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Doing the important rather than the urgent
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One of the greatest challenges you may face as a pastor, other than passing up a second helping of Esther Bolick's famous Orange Marmalade cake, is managing your time properly. But it's critical that you learn to distinguish the important tasks you must do every day - those that will truly matter if left undone - from the urgent tasks you'll encounter - those that only appear to be urgent, but that are truly brought about by poor planning or time management. Create priorities in your schedule and discipline yourself to stick to them, and not only will your days will flow better but you will accomplish what is truly necessary in your ministry and your life.
Sometimes tasks will cross our paths that, at first glance, seem urgent but that upon closer analysis, we realize may not always be as critical as they first seem. Often a sense of urgency arises from poor planning on our part or someone else's. Such a task doesn't necessarily require us to drop everything we're doing to complete this now "urgent" project.
For example....
Several years ago I worked in a large company with several hundred employees. My main job function was to support two engineering department heads and manage the engineering library. When I had free time, I also assisted about 80 departmental engineers and technicians who were notorious for waiting until the very last minute to submit their work to me.
Almost every day someone would rush up to my desk, throw a project in my inbox, and call out "Need this in an hour!" as they rushed away.
After much stress and a few missed deadlines imposed by my procrastinating co-workers, I put a sign on my desk that read, "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." It was a humorous way to let the guys I worked with know that, since I served so many people, I had to have advance notice for any projects I was asked to complete.
I loved "my guys" and always did my best to serve them, but if they had procrastinated in bringing me the project, or if they could do it as well as I could and simply didn't want to be bothered, they knew they weren't going to get much sympathy from me for their "urgent" need.
There were times, too, when I was working on something for one of the department heads that simply wouldn't allow me to work on another project. Unless I was able to plan my time properly and know in advance what was needed from me, I simply couldn't take on additional work.
That job had strict priorities and I couldn't allow poor planning on the part of others to hinder me from accomplishing my responsibilities. As hard as it was, I just sometimes had to say, "No."
Sometimes we as pastors must also say no. Regardless of how uncomfortable it is - and it can be very uncomfortable! - we must stick to our priorities rather than allow others (or even ourselves) to rearrange our schedule because of procrastination or poor planning.
Of course, there are tasks that will truly take us away from our schedule. A death, an accident, a family in dire need, or another crisis are truly justified reasons to drop what we're doing and change our plans. But we are the ones who must evaluate the priority of what we do. And we are the ones who must choose the important - sermon preparation, Bible study, devotional time, prayer, family, etc. - over the urgent when we need to.
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