Reading: 4.2—Proactive Scheduling

4.2 Pro-Active Scheduling: It’s best for a pastor to schedule ministry time proactively, taking charge of time and not being in a reactive posture of trying to respond to ministry demands as they pop up. By planning out an advanced schedule, leaving some space for the unexpected, a pastor can harness time and avoid becoming a victim of pressing demands and last-minute expectations. If you as a pastor don’t take control of your time, others will take control of it for you.

Use of a pastor’s time is not a zero-sum game, as in, if a pastor wins the time, someone else loses it, or if someone else wins the time, the pastor loses it. Use of a pastor’s time by that pastor and by those who need that pastor’s time can be a win-win proposition. How? By a pastor’s proactive, judicious use of his or her time, thereby keeping control of time while meeting needs placed on that time.

Let me correct one myth: “My door is always open” is not a good policy; it’s a recipe for having others needlessly control your time. While it might seem to be a magnanimous gesture as a leader to make yourself always available to those who need you, or think they need you, it’s actually a compromising gesture that says, “I’m never doing anything important enough that you can’t interrupt me with whatever is on your mind.” Of course, you do need to be available, but you can determine when to be available and make that known so that others will adjust their timetables to yours and not vice versa.

Here’s a brief reminder of our discussion in the previous chapter under 3.5 Calendar Commitments. We took a look at the five gears presented in 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 reminder 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

We made the point that Gear 5: Focus Mode is the gear that is most at risk. Why? Because when we’re at work, ministry work or otherwise, we tend to live in Gear 4: Task Mode, characterized by multi-tasking. Under the heading of multi-tasking, include focus-breaking interruptions that come in the form of office drop-ins, phone calls, text messages, emails with audible notifications, and the like, anything that throws us off focus. Proactive scheduling allows you to establish your own use of time. Schedule your Gear 5 intervals, communicate that you are not to be interrupted during those intervals, and don’t sabotage yourself by allowing any of those aforementioned focus-breaking interruptions to, well, interrupt.

I’ll illustrate the point with a ministry expectation that many pastors must navigate, the personal visit with people in the congregation. Most churches are small in the number of congregants, and most churches have a solo pastor who is the personal pastor to everyone in the church. There is a desire on the part of congregants, and rightly so, to be known by the pastor and to have some level of personal interaction with the pastor. Often, that’s in the form of a visit to the home or perhaps connecting for coffee or even a meal. Personal visits to everyone can add up to a lot of time committed, so pastors tend to put off such visits until there is either a crisis to be attended or until that particular congregant starts putting pressure on the pastor to invest that time. In either case, tension or stress is central to that relational transaction; the pastor is pressed for time and the congregant is left wondering if the pastor cares, questioning when or if the pastor is ever going to connect.

There is a simple solution: Pro-Active Scheduling. Here’s how it works. A pastor can determine how many such meetings need to happen and over what period of time. For example, a pastor might see that there are, say, eighty folks in a congregation, many of whom are married couples. So, there are, say, fifty households among the eighty people. Make a priority list of those households and determine which need to be paid a visit sooner and which can wait until later. Determine when you are going to be available to make these visits; maybe one evening per week. Proactively schedule who will be visited on a given evening and get those meetings set on the calendar. At that point, you and they know when the pastor is coming, and, even if that visit is months away, those folks know they’ll have that moment with their pastor and will know that they are on their pastor’s radar screen.

Not all congregants need to fit into that home visit scenario, some could be met for coffee at a local coffee shop, some could be met in the workplace or in a recreational setting. The point is that the pastor is planning ahead, people’s expectations are being met, and the pastor is preserving Gear 5 time to be in Focus Mode without interruption. Similar proactive planning can be utilized for all meetings, whether staff, key church leaders, community leaders, etc.

Of course, as a pastor, there will always be the need to be available in times of emergency and crisis, but those are usually somewhat sparse in small congregations. In larger congregations, this concept is still applicable but will entail delegation and a division of labor among multiple leaders.

Managing Ministry Time well is greatly enhanced when using the technique of Pro-Active Scheduling.