2. Spend less time in meetings.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but I am convinced too many leaders spend far too much time in meetings.
Meetings are often the enemy of your real work. The reason you work evenings and weekends is because you didn’t get your work done during the day, in great likelihood because you were in meetings.
Take a look at your schedule for a random week two months ago. Now look at all the meetings you were in that week.
Can you remember a single thing from any of those meetings? Probably not, unless they were an annual off-site, a strategic planning meeting or a brainstorming session to launch something new.
Chances are your week was consumed by the drivel of meetings that merely managed what you were currently doing. You could have cut those meetings in half and got your life back.
Need more convincing? Here are five compelling reasons to cut down the number of meetings you do.
3. Schedule the most important things.
Sure, you waste a lot of time in unnecessary meetings.
But even if you cut your meetings in half, chances are you’re still struggle to get it all done.
Which is why it’s a great idea to write your most important commitments into your calendar.
Commitments like family night, exercise, a day off, a message writing day or whatever else you absolutely need to get done that nobody ever asks you to do.
Too many leaders spend their day responding to other people’s crises, and in the process create a crisis for themselves in being unable to manage their lives.
I wrote about how to schedule your life in this post, How to Stop Working 7 Days a Week.
4. Get up earlier.
One of the top questions I get asked is, “How do you get everything done (church leadership, writing, blogging, speaking, podcasting, teaching, being a husband and dad)?
The answer is a little more complex than “I get up early,” but the reality is getting up early every day is critical to me getting everything I do done.
You know this is true of traffic patterns.
Say you have four stores to hit on a Saturday morning. Arriving when the first store opens is much smarter than showing up at 2:00 p.m. Traffic is so much lighter first thing in the morning than mid-Saturday afternoon. Errands that take an hour early Saturday can take double to triple just hours later.
The same is true of work.
Nobody texts you at 5 a.m. Nor does anyone email you or call you about a problem that demands your immediate attention.
You can move a LOT of freight before 8 a.m. if you work at it. If you’ve got young kids, even squeezing in an extra 30-60 minutes before they get up can mean you leave at 4 p.m. with your work done rather than leaving at 6 with an hour left to finish up after dinner.
Plus, generally speaking, you’re brighter and sharper in the morning than you are by 8:00 p.m. after a long day.
If you get your most important work done before breakfast, the rest of the day feels like a bonus rather than a burden.
