Reading: 3.5—Calendar Commitments

3.5 Calendar Commitments: It’s helpful to assign calendar targets to your GCOs. Think of it this way: deadlines are your friends. When a calendar target arrives, it’s easy to determine whether or not a GCO has been reached. Either an objective has been reached or it hasn’t, and the simple application of calendar deadlines provides accountability. Steven Griffith, in his book, Time Cleanse, coins the term Return on Time – ROT. He writes, “How, when, and with whom you reinvest your time is the key to reaching the goals you are committed to having. Just as you want to invest your money for the highest return, you want to be thinking about your time from that same investment perspective of getting the highest Return on Time, your ROT,” (Time Cleanse: Griffith, p. 111). Calendar targets, setting and meeting deadlines, with increase your ROT.

Procrastination is a widespread reality, common to virtually all of humanity. Though the maxim, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” is sentimentally appealing, the practice regarding time usage typically looks more like the reverse, “Don’t do today what you can put off until tomorrow.” By nature, and by virtue of being overly busy, people tend to engage a given assignment, in this case a GCO, at the last minute. If there is no calendar target, there is no identified last minute, so that GCO might be rolled overagain and again until forever. At the very least, create an actual last minute by assigning a calendar target. (Note: We’ll look more deeply into time usage in Skill 4: Managing Ministry Time.) 

Two issues are significant in this regard: 1. The Time It Takes vs. The Time You Have and, 2. GiANT Worldwide’s 5 Gears. Let’s take a quick look at each.

Time It Takes vs. Time You Have: In 1955, The Economist published an essay by Cyril Northcote Parkinson that included the phrase, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This became known as Parkinson’s Law. The reality is that people rarely reach completion of any assignment, project, task, etc., in advance of a deadline. People are busy, so they tend to work on matters that are exerting pressure, and one of the greatest producers of pressure is the deadline. If a deadline is still off in the future, it exerts little pressure, but, as the deadline gets closer and closer, pressure tends to rise proportionately. So, on any given day, people are typically working on whatever is exerting the most pressure, not on what’s most important, and approaching deadlines produce pressure.

This dynamic offers a basis for Parkinson’s Law as it is being driven by the Law of Procrastination. My observation is that the work doesn’t really expand to fill the time available for completion, but, rather, work is put off over time until an approaching deadline begins to exert higher and higher pressure, such that it can’t be put off any longer. So, for example, let’s say that a given assignment has a deadline of completion in six weeks from the time the assignment is made. Giving the benefit of the doubt, let’s acknowledge that the deadline will be met, right on time, and not a minute sooner. Does that mean that six weeks are required to complete the assignment as those responsible work tirelessly throughout the entire six weeks? Probably not. What’s more likely is that the assignment will sit dormant for five plus weeks, and those responsible will work feverishly for the last few days to meet the deadline. Perhaps, then, this is an assignment that should be given a deadline of a few days, maybe a week at the most, rather than a deadline of six weeks.

While I encourage the use of deadlines or calendar commitments, projecting them too far into the future doesn’t necessarily produce higher quality work. Rather, it produces a drag on the pace of moving forward and the quality of work will be much the same. In practice, then, I continue to encourage making calendar commitments, but I, also, encourage shorter over longer deadlines. Use deadline pressure to your advantage by removing dead time from the equation. Set short calendar commitments and get to work right away. This creates momentum and quickens the pace of progress. This one dynamic can make a significant difference in the progress of a church’s ministry as church leaders, as mentioned before, tend to move at a slow pace with no sense of urgency.

In planning your use of time in light of this Time It Takes vs. Time You Have dynamic, consider this perspective, for example: If a given task requires six hours of concentrated effort, you must decide which six hours to use. You could use six hours sooner or six hours later, but you’ll need six hours regardless. What tends to drain us of energy is leaving the task hanging over our heads for extended periods of time, giving the illusion that it’s taking far more than six hours to get the job done.

5 Gears: GiANT Worldwide describes itself as a global media and content development company specializing in leader transformation. I invested in a year of training with GiANT to learn their approach to leader development and to assimilate their tools and methodology into my training and consulting ministry. One construct I encountered was GiANT’s 5 Gears. For a thorough treatment, I refer you to the book, 5 Gears: How to Be Present and Productive When There Is Never Enough Time by Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram. Here’s a quick rundown of the five gears:

Gear 1: Recharge Mode – Personal recharge, completely unplugged

Gear 2: Connect Mode – Being present with family or friends without work

Gear 3: Social Mode – Present with people and can shift up or down easily

Gear 4: Task Mode – Task Mode, Multi-tasking; working hard in various ways

Gear 5: Focus Mode – Focus Mode; Task-Centered, fully focused and moving quickly

As it relates to our discussion, Gears 4 and 5 are in view. GiANT studies show that people at work tend to spend most of their time and energy in Gear 4. This Task Mode features multi-tasking in an attempt to juggle many balls at the same time. Working on everything at once often means working on nothing in a focused, efficient, and effective way. In explaining his disdain for multi-tasking, Gary Keller, in his #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, offers, “People can actually do two or more things at once...but, like computers, what we can’t do is focus on two things at once. Our attention bounces back and forth,” (p. 45). Focused attention is the key. As long as we are engaged in multi-tasking, wading through day after day with a split focus, we tend to lag behind, rising to the occasion to reach completion when pressure spikes, meeting deadlines that we push out as far as possible, but making slow progress with compromised quality.

The Power of Deadlines: “Deadlines can be one of the most effective supervisory and management tools in your arsenal. A well-chosen and steadily enforced deadline is a great way to help your people prioritize, increase motivation and productivity, and eliminate downtime. A series of deadlines percolating throughout the organization can also improve overall coordination and cooperation. But getting the most from deadlines requires two important supervisory and management disciplines: setting fair deadlines and enforcing them.” First Books for Business Series, Supervising and Managing People, p. 94.

How do we turn that around? We have clear GCOs that are scheduled in sooner rather than later calendar commitments and we hold ourselves accountable to meeting those deadlines. We work on our objectives in Gear 5 when we are focused on one thing at a time. In that way we make quick progress and our focused attention produces higher quality.

Setting Great Commission Objectives (GCOs) and establishing accountability are greatly supported by clear deadlines that firmly root high respect for calendar commitments into a church’s ministry culture.