Taming the Busyness: Getting Organized and Staying That Way

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Post Author: MaryAnn McKibben Dana

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Ministry is a high calling: a cliché, but also true. We have the joy and privilege of being present at the milestone events of life—births, weddings, deaths—what some of us call “hatch, match and dispatch” in our cheeky moments. One of the practical things I learned in seminary was this: when the call comes that a parishioner has died, hang up the phone, take out the calendar, and cancel any non-essential commitments for the next several days. The pastoral care and funeral are now the priorities. Then turn to the following year’s calendar and write a reminder to contact the family: “anniversary of Rose’s death—call her daughter.”

Tending to one’s calendar seems like a mundane activity in the midst of the emotional upheaval of a death—and it is. And yet our ministries are full of such moments. Yes, ours is a lofty calling, but we still need to get things done. There are plenty of urgent and important matters in ministry (death of a church member). Others are not urgent, but deeply important (our own self-care). Still other issues are merely urgent, but not important (insert your own example here). How do we organize our lives so as to make the best use of our time, while providing flexibility to respond to needs as they arise?

I’ve been a collector of organizational tips for a long time, but especially since moving to part-time ministry. I resonate with my friend Karen Sapio, pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church in southern California, who remembers working part-time while her kids were little. “I had about two or three hours of work time each day if I was lucky,” she says. “I didn’t have much of an organizational method. I pretty much arrived at the church and worked furiously on whatever I could until it was time to pick up the kids at child care.”

Whatever our life circumstance, we know that our resolve to be more organized waxes and wanes depending on our time, energy, and Myers-Briggs type. Here are some tips I’ve found helpful along the way, and others gathered from friends and colleagues:

“Take Care, TCB GTD”

With all due respect to Aretha Franklin’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” I’d like to revise her song a bit. I am a committed disciple of GTD, or Getting Things Done, David Allen’s popular book on “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.” The book is well worth reading for people who want to get their lives in order, but the basic idea is that we carry around a lot of unnecessary anxiety when we don’t have a way to organize and process the information and details that come across our desk. Having a system that is complete, efficient, and even a little fun (get yourself some colored folders and a labelmaker, friends!) alleviates that stress that comes when we are trying to keep too many to-dos in our heads.

If you’re a more spontaneous type for whom a high level of structure makes your teeth itch, here are just a few GTD tidbits that even a half-hearted organizer can implement:

Action items that are truly “actionable”

Many of us fall into the trap of putting things on our to-do lists that are so broad that we take one look at them and think, “That’s too much, I don’t have time for that now.”

“Plan Youth Sunday” is a great project, but not a good action item—it needs to be broken down into smaller chunks, such as “write letter to planning team,” “check youth ministry shelves for books and resources,” etc.

Group like items together, by context

Contexts are places where things get done: on the phone, on the computer, at home, in the car on an errand. Many of us organize our to-do list by project (if we organize it at all). As a result, items are buried in a list rather than right where we need them.

Do you have a few minutes before your next appointment? Pick up your To Be Called list and get going. Are you in the car between a hospital visit and a judicatory meeting? An Errands list will remind you to stop by the bakery or the post office.

Tickler files

These are file folders organized by date (I use one per month) in which you toss random ideas you want to think about at a later time. That’s where I put the cool World Communion liturgy that someone gave me last week that I don’t need to think about again until the fall.

Gotta-Have Gadgets and Doodads

OK, gadgets are not essential to being organized. In fact, many effective pastors I know do quite well with a paper calendar and pencil (with eraser—things shift often in ministry). Nonetheless, here are some items, both high-tech and low-tech, pricey and free, that might make your life easier:

PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)

Those of us who have ‘em can’t imagine going back. It is an expense, to be sure, but the peace of mind of having everything in one place, (including your Bible–Olive Tree), is well worth it. It’s also nice not to
have to record every single meeting on the calendar. Set the recurring ones to repeat, e.g. every second Tuesday, and you’re good to go. I have mine set to remind me of appointments and deadlines; it beeps and dings so much I go around sounding like R2D2. But I never miss a meeting. Accidentally, that is.

A twist on the PDA concept: Andrew Foster Connors, pastor of Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, keeps his calendar on his cell phone, which he syncs both at home and at work. “In addition to having a portable schedule that I can check wherever I am, [my spouse] Kate can keep track of my schedule all the time,” he says. “Of course, that doesn’t eliminate conflicts and tensions between church and home, but it makes it a little easier to plan or schedule stuff together. I’m still a terribly disorganized person—my desk is a wreck. I chalk that up to creativity. But I rarely miss an appointment.”

Global Positioning System

Says Susan Olson, convener of the Young Clergy Women Project, “A GPS system will save you enough time and gas to pay for itself. I have one as a gift and I keep thinking how much time I would have saved doing pastoral calls if I’d had one when I was first starting out. Heck, I would have argued to take it out of the book budget!”

Paperwork center

I keep everything I need for correspondence in one place: stamps, envelopes, notecards, church directory, checkbook for paying bills, and even a sheet of paper with credit card numbers on it so I can pay bills without fishing my wallet out of my purse. I keep all this in a basket so it’s portable—I can dash off a note while the kids are playing nearby in the family room or write a couple of checks while watching “The Daily Show.”

Calendar

This one’s not rocket science. But what kind of calendar? Many of us swear by paper calendars; others have gone high-tech. Google calendar is accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. And some of us prefer a combination, like Susan Olson: “When I was a solo chaplain, I kept prayer requests in a paper calendar. When the year was up, I could go back and note in the new calendar things like death anniversaries and anniversaries of other important things (I’d also add in student birthdays as I became aware of them, weddings I performed, etc.) and plot them on my electronic calendar to remember to send notes.”

A magical magnetic door

OK, it’s not magic, and it’s certainly not worth it to have one installed, but if the door of your house happens to be made of metal as ours is, grab a few magnets and stick them to the door. These are great for papers that need to walk out with you when you leave. No more leaving a stack of letters on the table for days (and days, and days…)

Alternative: get a magnetic white board mounted next to your door.

Jott

I always wondered if I was the only one who called my voice mail to leave myself reminders. I wonder no longer! (www.jott.com Jott) is a free service that allows you to call an 800 number, leave yourself a message, and have a text version of it waiting in your e-mail box the next time you log in. You can even have it send messages to other people (a great way to tell your friend or spouse you’re running late without texting in rush-hour traffic). I have been known to Jott myself poem snippets and sermon ideas—much more effective than scribbling notes on a fast-food napkin in my car. (Now where did I put that exegesis?)

Vitalist

There are tons of online to-do lists out there. (https://www.vitalist.com/ Vitalist) is my choice, because it follows the Getting Things Done methodology (and it’s free). You can sort your to-do list by date, project or context, set up ticklers, move actions into a “waiting” category if you’re waiting for someone to get back to you, and more. Having an online to-do list means it’s accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. When you’re going to be offline, it’s easy enough to print your Vitalist or just write down the day’s action items. And you can Jott to it, too!

Who’s Got Your Back?

It’s great to live in faith that God will provide, but that’s no reason to tempt the Almighty. My very unofficial survey of clergy suggests that very few of us keep proper backups of our computer files. Susan Olson keeps her sermons on a memory stick she carries with her between home and work. It’s good to have some redundancy, storing precious files in more than one place. Even better: a backup system that will do the work for you. Mozy is an online backup service that my husband, a former independent computer consultant, has recommended to his clients with great results. Mozy automatically and unobtrusively backs up those files you designate and stores them on their servers for less than $5 a month. Once you sign up and install the software you don’t need to give your files another thought. You can retrieve backup copies if you need them. God forbid.

The String Around the Finger—21st Century Style

My beloved uncle will leave me a voice mail from time to time, saying, “Call me back: it’s been 78 days since we last talked!” I finally asked him how he kept track. The iGoogle personalized homepage has an application called Days Since. Set it up to remind you to do those things that easily slip your mind. Days Until is also available. Never miss your mother’s birthday again!

Perhaps you need something more in-your-face. Bruce Reyes-Chow, pastor and candidate for moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), uses HassleMe to receive periodic e-mails that, well, hassle him. According to his blog, every four days or so he receives an e-mail that says, “This is a hassle to remind you to quit shoving food down your pie hole.” Whatever works!

Sermons and Worship

In my informal survey, I found many different ways of storing sermons and worship materials. Ann Bonner-Stewart, managing editor of Fidelia and associate rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Greenville, North Carolina, has a low-fi but effective system: giant three-inch three-ring binders with the bulletins and hard copy of the sermons, hole-punched and filed from Advent 1 to Christ the King Sunday from a single liturgical year. She also has a separate funeral/wedding binder, with bulletins and
sermons.

Rob Monroe, a layperson who works for National Capital Presbytery in the Presbyterian Church (USA), says, “I am in charge of coordinating getting our pastor’s sermons online. We’ve been exploring just posting them in a blog so that they are searchable by whatever she wants them in. We have included scripture references, too. Currently we just have them posted on our website and she can refer to them that way.” Organization and outreach! Of course, blogs can also be private, if you want an easy way to save and search sermons for your own use. Tag them with a theme, book of the Bible, or liturgical season for quick browsing.

Sarah Erickson, Associate Director of Lifelong Learning Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, does what most of us do: she keeps her sermons and worship files on her computer. Naming conventions are important for these files. If you start with the year, then the month and the day, files will be in chronological order. For example, your Easter sermon would be “2008-0323 Easter” or something similar. Sarah also files any notes—exegesis, orders of worship—under the same date, so they stay together.

The Last Word

We all know people who are so uber-organized that they are forever multi-tasking and seeking to maximize each available moment. These people are not fun to be around (it’s not fun to be that person either). And this kind of mentality can be detrimental to authentic ministry.

Louis Imsande, associate pastor of Roswell Presbyterian Church outside Atlanta, puts it this way: “For too long I have carried my engineering principles into ministry… But, I am starting to see that ‘decent and in order’ can impede the Holy Spirit. I am starting to think that those ‘annoying’ people who interrupt my schedule/organization might just be divine appointments from God. Maybe I should be open to the Spirit moving at a time I have not scheduled.” The point of any organizational system or strategy is not to exist for its own sake, or as some grasp at perfection, but to free us up to be present, trusting that whatever we’re doing is what needs to be done at that moment.

So do not worry about your life, what you will do or whom you will call. Is not life more than doing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither Jott nor Vitalist, and yet God feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow’s action items are on your to-do list. Today’s work is enough for today.

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Image by: STIL
Used with permission