I’ve long struggled with how to manage the things I consider important which often get relegated to the side (praying, studying, spending significant time preparing for preaching and teaching) for more “urgent” tasks (wave after wave of email, paper, unnecessary meetings, interruptions for things that don’t actually require a pastor). When I first became a pastor, I tried doing the method I’d developed during college and seminary: block out my day hour by hour, and assign myself working times around my classes and work schedule. Only, by then I was married, the phone rang a lot, and people were coming by that I hadn’t planned for. I’m sure I was rude to a lot of people because I saw them as interruptions to my work, instead of part of my work as a pastor.

So I tried Outlook. If I just prioritize my tasks and assign deadlines to everything, it’ll all get done, right? Nope. And by the time I came to Virginia in 2001, email was becoming part of the daily fabric of my life. I thought if I got a smartphone (first a Treo, now an iPhone), surely then I’d be able to keep up with the flood. Wrong again. Somehow I managed to teach myself German, write an STM thesis and finish that degree, but I have felt like I’m perpetually behind and under the gun for more than a decade, and it seems I never return phone calls and emails fast enough. Sometimes it makes me very miserable.

I came across these gems earlier this week, and it has caused me to reevaluate the entire way I work.

Prioritizing by Importance
Prioritizing by importance is a cause of bad time management, not a cure for it! Just how impressed would you be if your new car didn’t have wing mirrors because the factory thought the engine was more important than the wing mirrors? If it needs to be done, then it needs to be done, period.

Prioritizing by Urgency
Ok, so we sometimes have real emergencies which need an immediate response. You will recognise these when they happen – you don’t need to sit down and allocate them a priority. But let’s face it, all your other “urgent priorities” are only urgent because you have left them to the last minute. And why have you left them to the last minute? – because you are prioritizing by urgency, that’s why!

I’ve tried for several years to adopt the “Getting Things Done” methodology, and using appropriate tools such as OmniFocus to implement it. It just hasn’t worked for me. Perhaps it’s the way my mind works, or my own unique situation, but I miss far too many deadlines, or end up working significant parts of my time off catching up on the things I would have liked to have done during the working hours (e.g., the “Saturday Night Special,” a sermon written on Saturday night, which rarely comes out well).

The above quotations are from Mark Forster, and his Autofocus time management systems might actually be far better suited for the way I work. I used to be far more productive with just a sheet of paper and a pen, and I’m going to try employing a paper-like method on my iPhone. No complicated programs or syncing. No endless categorizing and creating views and perspectives. I’m going to give it a serious try the next few weeks. Surely it can’t be worse than the monumental failure that is everything else I’ve tried.