Video Transcript: Meetings on Purpose

Welcome back. We continue with our study developing great commission skills.  We're working on the skill of managing ministry time and today our skill topic is  meetings on purpose. Meetings on purpose, your mind should already be  spinning here as you think about meetings on purpose. What does that mean  exactly? And could it be that lots of meetings are happening that are off purpose, that are not on purpose. So let's just dive in. In an earlier session, I mentioned a  book called time cleanse, the time cleanse by Steven Griffith. It carries the  subtitle, a proven system to eliminate wasted time, realize your full potential and reinvest in what matters most. Now in chapter four of this book, Steven Griffith  deals with what he calls time toxins. Time toxins. Here is how he defines a time  toxin. He says any behavior, activity, habit, person, place or thing that  consumes, steals, hijacks or contaminates your time and causes you to become stuck, stalled or stopped when working toward what matters most to you.  There's a lot of words there, a lot of language. It's rather poetic, I would say. But  the bottom line is this, anything that crashes into your time and steals time from  you. Is a time toxin. So I want to make note of the 10 time toxins that Steven  Griffith mentions in chapter four of his book the time cleanse. First of all, social  media. No surprise there. He says, you know you're spending an hour on  Facebook or other social media when you're bored or tired. One hour might be a very conservative figure, gossip. You're spending an extra 20 minutes a day  gossiping and talking at the coffee shop. Number three, television, online  movies. You've developed longtime habit of watching endless television at night. You're binging, binge watching 24/7, number four, negative people. And you  used to enjoy spending time with an old friend. He's now disenchanted with life  and complains all the time. Engaging with negative people is a time toxin. He  mentions, overwork, increased demands at work have pushed your sales call to  the end of the day when you're tired and fatigued. Timing is off for your best  performance. You know, I think that seems to be the way it goes, that the longer  you are at a particular job, it seems that the there are increased demands that  keep increasing. Rarely do I ever hear about the demands on a particular  position being lessened in any way that just seems to be the norm. So let's  continue. Number six, texting, what started as a small way to stay in touch with  friends, has now become a constant distraction, I dare say, even an obsession.  You know, not long ago, I was my wife and I were taking care of two of our  grandkids, and we live in a community that has a pool and a recreation center  and a little playground. And so I had taken one or both of them up to the  playground so they could get some outdoor activity, some physical activity. And  there were three little girls up there, I would say, ages eight, nine, somewhere in  that range, they were sitting side by side on a bench inside the playground area, and each of the three had a personal cell phone, and each of the three had their faces buried in that cell phone. And. And we were up there for probably, I would  say, 45 minutes to an hour. And during that entire time, every time I glanced over

at that bench, those three girls buried in their cell phones, not engaging with  each other, and certainly not engaging with any any physical activity, all right.  Number six, I guess I got them out of order here. Number six is the news I gave  you. Number seven there. Number six the news. You know, there are folks these days that you might think of as news junkies. They're trying to keep up with  everything that's out there the moment it surfaces. And you know, you know, as  well as I that a lot of what's being portrayed in in quote, news, is highly  subjective, really pushing, pushing a certain point of view, a certain agenda,  agenda, a certain world view. But there are some that just get hooked. They  want to hear everything that's being said when it's being said. They don't want to be left out jumping down to number eight. Your phone constantly reaching for  your phone flat you know going through to check out your your email, that  there's 1,000,001 ways for a digital phone to occupy your time, number nine,  shopping, endless hours, looking at, comparing, researching the things you can  buy. You know, lots and lots of things. Now I don't know what the statistics are. I  do know that there is a constant stream of delivery vans coming into my  neighborhood, Amazon and others delivering packages all the time. My house  included. It seems that in the evenings, as things sort of shut down. Your  computer comes out, go online. You start thumbing through and finding things.  People find things they want to buy, and so they buy them online. It used to be  that if you wanted to buy something, it required a little bit of effort. You had to  actually get up off your sofa, you had to go and somewhere to the market or to  the store and physically shop and look around and buy things and bring them  home. Now you can just sit in your house and buy just about anything that you  want, anything that you can afford. So shopping is a Time toxin. And finally,  multitasking. You know, we've we've spoken of multitasking multiple times  throughout our series, and what we're finding here, of course, is that  multitasking is a way to do a whole lot of things at the same time, but none of  them very well, and so multitasking, in and of itself is a time toxin. Now here's a  time cleanse. Question that might frequently be on your mind, is this whatever  I'm doing, whatever activity I'm engaged in at this moment, is this contributing,  or is this contaminating to my happiness or to my success? Or, you know, have I been trapped into having my time taken by these distractions that I have  become interested in and in some cases, perhaps even even obsessed with.  Well, here's a question for you, self analysis. Are you suffering from any of these time toxins as you work your way down the list, which of these is impacting you  in a negative way, and you might also think in terms of, you know, other time  toxins that maybe weren't included in this list, what is poisoning your effective  use of time? And within the context of our discussion, specifically, what is  poisoning your ministry time? Any of these 10, my guess for most of us that  there's at least two or three things on this list that might be issues for us, as well  as perhaps something that's not on this list. Well, our skill topic is. Meetings on 

purpose. So the question we want to ask now is, how does meetings on purpose interface with time toxins? Well, I want to, I want to show you a diagram. I'm  referring to this as the meetings continuum. You know, at one pole, we have  meetings on purpose. At the other end of the continuum, we have meetings off  purpose. Now I think that Steven Griffith would would argue that most meetings  that take place in most organizations, including churches, are a waste of time, or at least partially waste time, lost time, creates time pressure and time pressure,  whether it's at work in some professional pursuit or ministry, time pressure leads to overwork, one of the common time toxins. So I want to spend a little time  talking about meetings on purpose. First of all, let's, let's think in terms of  definition, a meeting on purpose is a meeting that is convened to discuss  predetermined, preidentified items and to make predetermined, preidentified  decisions. So before I ever go to a meeting, if that meeting is truly going to be  on purpose, I know what the purpose is. I know what the items are that are  going to be on the agenda. I know what decisions are going to need to be made, and so I come into the meeting fully prepared to deal with those items and make those decisions. That's why we're meeting. This is a meeting on purpose. Now,  a meeting that is off purpose would be a meeting that is convened that that  hasn't identified specific items, that hasn't identified specific decisions. It's just a  meeting. Now in the church, what often happens is certain types of meetings  become routine. So a lot of churches, for example, will have a staff meeting  every Monday morning, every Tuesday morning, something like that. Well,  oftentimes there's no real set agenda other than Well, our staff always meets. It  could be some other type of meeting, but unless we have identified here's the  agenda, and particularly, these are decisions that need to be made, we're really  just gathering almost randomly, and the time that we spend in those meetings is  often time wasted. Now, recently, I was asked to attend a meeting it had to do  with my possibly being contracted to serve in a particular capacity with with this  church, and so there was a team of people, a committee that had been formed  that were in charge of having that discussion with me as we determine whether  or not to enter into that partnership. Well, it was a good three hour drive for me,  and so I thought through the meeting. I anticipated what I believed the kinds of  things that would be discussed. I knew the nature of the meeting, so I had some  idea. No one had informed me of anything specific, other than our committee.  We'd like to speak with you about this partnership. I left early enough that I could arrive in the area about two hours ahead of the meeting. And the reason I did  that was I wanted to spend some time doing a little bit of reconnaissance patrol  in the community. I wanted to see where the church was located. I wanted to  see what the community was like. Was it a business community? Was it an.  Industrial community were there schools nearby. What was the residential  makeup of the area? I wanted to get a feel for that church in that particular  community. But as I was driving there, I'm on the interstate, and I pulled over at 

a rest area, and I did that in part to check, you know, my email and text  messages. Well, I discovered that an email had come from the chairman of that  committee, and the email said something like, these are some questions we  would like to address today. Bear in mind, we're just a couple of hours away  from having the meeting, and all of a sudden, this list of questions that weren't  necessarily in an order. They weren't exactly related to each other, and they  were very, very big, broad questions. And you know what I realized is that the  person that is chairing this committee really hasn't thought this through, but at  the last minute deadline, the last minute has decided, well, let me put some  thoughts on paper, but it's more like random thoughts, brainstorm thoughts, but  you know, I took note of those. I didn't have a printer or anything with me. I  couldn't be looking at my little phone while I'm trying to drive. So I actually took  the time to hand write all those questions down so that I could glance at them  while I was driving and give them some thought. I arrived, I checked out the  area like I planned to. I went to the meeting at the appointed time, and guess  what? What I discovered is that number one of the, I don't know, 17 questions  that were on this list, maybe two were actually asked. It was very clear to me  that the other committee members were unaware of that list of questions. It was  very clear to me that they were not prepared for this meeting. They weren't  prepared for this discussion. Things were being asked of me that had already  been covered previously through email and and one on one voice  communication that obviously had not been made available to The committee at  large. I was trapped in a meeting that was off purpose. Now it was helpful for me to be there. It was helpful for me to meet those folks and spend some time with  them, and I continue, at this very moment, to be in discussion with them about a  potential partnership, but that was a classic example of a meeting without  purpose. And I don't know that. I don't know that it was really helpful to anyone  in any particular way. Well, what we want to do is we want to establish a  meetings on purpose culture. And in order to do that, we have to start crafting,  curating meetings that have a a vital and clearly stated purpose. This is where  when we're meeting, this is where we're meeting. This is who's going to be  there. These are the things that are going to be on the agenda. These are some  decisions that have to be made. Those kinds of things need to be addressed.  Time is a nonreplenishable resource. We cannot We cannot waste time. So I'd  like to encourage operating from what I'm going to call a premeeting checklist.  Now, how does that work? Well, here's some ideas, things that might be part of  a premeeting checklist. You know, why are we meeting? What is the purpose?  Who will be attending? When and where will the meeting be held? What is the  starting time? What is the ending time? By the way, it's critical to establish a  healthy meeting culture that you start on time and that you end on time, unless  you end early. Ending early is a bonus. What decisions need to be made? This  meeting, what actions will be determined at this meeting, what is expected of me

at this meeting, what are my responsibilities? I want to make sure that I know  what role I am supposed to play at this meeting, and I want to be prepared to  play that role. Now, there might be other questions that you would include in a  

premeeting checklist. My advice would be that you begin with at least these  questions on the checklist, and over time, as you get more skilled at holding  meetings, on purpose that you refine that list and really shape it into something  that works for you, but you're making sure that everyone has everything they  need to attend a meeting prepared. The meeting is going to start on time. It's  going to do what was, what it said it was going to do. We're going to take the  actions. We're going to move things along. And when we're done, we're done,  and we are going to be adjourning following a very satisfying meeting where  everyone feels like, wow, I didn't waste my time. In fact, that was really helpful.  We really got a lot done today. Wouldn't you love to walk away from the average meeting feeling like, wow, that was great. We really, we really got to it. We really  got a lot done today. Now here's a tip for you think about this meetings should  have a time clock. Maybe that's a little overstated, but the idea here is, if we're  going to respect time allotment, we need to respect the clock. We can't just  allow things to drone on. We need to set some time frames, like, if we're having  a discussion, maybe we decide that anyone that wants to speak to that  discussion has two minutes, something of that sort. There's this really interesting book that I have. It's called say it s-a-y, say it in six how to say exactly what you  mean in six minutes or less. It's written by a gentleman named Ron Hoff. It's an  older book, business book, but the idea is to say, you know, if you're prepared to have something to say at a particular meeting. Now we're not talking about  discussion here. We're talking about presentation that you need to get it said in  six minutes. And if you go over six minutes, you've gone over time you haven't  done your homework to really succinctly refine your presentation. So six minutes or less is all you get for a presentation. Some of you might be baseball fans. You might be aware that in Major League Baseball this year, in the US, there is now  a pitch clock that is being employed that limits the amount of time between  pitches. There are few nuances to this, but the batter has only so many seconds to get in the batter's box. The pitcher has only so many seconds to deliver the  next pitch. You know what has happened in the sport of professional baseball is  games have stretched and stretched and stretched to where the average game  is well over three hours. So in an effort to make the game more interesting and  lively and speed things up, they are this year, they are, for the first time, dealing  with a pitch clock in the sport of professional baseball, interesting, trying to  overcome their time toxins. No doubt. Think about it this way, if eight people are  in a meeting and an hour is wasted, then in total, eight hours are wasted, and  that's at minimum, because we also have to think about the time lost leading up  to the meeting and following the meeting. You know when you're when you're in  work mode and a meeting is coming up, your brain is shifting to the meeting. 

There's a little bit of gathering things together and transporting yourself to the  meeting, being involved in the meeting, and then getting back. So, you know, a  one hour meeting might cost you, say, two hours of time. So let's say if we've got eight people involved in a meeting that waste the hour of the meeting itself, then you've also wasted the time it took to get there and get back two hours. So now  you've got 16 hours that could have been productive that had been lost. So  these are the kinds of things we need to think about. In terms of time  management when we're looking at the value and the posturing of the meetings  that are part of our routine ministry lives. So we have reached the end of our  video managing ministry time meetings on purpose. And I hope that you will take the opportunity to engage with some of these ideas in terms of meetings that  you're part of, as well as perhaps to do some further examination of your own  engagement with some of these time toxins, or even a time toxin or two that was not mentioned. Now next time, we will be continuing with our In fact, it will be our final video concerning managing ministry time, and we are going to be focusing  on a rather sensitive issue, teaching and preaching preparation, lots of time is  lost, particularly for pastors who are preaching on a regular basis when it comes to teaching and preaching preparation, so we'll take a look at that next time. In  the meantime, may God bless your ongoing studies in the name of Jesus.  Amen.