Tip #1: Tick, Tick, Tick
December 16, 2007 – 9:35 pm
In one of the most memorable youth ministry convention speeches I’ve ever heard, Andy Stanley said “There’s not enough time to get it all done.” Does that resonate with your life in ministry? It did with mine!
Time management is probably the biggest challenge people in ministry face. We’re always on call. We believe passionately in our cause. We have Earthly and Heavenly accountability. All this makes us not want to say no, to be responsive, to be effective, to go above and beyond. But, to be honest, we can’t do everything, or be there for everyone, without dropping the ball on something else.
Most of us in youth ministry are super-connected for information and availability; that’s a good and bad thing for our time. Email is one of the items - dare I call it a necessary evil? - that has the potential to bring the most distraction to any day. Would you like to spend less time on email and have it be more effective for you?
Merlin Mann, founder of the 43 Folders personal productivity blog, provides a system for processing email that results in the zero inbox. Yes, really. The keys to processing begin with limiting the number of times per day that you actually process your email to every hour or two at the most. Then, follow these steps to determine as quickly as possible what to do with each message:
- delete it
- archive it
- defer it for later response
- generate an action from it
- respond to it immediately (if it—literally—will take less than 2 minutes or is so Earth-shattering that it just can’t wait)
More details on email productivity can be found in Mann’s Inbox Zero: Action-based Email series on 43 Folders by clicking here. If you are more of a visual learner, Mann gave a one-hour seminar at Google HQ, which you can watch right here!
