice a day that I need to respond to. Flag on my email respond on my computer has become a routine.
- StayFocused app – this app limits my time that I spend on social networks. There are ways around it, i.e. it’s a Chrome extension, so I could just open another browser. But this has greatly affected my workflow. I limit myself to 20 minutes a day. The biggest time suckers for me – Google Reader and Twitter.
- Headphones – For some reason in our office, the whole door closed thing doesn’t make a ton of difference to people. When I have my headphones on though people usually don’t bother me. I put these on when I am really trying to hammer out some work.
Big shout out to Jim Wideman. His book called Beat the Clock
What have you learned when it comes to time management?
