Video Transcript: Calendar Commitments

Welcome back. We continue our study developing great commission skills.  We're turning our thoughts in this session as we continue looking at skill three,  setting objectives and establishing accountability. We're looking at calendar  commitments, how to leverage the calendar in a way that that helps us  accomplish what we need to accomplish. We're going to assign calendar targets to our great commission objectives. And, you know, make those targets  nonnegotiable commitments, and as we do that, we're going to move ourselves  more and more toward the place that we're trying to get to. All right. Now think of it this way. Deadlines are your friends. Deadlines are your friends. You need to  adopt an attitude that is grateful for the friendship of deadlines, because  deadlines will determine whether or not your great commission objective is  reached. If you don't have a deadline, anything goes open ended, allows things  to drift, to float, and we've already talked about how loose things can be in terms of timeliness within the ministry of the church. Now, another advantage of having a set deadline is that when you when you reach that particular deadline, you  know whether you have completed that particular task or not, whether you have  reached that objective or not. So having a deadline builds accountability into  your efforts, and that is a good thing. Now there is a book that I think is  particularly helpful, and that book has to do with time. It's called the time  cleanse, and it's written by a gentleman named Steven Griffith. And Griffith talks  about what he calls the ROT. Now he derives that from the common business  jargon of ROI, which stands for return on investment. But what he's shooting for  here is your ROT, the return on time, the return on the usage of your time, he  writes this how when and with whom you invest 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. I love that phrase  return on time, and time is a is an investment. One thing that we need to note is  that time is a resource that cannot be replenished once it comes by, it's gone,  you'll never see it again. So remember this, remember this. Deadlines are your  friends. Procrastination is your enemy. Now, procrastination is widespread  throughout all humanity, in virtually any endeavor. You know the old maxim, and  don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today? Well, that's like a proverb. It  makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of truth in it, but the way that many people  live is just the reverse. Don't do today, what you can put off until tomorrow. You  know that can be very destructive to making progress. The fact that we're we're  busy, that we tend to engage and give an assignment at the last minute. You  know, we don't get to things early on in the time that we have. We find ourselves very often having these last minute flurries of activity to hit a deadline. Well, by  the use of calendar commitments, what we're going to do is artificially create last minutes, because last minutes tend to be motivational, tend to be catalytic in  helping us get things done. Now, when we get to skill four, we're going to talk 

quite a bit about managing ministry. Time. So we'll be taking a very deep dive  into time management, and that is not my intention here, but we are addressing  some very specific things here about how to use, how to use the calendar to  commit to deadlines that will help us get the job done. Now, when we think  about procrastination issues, there are a couple of things that I want to call to  your attention. First of all, there is the time it takes versus the time that you  have. The time it takes to do a particular job versus the time you have to do that  particular job. And then there is a contribution I want to look at from giant  worldwide, a leadership development organization. It's called the five gears, and we're going to take a look at both of these. So for starters, we're going to turn to  this idea of the time it takes versus the time you have. Now, here's how this  works. Back in 1955 a publication called The Economist published an essay by  a gentleman named Cyril Northcote Parkinson that included this phrase. It said  this work expands. Work expands so as to fill the time available for its  completion. Now this has come to be known as Parkinson's Law. Now here's  how it works. People rarely reach completion of any assignment, any project,  any task, 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. Now, if the deadline is significantly far off, we're not  feeling any pressure. We're not working on that particular job, that task,  whatever it is, but the closer we get to that deadline, the more the pressure  builds, until finally, we rise to the occasion we push at the last minute, we  respond to pressure and we get it done. Now, this dynamic offers the basis of  Parkinson's Law, as it's being driven by the law of procrastination. Now that law  is just a simple observation that people tend to procrastinate every chance they  get, even if they don't want to. Just the natural human tendency is to put things  off until they absolutely can't be put off any longer. Now let's think of an  example. Let's say, let's say that a given assignment has a deadline of  completion of six weeks from the time that the assignment is made. Now, giving  the benefit of the doubt, let's say that this deadline is going to be met six weeks  from now, when that deadline arrives, this assignment will be completed, but not a minute sooner. Right on time, but not a minute sooner. Well, question, does  that mean that six weeks are actually required to complete this assignment? No, it would be incredibly rare if there was some assignment we had received that  we had to work out feverishly every day from now until six weeks from now to  complete the task. In that stretch of six weeks, we are going to use some time to complete this task. The question is, Which time are we going to use? More than  likely, what we're going to do is wait to the last minute and push to get it done  well in practice, then what we want to do is use deadline pressure to our  advantage by removing dead time from the equation. Okay, so let's think about  this further. Let's think about it this way. Let's say, let's say that over that six  weeks period of time, I'm going to need to devote 15 actual hours to the 

completion of this task. So the question becomes, which 15 hours am I going to  use? Am I going to use the very last 15 hours, back to back to back, straight up  to make the deadline? Well, of course, that wouldn't be very wise, but since I  only need 15 hours out of six weeks, I'm not feeling any pressure right now to  get that task done. So chances are I'm going to let it drift. I'm going to let it drift  other things are going to interrupt, interfere. I'm going to keep pushing it a little  bit further away, a little bit further away, and I'm going to be thinking to myself, I  got plenty of time. I've got six weeks to get this done, and I only need 15 hours.  But what tends to happen, you see, is all of a sudden, this sneaks up on us, and now we've only got three days left of the six weeks. If we're talking about eight  hour work days, we're talking about 24 hours, and 15 of them have to be spent  on this one project. You see how this works? The closer and closer and closer  we get to the deadline, and the more we have pushed the deadline off, or  pushed working on the task off, the more the pressure mounts. Lo and behold,  we're at the last minute scrambling to get things done. We leave the task  hanging over our heads for extended periods of time, and then all of a sudden,  the deadline sneaks up on us. We're in trouble. We're pushing. We're under high pressure to get the job done. We're probably going to get it done, just because  that's the way we work. We always get it done. But what level of quality are we  going to get to this work if we're jamming it all up at the very last minute. Now  here's another quote for you. I'd like to share this. It comes from a book called  first books for business series. The topic is supervising and managing people.  So take a look at this. The power of deadlines is how this little article is titled,  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 by getting the most from  deadlines. Getting the most from deadlines requires two important supervisory  and management disciplines. Number one, setting fair deadlines. Number two,  enforcing them. You know, setting deadlines might might play into this idea of  establishing objectives. Enforcing them plays into our idea of establishing  accountability, fair deadlines with accountability gets the job done without being  under intense pressure. Now, giant worldwide describes itself as a global media  and content development company specializing in leader transformation. I went  through a rather intense year of training with giant that involved 24 training  sessions, two per month over 12 months, along with lots of reading and  assignments in between, but I found it to be extremely valuable. It really helped  me develop as a leader, and it has helped me in in my development of other  leaders. Well, one of the things that the giant has produced is is a a concept that it calls the five gears. The five gears, it's in a book form. And you know, you can, you can get a hold of that book. The subtitle of the book is how to be present 

and productive. When there is never enough time. Now, that idea of never  enough time, you know, that's one of those emotional, sentimental statements.  The truth is, there's plenty of time. We just don't use the time very well. So it  seems like there's never enough time. But let me walk you through these five  gears that are the substance of this concept by giant worldwide gear number  one, recharge mode, now in recharge mode, this is to do with personally being  recharged. We're completely unplugged. We're not distracted. We're in a state of restfulness, a state of being at peace, calm, taking a break from the flurry of  activity that often accompanies our professional lives, as well as our our  personal lives. Gear number two, connect mode. This mode has to do with being present with your family, with your friends, without work, so we're socializing with those who are close to us and we're not engaged in professional pursuits. Then  there is gear three, social mode, where we are present with people in general,  whether it's people with whom we work or some other context. But the 10 pegs  are loose, and we could easily move back down toward gear two or up toward  gear four. Now, gear four is called Task mode, and task mode is where we  spend most of our work hours. Task mode. It's characterized by multitasking and working hard, but in multiple ways at the same time. Stay tuned. We're going to  say more about multitasking in a moment. And then there is focus mode, gear  number five, focus mode is task centered, but we're fully focused on one  particular priority, and we're moving very quickly. This is a time of intensity where we're doing perhaps our highest level of work, because it's intent. We're focused and we're zeroed in on one significantly high priority. Now, when it as it relates to our discussion about setting objectives and establishing accountability, the gears that we're mostly concerned with are gears four and five, because these are the  gears that we would be mostly engaged in when we are involved in our ministry  pursuits, giant studies indicate that most People spend most of their time and  energy in gear number four, where we're juggling a lot of balls at one time. We're trying to multitask. We've got three or four projects that were part of the way  through. We're dealing with interruptions, we're dealing with phone calls. We're  dealing with voicemail, we're dealing with with, you know, email that sound  familiar, like a typical workday? Well, I think so. Well, you know, that's  understandable. But here's the thing, when we're working on everything at once, there's a sense in which we're working on nothing and a focused, efficient and  effective way. Now, I told you I was going to say a little bit more about  multitasking, but actually I'm going to allow Gary Keller to say a little bit more  about multitasking. This comes from Keller's book, which is called the one thing,  the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results. He says this. He says  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 is bouncing back and forth, back and forth. This is not where we want to be focused. Attention is the key to  making significant Progress. As long as we are engaged in multitasking, waiting 

through day after day of juggling all the balls in the air with a split focus, we tend to lag behind. Now, we might rise to the occasion to meet certain deadlines. We  can we can push to get out there, but we're compromising quality because  we've got too many things going on and we're not focused. So let me get back  to this idea of the 15 hours that might be needed to complete that task that  you've been given six weeks to complete. You know, if we're trying to dabble  with that as one of many things we're working on while we're multitasking, the  quality of our effort is not going to be very good. And if we apply 15 unfocused  hours to that particular assignment. Chances are our product, our outcome, is  not going to be very good. What we need to do is have 15 highly focused hours,  or maybe we could even accomplish this in, say, 12 highly focused hours. So the question is, how do we find a way to put more gear five time into our day? Well,  how do we turn things around? Well, we have clear, great commission  objectives. We hold ourselves accountable, and we use the calendar. We use  commitments to the calendar to to be catalytic in moving us forward. You see, if  something is going to take us 15 hours, but we've got six weeks to do it, why not schedule that two or three hours of focused time at a time spread over several  weeks. That way, the quality of our work would be at a very high level, and we  would be able to complete that task, not under pressure, and finish by deadline,  or even before deadline, because what we leveraged calendar commitments to  better measure our time, gear five, we've got to find a way to have less gear four time in our lives and more gear five times in our lives, so that we can complete  tasks on time at very high quality. Now that completes our video that's dealing  with this skill topic of calendar commitments next time, we are going to be  looking at the skill topic checkpoints and partners as we continue our Study of  establishing of great commission objectives and establishing accountability. So I  pray that God is going to bless your efforts on his behalf, that you will be able to  find some of that gear five time over the next next few days or few weeks, so  that you can begin to experiment with what it feels like, what it looks like, what  you can accomplish with focused mode time. God bless you. Amen