Chronos Management
I know I excel at some things, like sleeping. At others this, I know I struggle….like remembering names. Managing time, though, is beyond me. It’s not beyond me in that I know I can’t do it. In fact, I very well might be quite good at time management. It’s just hard to tell.
I had an interesting conversation with a pastor friend last week in which he said something like, “Everyone assumes I’m so busy, but I’m not. I have a lot of time to do anything I want. My congregation just runs itself.” I do know, for certain, I am not like this pastor. Yes, our congregation could function perfectly well without me, but I do feel really busy. And I’m pretty certain it’s more than just a feeling. I am busy.
So the question: how, if possible, might I improve my time management? What tips do you have for pastors so that they might use their time to God’s glory?
OK, so here’s the main tension I feel. The culture is all about time as a commodity, time as something to be managed, something to fight, something to beat. But the Christian take on time is different. First of all, time is a gift from God. It shouldn’t be something to wrestle, but something to embrace.
So in the New Testament, there are two words for time. “Chronos” is chronological time, sequential time as we usually think of it. “Kairos” is a more complicated term, a time more qualitative than quantitative. Kairos time is the moment when God deems something appropriate, the right moment almost regardless of the time on the clock.
The go to verse to show kairos is Mark 1:14-15 “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The TIME is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’” That’s kairos time — a God moment.
So as a pastor, as a Christian, I am aware of the danger of being sucked into thinking time is something to fight against, something to be freed from. In fact, God might be using time to do God’s business. But, all that being true still doesn’t necessarily mean I feel as if I use my time wisely, or that my time is best spent to serve, or even that the way I spend time is faithful at all.
Here’s a few things I’ve figured out re time and ministry, but I’d love to hear more from you all:
- Emails can wait. When getting to the office, reading for 20-30 minutes is a real handy way of scheduling study time.
- Saying “no” is a gift. Saying “no” is often a good idea.
- No matter how many hours I work in a week, it’ll always feel like there’s something more to do.
- Twitter and Facebook are really valuable ministry tools, but I needn’t use them constantly.
- Thinking of my day in blocks is helpful. If I have meetings at night, cutting afternoon work short is a good idea.
- Schedule time to study, don’t just say “I should read this week.” (Ok, I’m no good at this, but I’m aware at least.)
- Sometimes, often in fact, opportunities for real ministry are unscheduled — the conversation at the post office, the person who pops into the office unscheduled.
- Writing a sermon while at the office just doesn’t work. I need to start scheduling more time away from the office and not feel guilty about it.
- Visits — along with study — tend to be the first thing that get cut from a busy week. Some visits to those ill have to be done, the other visits get pushed off easily.
Ok, I’ll stop there. Often, when thinking about this stuff, I recall Eugene Peterson’s book “Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness.” He gets this stuff, but I also don’t quite think his experience is easily translatable to other contexts.
So this friend of mine who says he’s not busy, says what he primarily does is “Spend my days listening for God, and enabling my congregation to do the same.” Maybe that’s something else to keep in mind. May God’s time allow it.
image by Rich DuBose
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I think that you must have recently jumped inside my head and pulled out this blog post. I’ve been thinking about ALL of these things in the last couple weeks. I’m reading Peterson’s “The Contemplative Pastor,” which takes a pretty particular stance on the ways pastors think about and use their time. Like your post suggest, he also advocates scheduling time – actually SCHEDULING it – for reading, study, prayer, contemplation, and even things like family time or exercise. His take is that when we write those things down in our planners, we are more likely to do them, and more likely to orient our pastoral lives around the things that matter to ourselves and our vocation, rather than around the tasks and responsibilities that other people would foist upon us.
As for me, I tend to resist his idealistic notion that the life of the pastor can and should be easily freed from the grasp of all minutia, all busy-ness, or most administrative tasks. Inasmuch as I would love to be a pastor who does only pastor-y things on my own terms (reading, writing, studying, visiting, counseling, contemplating, etc.), I also do not (yet) resent the reality that the congregation also has their own set of expectations for me. Part of accepting a call, in my opinion, is to remember that this church belongs to the congregation and not to me. I am serving a congregation who has been here before me and who will continue here after me.
The tension is how to keep a balance between others’ expectations and my own needs as a person and a pastor, and how to manage my time in such a way to honor both their expectations and my expectations about the role of pastor.
I have always scheduled Thursdays as sermon writing days. I write at home. People can call me, but it is the place and time where I at least begin writing. I try to keep a schedule because it keeps me disciplined.
Maybe it’s not management but stewardship.
Thanks, folks. That’s helpful. I know another pastor who schedules thursdays as sermon writing days. I’d like to get into a similar habit, I think, but it’s tricky as I’m 3/4 time. So I guess that’d mean I’d only be in the office for 2 days a week plus Sunday. Doable, but delicate too.
Excellent post Adam. After 25 years of ministry and across two continents, I wish I could say here’s what to do.
Every day is different, so no matter how much chronos you try to organize, the kairos moments are what’s important.
This is an interesting topic that ‘ve recently been thinking about as I balance seminary, work, ministry and the other pieces of life. After a lot of prayerful consideration (and contemplation about the meaning of stewardship), I came to two conclusions: Chronos is what you need to harness to have more opportunities in Kairos.
What I mean by this is that you can set a certain automatic pilot schedule for administrative tasks while leaving open the door for unexpected ministry opportunities and blessings. Once you figure out how much time you need to actually do the daily administrative tasks, you can move that chunk of time around during the day to accommodate whatever happens during God’s time. I may block out an hour to answer emails and voice mails, but I can move that hour around however I need to in order to accommodate the relational ministry opportunities.
Do I schedule my time whenever possible? For appointments and class, absolutely I try to. Am I flexible when something pops up? Absolutely. But at least I have it down, and a minute finagling it seems to get everything done for the day that needs to be done.
What helps me is using a tool like Google Calendar that lets me drag and drop appointments, lets me have multiple different calendars (each a different color), and integrates with Gmail and has a task list. Maybe you have a email client like Outlook that does something similar. Anyway, I pretty much divided my life into different types of activities and made a calendar for each type of activity. School gets one, Work gets one, ministry gets one, finances gets one, household chores gets one, etc. You could make one for contemplation, prayer, reading, exercise, whatever. I figure out what I NEED to do on a daily basis to keep myself focused on God and God’s call for me, figure out when the best time would be for me to do those tasks and schedule them. Then I schedule everything else around that.
Personally, I like using multiple calendars because you can, in a single glance, see where you are overburdening yourself or under-burdening yourself. If you are using different colors and you see that your congregation is the dominant color on the calendar to the exclusion of all else, then you know you need to begin setting some boundaries. Congregational expectations are one thing, pastoral health is another.
Good luck!