How Do You Organise Your Time?

I reorganised my diary last night. I do this fairly regularly as things I need to do often change slightly, and if I don't keep up with my diary then I easily lose my way. I tweeted/facebooked that this was what I was doing and my sister asked me how, as a pastor I went about organising my diary and building flexibility into it. (She had reasons for asking!) As I was trying to note down brielfy what I did I thought it might make a good blog post - and she encouraged me to go for it. So here is a slightly expanded version of what I wrote to her. I would be very interested in how you organise your diary (especially if you are entirely responsible for how you organise your time). It's always good to share ideas and learn from each other, and being organised is definitely an area I could do with some help in. Anyway - enough of the intro; here it is:


I use Google Calander for my diary, which I find very helpful - especially as it syncs with my phone (which plays a reminder for each thing I need to do!!!). We also have the church calendar online, and Helen has her calendar online too. Therefore at a glance I can see what is on Helen's schedule, my schedule and the church schedule. As I plan and change my plans having all three together is really very helpful.

In terms of how I sort out my weekly time table it works something like this.

1) I print out (or write out) a blank sheet of paper seperated into 1/2 hour blocks from 8am-10pm for the whole week. I do not plan to work outside these hours (and usually not before 9am or after 9pm). It gives me time to get up to pray and help Helen with the kids. It helps me to make sure that I get to bed on time so that I can get up on time! As Rico Tice likes to remind us, "If I go to bed after 10pm I have decided not to pray in the morning."

2) I write into that all the immovables - which for me are mainly meetings (and meal times!) my day off and time to spend with the family. It is very important as a husband to corner off part of my week specifically to spend with Helen. It is very important as a father to corner off part of my week specifically to spend time with the children and for us to spend time together as a family. Most of my other immovables are on the church calendar; homegroups, Sunday ministry, etc.

3) I make a seperate list of all the things I need to spend time on in the week, preparation for meetings, admin, visitng/phone calls, etc. and write down next to each one how much time I want to spend on them.

4) I then add up all the hours I have placed on that list and if it is more than I can handle working week in week out I begin to edit the numbers until it is manageble. You need to know yourself to do this well - and it may take some trial and error. You need to know if you can work a 60 hour week no trouble, or if you will burn out if you work more than 45 hours. Know yourself - don't expect more of yourself than you know that you can give - but plan with faith in the goodness of God! If you are anything like me you will end up with a total above what you know you can do - therefore you will need to slim how much time you want to spend on tasks, to how much time you need to spend - starting with the most important things. For instance I would love to spend 10 hours on sermon prep, but I limit myself to 8.

5) Once I have my list of what I need to do, and how much time I can afford/need to spend on each item I begin to work these into the week planner that I have drawn up. I put the most important things earliest in the week so that if the unexpected happens I have some time to reorganise for later in the week. I put more flexible(read "unpredictable") things in later in the week so that as the week fills up with unplanned things (you notice how weeks do that) I can swap the important things that I have missed into the place where the flexible things were planned. (Hopefully this makes sense. I will try and post a couple of examples soon so that you can see all this worked out.)

HERE'S THE FLEXIBLE BIT

6) I add at the end of every day time to thank God for what he has helped me get done that day and to prayerfully plan the following day. (I also spend some time on a Tuesday morning planning the whole week). I know what I have and haven't accomplished that day; I can see where I have meetings and other events that are unplanned (an urgent hospital visit for instance) and can reorganise my time around them. I have time on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday that is flexible that is either labelled "Pastoring" or "Study". These are the major blocks of time that are movable in the week describing a broad range of activities that crop up in the week at all sorts of times. Then if I get a call to make a visit on Tuesday when I should be starting on my sermon, it simply swaps with part of the "Pastoring" time. Or if I have a meeting about organising a youth event earlier in the week when I plan to be doing admin, then I can swap it round with the "Study" time. Study time moves to Admin time and Admin time moves to Study time.

The most important times in the week are these 10minutes at the end of the day to give thanks and to plan the next day. If I don't do these then everything falls apart because I get stressed that I haven't done what I have planned - stress causes me to procrastinate - and everything goes down hill from there!
If you got through all of that - congratulations! I will try and post some examples of what I do and how it works out so that you can see it in action - I think that will help more. I do this process three or four times a year, depending on how my diary might change. School holidays are obviously different to term time. Different terms are often different because of after school clubs, etc. It takes about an hour of prayerful work - but without it I would be thoroughly lost!!!
I hope this is helpful to someone.