Managing Time

We terribly overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in five.
Ted Engstrom

Never plan to do an hour’s work in an hour.
Ed Dayton

People want counseling, the sermon needs to be written, the board meeting must be prepared for, the copy machine needs to be repaired, someone needs to be recruited for the fourth-grade Sunday school class — a thousand worthy activities clamor for our time. Each one spends a pastor’s time, and once spent, that time cannot be reinvested or recouped. So leaders need to monitor their time investments.

Two of the best “investment counselors” for leaders wondering where to spend their time are Ted Engstrom and Ed Dayton. President emeritus and senior vice-president of World Vision, respectively, the two have led hundreds of “Managing Your Time” seminars, have written several books on the subjects of administration and time management, and are joint authors of Christian Leadership Letter.

Ted Engstrom graduated from Taylor University, was editorial director and general manager of Zondervan Publishing House, and became president of Youth for Christ International before joining World Vision International in 1963.

Ed Dayton graduated from New York University and Fuller Theological Seminary. He worked as an engineer with Sperry Gyroscope and Lear Siegler before joining World Vision in 1967.

What is the most common time-management mistake Christian leaders make?

Ed Dayton: Not planning for tomorrow. The leader is so busy doing things, he or she doesn’t take any time to think about the future. Seldom does he realize many of his problems can be solved by taking just 5 percent of his time to ask questions like, “Who can I get to do this job next time? Who can do it better than I can?”

Ted Engstrom: We terribly overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in five. Start by realizing that you can’t get out of this mess in one year. But you can lay a foundation that can get you out of this mess in three or five years. By planning now, you can get some control over your time down the road.

Delegation is the word time experts use. In the church, delegation means discipling: training others. Leaders don’t do things that others do as well or better.

If delegation is a key to managing time, why do many leaders struggle with it?

Dayton: Given a choice of doing work ourselves or doing work through others, most of us will opt to do it ourselves. Very few people like to manage others. It’s hard work with a slow payoff. For example, most of my work is managerial. So I find I enjoy writing the Christian Leadership Letter with Ted. We feel we’ve done something tangible. The rest of the time we’re in the management business, and years may go by without knowing if we ever did anything right.

Most pastors are in one-pastor churches. All they have is themselves, some books, an old, beat-up desk, maybe a parttime secretary, and a telephone that rings off the hook. What would you bring to this situation from all you’ve learned about time management?

Engstrom: Let me make a philosophical introduction to our answer. When you talk about management of time, you’re really talking about managing yourself. You cannot learn to repair an automobile solely by knowing how to use a wrench, screwdriver, and pair of pliers. You must first understand how things work overall. Once you gain the comprehensive understanding, you realize it’s difficult to tighten a screw with a pair of pliers. That’s where time tips can help.

For example, we distinguish between purpose and goal. Purpose is the general aim you’re going for. To give glory to God is a purpose. To preach good sermons is a purpose. A goal, on the other hand, is measurable. To complete writing an outline of my sermon by two o’clock tomorrow afternoon is a goal.

Clearing up this fuzziness helps pastors set goals and utilize their time. Ministry purposes often can’t be measured quantitatively; ministry goals can and should be.

Dayton: The first thing I’d do is declare what my goals are. Then I’d ask one or two individuals to hold me accountable in doing my best to achieve them. Second, I would find a prayer partner, a Barnabas who could give me counsel, probably a more mature person than I. Third, I would try to determine my particular gifts. If I were a pastor-teacher, I would build on that. If I were a relationship person, I would build on that.

Let’s back up a minute. You talked about people who would hold you accountable. In a one-person pastorate, who might that be?

Engstrom: It may be a mature lay leader, a fellow pastor in the community, or another friend outside the church. Too many pastors start in the ministry with all the capabilities to make the church spin, but they never develop a deep relationship with people who can look at them in a different way than they look at themselves. They look back after ten years and realize that if they’d had counsel at certain points, it would have helped their ministry. For more than a dozen years I’ve had an accountability group. It has been very meaningful to me.

Dayton: The next step is to take stock of the people in your church. They have spiritual gifts to be tapped. Sometimes people know they have them, sometimes not. Sometimes others see gifts people don’t realize they have. Begin to ask people, “What do you think our church is really good at? What can we do well? Who are the gifted people in our church?” Forget the negatives and find the positives. When you begin to hear the same information from three or four people, you know you’re discovering the strengths of the church.

This doesn’t sound like time management.

Engstrom: But these are the absolutely essential preliminaries. Remember, you have to find out how the pieces work together before you can fix the car. In the church you have to understand the people, their relationship to one another, and how you fit in before it will function effectively and efficiently. Far too many Christian workers unconsciously let work come ahead of their relationships. They put task ahead of understanding.

Dayton: I know a pastor who took a small church of ten families in Washington and decided from the start that nothing was going to happen in that church unless, first of all, someone suggested it and, second, someone volunteered to do it. I happened to be preaching there one day when I saw an example of how this works. Someone came up and made a suggestion to him. He said, “Yes, that’s fine.” And sure enough, a little later someone came and said he thought he knew how to implement this suggestion and would be willing to try. That church grew because the pastor let the people decide what they could do best and let them go at it.

Engstrom: Once you discover the capabilities of the church and determine a workable leadership style, you can concentrate on practical methods. One thing I’d do as a young pastor would be to keep an appointment book based on twenty-one increments of the week: mornings, afternoons, and evenings, seven days week. Thinking in terms of those twenty-one units rather than every thirty minutes helps avoid being frustrated with the inevitable interruptions. You have an open enough account so you can handle the interruptions, yet still feel comfortable with keeping your calendar.

Dayton: The idea of having twenty-one units also helps you see how much work you’re doing. Some pastors may be working twenty out of the twenty-one; that’s obviously too much. Eighteen out of twenty-one is too much. This type of calendar helps develop the idea of a standard day. In a typical week, certain patterns will emerge: You’re going to be alone to meditate in your study at such-and-such a time; you’re going to try to stay uninterrupted for a certain block of time for sermon preparation; you’re going to leave some nonscheduled time.

I also suggest letting the board know what you’re doing. I know one pastor who went before his board and said, “I want to tell you about a day in the life of your pastor. Here’s what I’m doing; this is what I’ve done for the past two weeks.”

So the pastor is in an accountability group, has developed a plan for ministry, and is using a calendar particularly suited to the hectic demands of each week. What are some other things a pastor can do to make ministry more efficient?

Dayton: One of the things we think can be of tremendous help to a pastor is to plan a large number of sermons in advance. It doesn’t matter whether you preach them in sequence or not. But why not outline fifty sermons? Set up fifty file folders with subjects and rough outlines; then you’ve got a place to put ideas when they come to you. In another drawer start a series of folders on your other tasks in the church: a folder for the trustee board, elder board, and the others. This will help you think about your life and the way you’re living it in terms of the future, so you plan better.

What about the incredible volume of paperwork?

Dayton: It’s not necessary to read everything that comes across your desk. In five seconds I can tell you whether something is worth looking at or not. That’s a skill anyone can learn.

Engstrom: Or you can find a retired person to read for you. He or she can cut out or underline things you ought to read. It doesn’t take as long as you might think to teach someone what you’re looking for. In two or three hours a week, a volunteer can make a huge dent in your paperwork.

Aren’t most of us afraid to let someone else do our reading for fear we’ll miss something?

Dayton: Yes, there’s the fear something is going to slip through the cracks. I found a psychological way to handle that. I asked myself, “What happens when I’m off camping in the woods for three weeks?” The world somehow gets along without me even though I don’t read my mail.

So you miss one out of ten important articles. So what? You have to have a little faith in others. An I-do-it-all attitude really says, “I don’t believe in community. I don’t believe in other members’ gifts.” You have to let others help you.

Let’s go back to goals. It’s fine for the Christian leader to outline one-year, three-year, and five-year goals. But coming into a new situation, he or she is usually faced with welldefined expectations. How does the leader reconcile personal goals with existing expectations?

Engstrom: The first rule is “Don’t hurry!”

Dayton: And the second would be “Preach your dreams.” I’m not talking about preaching in demanding terms. But if study and prayer have led you to certain convictions about what the expectations of your church or organization should be, then let the Holy Spirit voice those convictions through your preaching. It will take time for the message to get through, but after a year or so, you should begin to see small shifts in attitude.

Sometimes people expect a new pastor to march in and make wholesale changes. They steel themselves to resist. Fool them. Don’t change a thing. Wait. Pretty soon they’ll come and ask, “When are we going to do so-and-so?” Remember, change takes place only when there is discontent. Your task is to preach holy discontent.

Engstrom: The skills required to get things done through other people can be learned. You can learn to plan, organize, lead, and control. You can learn how to delegate and develop people. Obviously, some people can learn these skills much better than others. But they are learned skills nevertheless. The key is learning to rely on others. For example, you might say to a member of your congregation, “I’m not a very good planner, but I understand that you work for such-and-such a company and that you are involved in planning there. Will you tell me how you do it?” That kind of reliance is a key management principle and also one that fits nicely with the view of the church as a body with many different spiritual gifts.

Once you’ve found you can learn these skills, practice them. You don’t become a good preacher in three or four or five years. You don’t become a good manager-leader in three or four or five years either. Sit down in your office and ask, “How old am I? How much experience have I had? What is it that I’m going to have to learn and become skilled at before I can expect to lead these people where God wants them to go?”

Doesn’t part of this process include learning how to say no? Traditionally, pastors are supposed to have an open-door policy, being available for every emergency.

Dayton: To a certain extent, being available for emergencies goes with the territory. But you can forestall many interruptions by simply telling your congregation what your standard day is and when you’d like to be left alone for study. If people perceive you to be highly open to interruptions, they’ll interrupt you.

A secretary helps a great deal, of course. If you don’t have a secretary, or only a part-time one, you might consider a telephone answering machine. Leave this message: “This is Pastor So-and-so. Thanks so much for calling. Right now I have another commitment. I’ll be through at eleven o’clock. I’ll be happy to call you between eleven and eleven-thirty. If there is an emergency for which you think I should be interrupted, call this number.” Then leave the number of someone who lives close to the church and has agreed to take such calls. It can be a different person each day. They can bring the emergency message to the church.

Engstrom: You don’t have to be available to everybody all the time. That’s poor management. Better management lets people know when you are available.

Pastors who don’t manage their time very well often burn out. What are the symptoms?

Dayton: Feelings of unproductivity, discouragement, unsatisfying relationships at home, weariness, and depression. We’re seeing more and more of it.

Engstrom: We think one of the major causes is the nature of the church.

A profit-making organization is the easiest to run. It’s a business with a narrow measuring stick for success — profit. The next easiest to run is a nonprofit organization like ours, World Vision. We pay our people. We can hire. We can release. There are more problems than with a profit company, but we still have a strong measure of control. Running a volunteer organization like the church is the hardest. The church accepts everyone, warts and all. Yet you’re challenging these people to difficult ministry — without pay.

The young pastor coming into the work doesn’t realize how difficult this is. And if a businessman says at a church business meeting, “Boy, we ought to run this church like a business,” he creates tremendous ambivalence and guilt in this young pastor. You can use some businesslike principles in the church, but you can’t run it like a business. It’s different.

Dayton: The church is the most complex of all human organizations. It’s what we call “goal-conflicted.” One goal is to send people forth, and another is to care for them. People are always either getting on a stretcher or getting off — recently hit by disaster or recovering from one, ready to serve. You’ve got this continual dynamic where relationships, not bottom-line numbers, are the key product. And the number of possible relationships in a church is huge. In a group of 10 people, you have 45 possible relationships. In a church of 100, you have 4,950 possible relationships. That’s why pastors must develop processes so the body will care for itself. The pastor alone can’t keep up with all the shifting relationships.

Does the body itself need to think in terms of time management?

Engstrom: It could be important. Big corporations like General Motors and AT&T think seriously about corporate manhours. At World Vision we have six hundred people, and we sometimes think in terms of total corporate time. But as a church, we take time cavalierly. We have all the time in the world, so we tend to relax.

I don’t want us to get uptight about the total man-hours we spend (and sometimes waste) in committee meetings and such, but we don’t think enough about the value of combined hours from a group of people.

Dayton: Right. We don’t train people to lead meetings or to participate in meetings. Too often our meetings don’t have agendas, purposes, or goals. I’ve found every discussion item has three parts: reporting, discussion, action. It helps to announce ahead of time which of these three things will be done at the meeting for each agenda item. Sometimes it will be all three, sometimes only one or two. But announcing it ahead of time aligns everyone’s expectations.

I know one lay person who leads meetings very effectively. But the first meeting I attended with her in charge bothered me greatly. If we got stuck on an agenda item, she’d stop the meeting and say, “I think we should pray about this.” After prayer she’d sometimes just go on to the next agenda item. The first time it happened I thought, Boy, what a railroad job that was. Next month the item was back on the agenda. She was exercising spiritual discipline; when we weren’t going to come to an agreement, she moved us on.

Engstrom: The average businessman comes to church meetings and says, “Why can’t we make decisions? All day I made decisions at work. Yet I get in this board meeting and spend two hours on what should be a cut-and-dried problem.” The businessman forgets that he knows the people at work well. He’s with them every day. He sees church board members once a month, and he’s already missed three meetings. These people are supposed to agree on things, yet they’re coming from twelve different places. It takes time to get to know one another.

Dayton: It also takes time to teach one another what’s expected. We often jokingly say that if you want to get something across in a sermon, you need to preach the same sermon six times.

Engstrom: We have an exercise we use at the seminar to help participants get a handle on how they are, and should be, using their time. We ask them to make a list of all the things they’re doing and evaluate each one. “How do I feel about that? Am I spending the right amount of time doing it?” Then we ask them to share their lists with a colleague. “How do you feel about what I am doing?” They usually hear some different perceptions of their schedule.

Another exercise is to write the ten most important things you do. Then ask your board, your wife, and your friends to make a list of the ten most important things they think you do. The comparison will probably surprise you.

Dayton: A pastor recently told me his biggest problem is meeting his own expectations. He has an idea of the person he should be when he’s forty-five years of age, the size church he should have, and the amount of national influence his ministry should carry. And he’s burning himself out trying to meet those expectations, unaware of what others’ perceptions of him may be.

Over the years, how have your time management habits changed?

Engstrom: You never fully arrive in the matter of time management. It’s a constant struggle. I frequently renew and review my priorities.

If I didn’t have my pocket Day-Timer, I would be in trouble. I try to outline my day, my week, and my month, and live with that. But I fail so often in it.

When did you find yourselves becoming aware of the importance of time?

Engstrom: For me it came when I was forty-five. I was president of Youth for Christ, and I realized I was spending too much time on minor matters that were stealing time from important projects. About that time I met Alex MacKenzie. We discovered we were both struggling with problems of time. Out of those discussions, I developed a new perspective on the use of my personal time — and those meetings also led to a book we coauthored, Managing Your Time.

Dayton: I’ve made some monumental mistakes with my schedule. Like Ted, I still struggle with it. I remember a time Ted and I were scheduled to do a “Managing Your Time” seminar in Florida. But my son needed an operation, my missionary daughter was home on furlough, and our other daughter had flown out from the East Coast to be with us. Everything dictated that I stay home, so I said to Ted, “I can’t go. You know my priorities. I’ve got to be here with my son and family.” I made a good decision originally.

But the operation went well, and I got to thinking about poor Ted in Florida all by himself. On an impulse I raced to the airport, got on a plane, and after flying all night arrived in Florida the next morning. Exhausted, I did the seminar, but I realized how foolish I had been. My family has never let me forget it.

I take on too much because there are so many fun things to do: teaching, consultations, video projects — creative things I love to do, but don’t really need to do. A calendar gets full very fast.

Engstrom: It’s easy to say yes to things six to nine months from now. To counteract that tendency, I keep a full-year calendar in my office so I can see and then regulate how full it becomes. Also, every four or five months I take two days with no agenda whatsoever, check into a hotel, and just get my senses together. I may write, read, or just sit and think. It’s a time away from people and telephones when I can sort things out and get on track again.

Dayton: I think all of us in the ministry, whatever form, drive ourselves pretty hard. My dad used to say I was a Ford with a Cadillac imagination. We all need to match our workload with our energy level and physical capabilities.

What is the best motivation to help people do something about controlling their schedules?

Dayton: First, discontent. You must get to the place where you’re sick and tired of living a hectic life.

Second, prayer. Do what we call fantasizing in prayer. Get away for a day alone somewhere. Bring yourself into God’s presence and think about what kind of life you’d like to have fifteen years from now. (If you’re eighty now, better make it ten.) Picture in your mind a day in your life. What would you like to do on a typical day fifteen years from now? Imagine yourself getting up in the morning, greeting your family, going to work, and coming home in the evening. Be as detailed as possible. Why fifteen years from now? Because most everything is possible in that time. Then work back into the present. What would you like to be doing ten years from now? Five years from now? At each stage you get more specific as you have to make plans for that fifteen-year ideal. The process will help clarify what it is you really want to be.

Engstrom: Goals motivate us better than anything else. But we realize self-motivation is difficult. I can get our staff moving on certain projects far more easily than I can get myself going.

What are some of the telltale signs that you need to focus on self-motivation?

Engstrom: The easiest one to measure is productivity. Write down in a notebook or journal what you want to accomplish each day. Everything worthwhile needs to be written down. Goals, desires, ambitions, dreams, whatever — write it down so you can review it. I don’t accomplish all the things I write down, but if I write it down, I’ve taken the first step toward doing it. I love to be able to cross out things I’ve completed.

Dayton: But we always caution people that faster doesn’t necessarily mean better. Some time-saving techniques have the capacity to destroy relationships. Every one of us can find ways of doing things in less time. But the question is, “Would our lives still be God honoring and biblical?” You can make a fetish out of saving time.

Occasionally you need to waste some time. Some people come to our seminars who are already way ahead of us. Some are so rigid they need to go to a time-wasting seminar, not a time-saving one. In fact, for the church leaders who come to our seminars, we’ve devised some very inefficient-sounding advice: Never plan to do an hour’s work in an hour. The very nature of ministry means there will always be interruptions.

Give us an example of a particularly well-organized person you’ve known.

Engstrom: I can think of a disorganized person who accomplished a great deal: Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision. Bob Pierce was probably as poorly organized as anyone you would ever meet. He hardly knew from one hour to the next what he would be doing. He always had his bags packed ready to go off to Asia or Latin America. But Bob was so Spirit led and personally driven that he was usually in the spots where the need was greatest. He would no more understand what we mean by time management than I understand the mechanics of an airplane. Yet God really used him. Time management is not the only answer to living a productive, redemptive life.

Dayton: I’ve known many industrial executives who would smile at the elementary nature of the things Ted and I teach about time management in our seminar. For pure personal organization, most industry executives beat us hands down. It’s combining some of these time-saving practices with the unique, people-related demands of the ministry that’s the trick.

Engstrom: A man who has combined both in his life so well is Paul Rees. He is disciplined: he’s an early riser, has an impeccable filing system, and has catalogued all of the books in his large library. Paul is always prepared. He is a disciplined writer. But although he’s an organized person, he’s never too hurried to talk to people. You have the feeling you’ve got his full attention when you’re talking to him.

Dayton: In Chariots of Fire, all the trainer did was prepare another man to run a race. He wasn’t out in front of the crowd. In a sense, he ran his race through the other guy. That’s not a bad role for a pastor. I don’t think it is the role, but it’s a good model: building up the rest of the body so it fits together and does what God wants it to do.