This list is by no means exhaustive, but I wanted to share a few practical steps you can take to start changing YOUR world today instead of being frustrated that you can’t change THE world.

Do for One What You Wish You Could Do for Many
Rather than lamenting about the fact that the world has problems, solve that problem for one. Remember that just because you can’t help everyone doesn’t mean you can’t help someone.

Be Consistent in Your Serving
Rather than dreaming about serving in a big way, serve faithfully at your church in small ways. Remember that it’s the long obedience that makes an impact in the long run.

Honor the Past Leaders
Young people today seem to think no one has ever loved God and loved people the way they do. That’s a very arrogant place to be. Remember that the leaders of the past were serving God and took the ball a long way down the field. Honor their impact and legacy as you seek to change YOUR world.

Do Something
Stop waiting for God to tell you what to do and go do something. If you’re not doing something contrary to His will, then you are are living in His will, fulfilling His purpose for your life. Don’t let the fear of not doing something grand paralyze you from doing anything at all. Just do something to change YOUR world.

What helpful tips for changing YOUR world would you add to this list? 

Shifting your focus from changing THE world to changing YOUR world isn’t easy when you’re surrounded by a culture telling you to be radical, dream big, and live a grand epic story. But I think there are a couple of mental habits we can practice that will change our behavior in the long run.

Don’t Focus on the Results

In a world of instant gratification on so many fronts, we want to see the results of our efforts immediately. If the results aren’t there we can quickly because frustrated or demotivated because we start thinking our efforts are pointless, our work is meaningless. What we fail to remember is that oftentimes the process of the work is why God has called us to it. He has lessons to teach us and lives to impact through our obedience in the journey. Scripture also reminds us again and again that we plant the seeds, we water the seeds, but God makes them grow – the results are His business, not ours.

Learn to See God in the Mundane
Parenthood can feel very mundane. Very few stay-at-home mom’s wait with anticipation for the next diaper change or mess to clean up. Working in a factory can feel very mundane. Repeating one small step of an assembly process can feel insignificant. Cooking at a fast food restaurant can feel very mundane. Wrapping burgers for 8 hours a day doesn’t seem world changing. But, if we learn to see God in the mundane areas of our lives we will come to see that He is always at work. We will see that He is using our obedience in the mundane routine of life to impact the lives of those around us – He’s using the mundane to change OUR world.

Remember: It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint
When you’re watching the olympics, the sprinters look impressive. We are amazed at how quickly then can travel the 100 yards from start to finish. But, while their speed is impressive, they don’t cover much ground. Marathon runners are less impressive to watch as they run more slowly repeating a mundane motion of putting one foot in front of the other. But they cover a lot of ground in the end. Long obedience in the same direction covers a lot of ground and makes a significant impact even if we don’t get to see them in our lifetime.

How many times as a child did your parents, or maybe a teacher, tell you that you could change the world? You could be anything you wanted to be and make a dramatic difference.

The idea of changing the world is planted in many of us from little on. It’s not an inherently bad idea, but unfortunately the result is that we get to a place as adults where we start waiting for God to move in radical dramatic ways when the reality is that He often moves in the mundane.

There seems to be an idea floating around churches today that, “If I’m not literally changing the world, being radical, I’m missing my God given calling.” But if we look at Scripture we see that oftentimes God called people to be obedient to a very specific change in their every day world. That obedience affected the people around them. Sure, sometimes it caused changes in the greater world but often those individuals didn’t even get to see the impact of their faithful obedience.

The fear of not doing something grand, of missing our radical calling, paralyzes us and we sit waiting, doing nothing. This week, I want to encourage you to stop worrying about changing THE world and instead focus on changing YOUR world. We’ll look at that idea a bit more deeply and share some practical steps for changing YOUR world.

If you laid the groundwork yesterday, you should currently have three lists – a 5 minute list, a someday list, and an essentials list. Today we will build a system to get them all done.

Step Five: Contextualize Each Item on Your 3 Lists
Contextualize each item on your three lists. Ask yourself where you need to be to complete each task. And keep in mind, we think these items are tasks but many of them are actually projects – there are several steps required to check the item off the list. It’s important to distinguish between the two. It may be helpful to group items together by context for completion.

Step Six: Determine the Next Actionable Step
Take a look at your tasks and determine the very next tangible step you must take in order to complete the item. Be as specific as possible. i.e. – before you can order invitations for your child’s birthday party you need to pick out the design. Focus on the smallest actionable next step possible.

Step Seven: Do a Weekly Review of All Projects
An app that is designed around the Getting Things Done method can be a very helpful tool for this. Look at tasks in context groups and schedule out your tasks for the coming week.

Step Eight: Keep an Up to Date Calendar
A calendar is the glue for a solid time management system. Put everything on it!! It is the foundation of a trusted system.

Between a calendar and a list of next actionable steps, you will have the peace of mind that you aren’t forgetting something. This will result in lower stress and eventually you will train your mind not to even worry about about what you have to get done.

Do you have a time management system currently? What have you found works for you? 

There are eight steps I would suggest when setting up a solid system for time management. This process can seem a bit overwhelming. Have no fear, we’ll lay the groundwork today and start fresh in tomorrow’s post as we construct the system.

Step One: Purge Your Brain
Write down all of the things you feel like you have to do, or feel like you have to do. This should include anything that requires some sort of action from you – big or small. Everything from taking out the trash to picking up a shirt at the dry cleaners to writing the next chapter of your book. Get it all out of your brain and on to paper.

Step Two: Enact the 5 Minute Rule
Go through your list and put a check mark by all of the items that would take less than 5 minutes to complete if you were in the right place. i.e. – You were on the road by your dry cleaners or you were at your computer to send an email.

Step Three: Give Yourself Permission to Not Get Things Done
There are things on your list that aren’t necessary. Commitments you’ve made that you shouldn’t have, whether to someone else or to yourself. Get rid of these things. It may mean some hard phone calls but it will mean you get more done in the end.

Step Four: Put Things Into a Someday or Maybe Category
There are things on your list that you should do and want to do but perhaps not at this time. Maybe ideas you want to take action on but you don’t have the space for in your current schedule. Don’t get rid of these things, just put them in their own list.

What you should have left after steps one through four are the essential things. The things you want to do & have to do at this time. Tomorrow we will build a system to get those essential things done as well as the other items.

Time is something many of us wish we had more of. But it’s also something few of us have a solid system for managing. We often fail to see the value in setting up such a system.

Time management, however, is important because if you don’t manage your time, it will manage you. And time is not a kind manager. It will do it’s best to keep you living in the urgent, frazzled, stressed, overwhelmed, anxious and not getting done the things you want to get done.

There is a lie that says you don’t have enough time. Maybe you’ve believed this lie. Or it’s brother “I wish I had as much time as _________.” The hard truth is that you have exactly the same amount of time as ____________ – the same amount of time as every other human being in the history of the world.

The first step in changing our actions is changing our thinking. This week I’d like to challenge the way we think about time & offer some practical steps for setting up a solid system of time management.

I thought we’d wrap up this series sharing a few tips for navigating life as thiner:

Define Your Wins. I don’t get caught up in the rat race of tracking my hours. I know what I need to get done and what it looks like to win. I know that I put in a sufficient amount of time and that’s what matters. As long as I’m winning I don’t let the amount of time I’m spending or not spending affect my feelings of productivity and accomplishment at the end of the day.

Find a Schedule that Works for You. I personally allow myself a more flexible schedule, but I have friends in similar jobs who need more rigid schedule. I have several blocks of time in my week that I fit into that flowing schedule including:

• A couple of hours working on my next sermon. I’m usually 4-6 weeks ahead on sermons so the sermon I week on I may not preach for another month.
• A couple of hours working on the next series
• An hour to review and practice the sermon for Sunday. Chances are I haven’t seen that sermon for a couple of weeks so I spend some time praying over it and refining it.
• Several hours preparing and having meetings with staff. As the lead pastor I am responsible for being forward thinking and keeping us on vision as a church. I block out time to set meeting agendas, think through the conversations, etc.
• Several hours dedicated to communication. This includes communication with my church through emails, training videos for leaders, writing thank you notes and posts on The City. I also spend time communicating with people not in our church through notes, emails, and text messages.

Schedule Time to Fill Up. As you can see from above a great deal of my time is spend pouring out, whether that be through writing, preaching, counseling, leading a meeting, etc. When you spend a great deal of time outputting it’s important to block off time to fill up. I schedule time to do things like read, take a walk, listen to a podcast or anything else that will feed me emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

See a counselor. I have a counselor I see regularly. Because I spend so much time thinking and helping other people process, I need someone who can help me think and process. I also have a trusted group of pastor friends that have a group text message conversation we check into regularly to celebrate wins together and encourage one another through the tougher times.

Do you have any tips you would add that help you navigate life as a thinker? 

White collar workers punch in at 8 o’clock and punch out at 5. In between they have a routine set of responsibilities, most of which revolve around managing people who are responsible for tasks.

Blue collar workers are also punching the clock but spend their days producing very tangible results that directly correlate to the amount of time they put in.

This new thinking creative class falls somewhere in the middle. Oftentimes they still produce something, like the blue collar folks. And they also spend time managing people like white collar workers. But, the majority of their time is spent on thought.

Designers deliver you a beautiful poster that required 3 hours of work in Photoshop but only after 3 hours of thinking about colors and fonts, brainstorming ideas, and doing some research for inspiration. Consultants spend a great deal of time thinking about what is effective for their industry before they ever step foot into an evaluation to consult for a client. Writers spend a great deal of time thinking about ideas, doing research, and having conversations about their next book before they ever write a word.

In this new thinking class of work, the time invested doesn’t directly correlate to the amount of “product” at the end of the day. Nor is the time spent an accurate indicator of energy spent. An hour spent brainstorming ideas for a new sermon series is not equivalent in terms of energy to an hour spent approving expense reports and returning some simple emails.

The dilemma becomes: how do you measure the “productivity” of your time if you’re judging it simply on the number of hours you log in any given day? How do you measure thinking? And how do you justify feeling exhausted after time spent thinking even though you haven’t produced anything tangible from it?

If you consider yourself part of this new in between group of workers, how do you measure the productivity of your day? 

I had two conversations recently that caused me to consider a question: Are pastors blue collar workers or are pastors white collar workers? 

The question first came in a conversation with a mentee who was concerned maybe he doesn’t put in enough “time” at his job. As I was talking to him I figured out that he gets everything that is expected of him done, and more. Outside of his job responsibilities, he contributes a great deal to his tribe, and doing a great job at all of it. However, it’s difficult for him to add up the hours to get 40 hours in a week or 60 hours in a week. He may be working 80 hours and doesn’t realize it because a lot of what he produces is thinking.

I asked that same question myself in speaking with a mentor. I oftentimes get to the end of a day and I’m exhausted but if I add up the hours it wasn’t that many full on meeting hours or conversation hours, but must of my time was spent planning, thinking and writing.

Processing that with my mentor, I realized that the activity of thinking can be mentally and emotional zapping. We think we shouldn’t be exhausted because we didn’t produce something that we can tangibly see, but producing thinking is equally exhausting.

I believe there is a new working class that doesn’t fall into white collar or blue collar. And it‘s not just pastors. It includes any job that dedicates a great deal of time to thinking – it’s the rapidly growing creative class. 

This new class is neither management driven nor task driven but is a mix of the two. Our churches are full of this type of leader, many who wrestle with feeling like they’re not putting in enough time because they’re not outputting enough tangible “products.” I want to spend some time this week talking about how we can navigate this new thinking class in a healthy way.

As you think about your job, which class would you typically say you fall into? 

I hope you’ve seen this week that summer truly doesn’t have to mean shutdown. The natural change in rhythm that happens this time of year is a great opportunity to develop new leaders and recruit volunteers.

There are a few practical steps you can do to get started:

• Make a list of people of the top 10 people you wish were volunteering but are not currently.
• Invent an event to create an opportunity for those 10 people to serve and then ask them to be involved.
• Ask current leaders to identify their replacement now so that you can start being intentional about investing in those individuals
• Spend 1 on 1 time with 1 leader each month from May through July
• Draw out your leadership pipeline and plot where your current and just below the surface leaders are. Make it a goal to move people along the pipeline over the summer and track that progress.
• As you are planning Vacation Bible School, use it as an opportunity to invite some new friends to the volunteer pool.

What practical steps would you add to take advantage of summertime in recruiting new volunteers?