I am breaking into my Time Management series to include a report on my recent visit to West Africa.
It was a joy to be with John Kpikpi in Ghana and Sam Amara in Nigeria. John leads City of God Church in Accra and brings apostolic oversight to Newfrontiers churches in 7 West African nations. Sam leads the Riches of Grace Church in Lagos and is church planting in both Lagos and beyond.
This report will come in 2 parts. The first is primarily an interview with John about his ministry and the West African scene. I encourage you not only to watch this but then to link to his teaching videos which have arisen out of his very successful television ministry.
In the second part (with the next Time Management posting first) I will tell you about some of the detail of the visit and have a second short interview with John about how he sees the Kingdom mandate about ‘setting the captive free’ from an African perspective. Interesting viewing – don’t miss it!
So now, sit back and watch John as he shares about his apostolic ministry and vision for West Africa.
Newfrontiers in West Africa from Newfrontiers on Vimeo.
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Tags: Apostle, Christian, Church, John Kpikpi
Its as easy as ABC!
How did you get on with a ‘Do it’ list? I now want to help you complete the prioritising but first we need to unpack ‘Important’ in a bit more detail.
Last time we saw how the definition of Important in this context was a matter of values and had a particular focus on your unique gifting and responsibility. However, there are other considerations and these typically relate to how you interact with others. Let’s consider an example.
Suppose you have to write some ‘copy’ for a piece of publicity. This may not seem very important or urgent to you for today. You know it is not going to be printed for another month. However, when you have written that copy it has to be incorporated into a design by some Graphic Designers. They may well produce some ‘roughs’ for you to consider before producing the final design which you will approve. If you delay writing the copy it is putting them under unfair pressure which may result in missing the deadline. So, ‘Important’ in this case is determined by the effect on others of your not doing it today.
There is no rigid definition of ‘Important’ – your gifting and the interaction with others are just two of a number of indicators you may wish to consider. But it is ultimately personal to you.
ABC
So we have a list of 15 items and can begin to break them down into one of four categories, as defined in the last posting. As I promised, the solution to prioritising is as simple as ABC.
Look at your ‘Do it’ list and put * beside anything that is urgent. That does not prioritise in itself but alerts you to consider the urgency when assigning priorities. Now put an ‘A’ beside any item that is both Important and Urgent. These are the first things you will be giving your time to. Hopefully the number of such items will be small.
Next look at the list and put a line through anything that is neither Important nor Urgent – why waste your time on it!
The third stage is to allocate as many ‘C’s as possible. C is the category for Important but not Urgent, in other words activities you do not realistically expect to do today but nevertheless you will do them at some stage, not delegate them. I am not in favour of procrastinating or putting things off till later but this is the one occasion on which I recommend planning that way!
The final ‘B’ category is for everything else. It will include the remaining items ie
a) Urgent items marked * and b) other items that you would really like to achieve today but can wait till tomorrow if necessary without serious consequences. It is at this point that you decide how to delegate the Urgent activities.
- If Urgent activities appear on your ‘A’ list that is OK. You expect to get them done today and they probably need to be top priority
- If there are Urgent activities on your ‘B’ list you should consider someone else doing them, in which case the action is ‘Delegate xxx to yyy’ and re categorise it to you’re ‘A’ list
- If it is on your ‘C’ list it should not be! Those items are definitely not going to happen urgently.
1, 2, 3
Now look again at the 3 categories and consider each group in turn.
Because the number is so much smaller than the original 15 in each category it is simple to prioritise within that category with 1, 2, 3 etc. Write these numbers beside the letter so that you will now have a randomly written list with A1, A2… B1, B2 etc beside each item, thus giving a priority order. Never give the same rating to two or more items!
Were do we go from here?
Now that I am encouraging you to write lists etc it is time to consider what is a suitable ‘vehicle’ (i.e. a ‘super diary’) for planning and recording lists and activities. This will be the topic for the next posting. Both electronic means and paper will be referred to. Meanwhile, use a notebook to make your Do it lists if you have no other way and practice allocating As, Bs and Cs.
I hope you are beginning to feel the impact of this series in your life!
Tags: Administration, Christian, Planning, Time Management
Saturday January 30th saw 80 people gather in Swindon, UK for a Vision Day on Foundations for Farming. We were greatly privileged to have Brian Oldreive, the visionary who has developed Foundations for Farming, with us for a day of envisioning and impartation of the Biblical principles around which Foundations for Farming has been developed.
Tobacco or Food?
Foundations for Farming, formerly Farming God’s Way, has been developed by Brian over the past 3 decades in Zimbabwe. Having been a very successful tobacco farmer he was challenge one day by his daughter, ‘Daddy, why do you tell us never to smoke and yet you grow tobacco?’ He was so convicted that he never grew another tobacco plant!
As he shared his personal history and walk with God we were conscious of being in the presence of someone who had covenanted with God to do only what he heard Him say. ‘How do things grow if they are left to develop as God intended?’ Brian wrestled with the contrast between the way man farms, and the devastating way that in years of drought the harvest is very poor, with the way God grows his crops, and the way that trees in the wood survive under the harshest conditions. He noticed how, in times of heavy rain, over 90% of it ran off the surface, taking the good topsoil with it. In contrast he observed how, in an untilled area, 96% of the rain was absorbed into the ground with minimal soil loss.
God’s way
God revealed His way. This resulted in Brian developing ‘new’ (or old?) principles for farming, particularly:
- No inversion of the soil (i.e. no ploughing)
- Allow the previous year’s dead growth etc to lie and decay into the soil etc
Since this revelation and new understanding Brian has experimented and established the necessary basic principles to bring optimum growth – what area of soil is required to support each plant, how much fertilizer (or termite hill soil) is required to feed the crop, and so on. He has taught both rural farmers and ‘big time’ farmers the same techniques according to the four cardinal rules:
- On Time
- To Standard
- No Wastage
- With Joy
The fruit of Faithfulness
The results have been amazing:
- Rural farmers in Africa typically get yields 5-10 times as great as using traditional methods
- 65% of Zimbabwe’s farmers had adopted the methods up to the time of the ‘land redistribution’
- Zambia was turned into an exporting nation in maize with a surplus of 400,000 tonnes about 8 years ago
Visual demonstration
During the day Brian taught both theory and practice, the latter using a specially created demonstration plot in a warehouse next to the Gateway Church building – thank you Swindon for you hard work! To find out more go to the Foundations for Farming website (below).
Operation Trumpet Call
Training Materials
Another aspect of the day was the sharing by Adrian Willard about Operation Trumpet Call. This ambitious vision that is being worked out by Scott Marques and his team, together with the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, is to feed 5 million people in Zimbabwe (the whole of the rural population) through teaching them Foundations for Farming within 5 years. This is being carried out on the basis of Training Trainers where by training 100 farmers who each train 100 the multiplication effect is rapid. The first phase has gone well with nearly 80% success.
We look forward to welcoming Dr Goodwill Shana, Chairman of EFZ, as one of our speakers at the Together on a Mission Leaders Conference in July in Brighton.
‘If my people..pray..’
Adrian also shared about the exciting initiative to mobilise prayer for Zimbabwe. At the end of March Terry Virgo is joining Dr Shana to speak at two Leaders’ conferences for up to 5000 Christian leaders. This will be followed up in late September with large rallies for tens of thousands around Zimbabwe. Through the day, and based on 2 Chron 7:14, there will be a worldwide call to prayer and fasting for Zimbabwe with opportunities for both Zimbabweans in the diasporas in different nations and others with sympathy for Zimbabwe to pray for the nation.
This is a tremendously exciting initiative – look out for more details as they are publicised!
For further information go to www.foundationsforfarming.org or contact Josie@foundationsforfarming.org
Tags: Christian, Foundations for Farming, Poor, Relief and Development
Hopefully you have a grasp of appointment time. Now let’s look at discretionary time.
As the term implies this is time over which you have discretion. Appointments are often determined by someone else; discretionary time is always for you to determine and use at your discretion. In any day this is the time where the battle of fulfilment and achievement tends to be won or lost (although, believe it or not, even meetings can be fulfilling and satisfying, though many see them as wasting hours to keep minutes!).
Are you a list keeper? As one who lives by lists I am often amazed to find that about 50% of people do not use them to plan their time. Recently I was in Africa and my friend told me that typically his friends would wake each morning and then decide what to do that day - whatever occurred to them. If you are one of those I urge you to begin making a daily list. Without it, prioritising your discretionary time will be difficult and you will not find that you have used your time to maximum effect.
The ‘Do it’ list
This is the list where you collect up all the things that you hope to do sometime or, more specifically, may hope to do today. But if you write down this list you will probably find that, realistically, there is no hope of completing everything.
Before we continue, I would like you to take a piece of paper, if you do not already have such a list, and write down all the things you would like to do today. This will help you as we continue to discuss how to prioritise. Really – please do stop and do it!
Now look at that list, which may have 10-15 items on it. If you start to work your way down the list from the top will you be achieving everything in priority order? Be honest with your answer – I am sure it is ‘no’. The reason is that the order of the list is an accident of history – the ones at the top came to mind first and the ones at the end last! That does not assign any priority to the list – it is random.
So what do you do? Assuming the list is 15 items long you can try listing them 1-15 according to some priority scale you may have in your mind. Not easy is it? Why is that? Because you have to compare each item with every other item - to do that you have to make over 100 comparative decisions! This is very unwieldy.
Important or Urgent?
The solution is as easy as ABC. But before we see why there is a very important issue to consider; how to prioritise between the Important and the Urgent.
Important activities are a function of your value system – something that is best done by you because of your gifting or job decription and something that you feel is significant in importance on a basis which only you can define. We will look at this a little more next time.
Urgent is purely a function of time – if you don’t do it today tomorrow is too late. But that does not make it important. It is just one factor you have to take into account when you are prioritising. It is possible that it is unimportant and will have to be left undone because something else must take your time. Or perhaps you should ask someone else to do it for you.
Consider this diagram for which I am indebted to my friend Bryn Hughes, Christian Trainer and Consultant in Personal and Organisational Development. Here you will see that there are four possible responses to any particular scenario.
- If something is both Important and Urgent it needs to come high on you priority list.
- If it is Important but not Urgent you should Plan to do it.
- If it is unimportant but urgent Delegate it.
- If it is neither important nor urgent Drop it!
In the next posting I will help you refine this and give you a simple way of prioritising the whole list. Meanwhile, if you are not already a list maker, please start making a daily ‘Do it’ list. Even doing that will help you to focus your thinking and planning for the day.
Tags: Administration, Bryn Hughes, Planning, Time Management
A promise
The techniques of Time Management I am going to share with you give you a water-tight system. There is no reason for you ever to miss an appointment or activity that is important to you again! Can that be true? Yes! But first, it is important to have an understanding of time.
Types of Time
Broadly, there are two categories of time that comprise your day - Appointments and Discretionary.
Appointments
Activities that come under the category of ‘appointments’ carry the implication of being predetermined. They have a start time attached to them. Sadly, they do not always have a finish time - and this may be one of the things that occurred on your list of challenges from the last blog – interminable meetings.
Tip: In order to maximise the use of time try to determine both the start and finish time of appointments and make sure that all involved with you are aware of these
But who makes the appointment? Do appointments refer only to meetings? No! An appointment is any period of time which is scheduled in advance. It may be with someone else by agreement – a meeting, a phone call etc. Or it may be with yourself, time set aside for a specific purpose – a time of study or prayer, for writing or reflection.
Appointments can either be positive in providing a skeleton on which to hang your other activities or they can represent a blockage to being able to achieve the things that are peculiar to you. In the work context you have certain responsibilities defined by some form of job description. These are the things that should be taking quality time as, by definition of your job, they are the things that are focussed on your gift and calling. They should not be the things that are ‘tucked in’ between meetings. How do you achieve this?
First things first
There is a well known illustration to help you. If I show you an empty bucket and then fill it with large stones or boulders until they are bulging out of the top you will probably agree that the bucket is full.
If I now take smaller stones I can fill some of the space between the larger ones. Is it now full? No! I can add sand and shake it into all the remaining gaps. So now is it full? No, not even now, as I can add water.
If I were to fill the bucket with water (the trivial things of life) I can not get any of the more solid material, sand, pebbles or stones into it without spillage. Similarly, if I put water and sand in first I have the same problem with the pebbles and boulders. It is essential to put the boulders in first or they will never get in there at all.
Appointments are the things that can be written into the diary in advance. Gordon McDonald puts these boulders in 8 weeks in advance according to the quote I included last time. I find it necessary to put them in 12 months in advance, and reviewed every 3 months, as my priorities include international travel, meetings with other busy people which may be scheduled to last for several days and so on. If these are not first put in the diary sacrifices have to be made – often affecting other people – in order to force them in later.
In the next posting I will consider Discretionary time, which will allow us to begin to discuss priorities and planning.
But meanwhile, don’t forget the boulders…
Tags: Administration, Christian, Planning, Time Management
Pursuing Goals
What are your goals in life? Over the next ten years? Five years? This year? Are you intentional about planning steps to fulfill these goals?
If you are going to use time effectively – to help you do so is the purpose of this series – it is important to have some sense of direction and destiny. Clearly some have this much more precisely defined than others. The young swimmer aspiring for gold at the Olympics has a passion that will cause her to practice swimming at 5 am each morning before school for many years, a discipline that requires intentional planning and sacrifice. But not many of us are budding Olympians!
But what about life? Marriage, Career, or other ambitions? Where do you picture yourself in 5, 10, 20 years time?
Writing your history in advance
In part 1 of this series I spoke to you about writing your history in advance. If you did not watch that video please go back to January 4th. Time Management pt 1 – What is it all about? In that video I was particularly referring to a day, the period of time we will return to shortly as the basic unit for time planning. However, weeks, months and years are made up of days.
At the end of last year did you think back over the past decade? Did you feel challenged ‘I would never have expected such-and-such to have happened’ or ‘I hoped to achieve a particular goal and surpassed it’? Clearly, none of us accurately knows the future, but either we can be fatalistic and let the future come to us, accepting whatever it brings, or we can be intentional to chart our path into the future in a particular direction.
My story
I felt called into ‘ministry’ at the age of nine. This determined my choice of school studies – classics – until, with a fading ‘call’ when I was 16, I changed to the sciences. Having obtained a degree in Mechanical Engineering I realised I would have liked to have become a medical doctor, so intentionally looked for opportunities in the medical field. Nothing suitable was available for professional engineers at that stage (I am going back over 40 years!) so I returned to university and carried out research before an opening came up.
During those research years God called me again and seven years later I started serving Terry Virgo ‘full time’ as his administrator. (It is interesting to note that there are famous Biblical characters who had many years of waiting before they began to see the fulfillment of their call – Abraham, Paul and, of course, Jesus are just three examples – not that I equate myself with these spiritual giants!!! There can be the danger of believing that what God has spoken into your heart requires an instant manifestation; this is often not the case.)
Through all this I made decisions that moved me towards short, medium or long-term goals. These had to be outworked on a day-to-day basis, often at a relatively unconscious level, being the ‘canvas’ rather than the detail of my life.
That represents something of the ‘macro’ of time management, handling the large issues. But what does the micro look like? This will become the main focus of future blogs.
A two minute exercise
Before we consider the detail of time management I want to give you an exercise – it will take only two minutes but will really help you engage with what I shall share in the coming weeks.
What are the challenges you are aware of that make you less effective than you would wish? Interruptions? Lack of punctuality? Procrastination (putting things off till tomorrow)? ….? The list must be honest and specific to yourself.
Please record your answers and use them as a checklist as we explore this skill together. I hope it will encourage you as you discover ways of addressing these challenges.
Post Script
I will close this posting with a quote from Gordon McDonald’s classic book Ordering your Private World, first published in 1984 and now in its 4th edition. There is one word I have highlighted several times – intentional.
“I seize time and command it when I budget for it in advance. This last principle is the most important – here is where the battle is won or lost. I have learned the hard way that the principle elements of my time budget have to be in the calendar 8 weeks in advance of the date! I must take initiative in planning to feel that I am initiating rather than responding to life”.
Gordon McDonald is intentional in his planning!
And so was Jesus, which allowed him to shout in triumph from the cross “it is finished!”
Tags: Administration, Christian, Planning, Terry Virgo, Time Management
What does God think?
Before we discuss specifics about Time Management I want to take just one posting to consider briefly what God’s view of time is.
In Ps 90 the psalmist tells us to ‘number our days’ (v12) having already told us in verse 10 that ‘the years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty’. I once spoke to a Godly ‘elder statesman’ who took verse 12 literally, telling me the exact number of days since he started praying for revival, which coincided with the number of days since he became a Christian!
70 years is 25,567 days. How many of those have you had? Use the diagram to work it out.
Verse 12 continues ‘…that we may get a heart of wisdom’. The psalmist is telling us to make a realistic assessment of how long our lives will last so that we handle them wisely.
The Psalm ends with ‘Let the favour of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!’ (Ps 90:17). In other words, how we lead our lives is a partnership between God and us. He has great plans for us and has built in enormous potential. He longs for us to fulfill His will and walk in obedience to Him.
Jesus said ‘you are my friends if you do what I command you’ (Jn 15:14). But God has given us freewill and does not over-ride that. Look again at Ps 90:17. The psalmist is pleading with God to make our work effective; but, by implication, this can happen only if we walk in His will. In Prov 16:3 we read ‘Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established’. As we plan prayerfully we can expect to have sufficient time to accomplish all that He wants from our lives.
Cultural differences
In the next blog we shall begin to look at some of the practical ways in which we need to approach time management. However, let me first make one comment about the difference culture makes to our approach to time management.
Relationship or Task?
I have many very close friends in Africa, India and other ‘warm climate’ cultures, to quote the excellent book Foreign to Familiar by Sarah Lanier. In such cultures they will say to me ‘you have the clocks we have the time’. The sentiment behind this is that they are more relational while I am more task-led. I agree! But neither approach is ‘right’ in any absolute sense – so we must take care to avoid polarizing the difference.
Jesus accomplished a huge amount but always seemed to have time for people. Relationship or Task? Jesus seemed to be able to embrace both and my desire is that we should emulate him, combining relationship with accomplishment.
I believe that what I shall share will help you to accomplish this!
Tags: Administration, Christian, Planning, Time Management
Do you feel in control of your time? I think I can help you!
25 years ago I recognised that I was very inefficient at managing my time despite the fact I had been heading up a research team in Rehabilitation Engineering for 15 years. I had never heard the expression ‘Time Management’ and started to pray about how to improve. God sent a wonderful solution in the form of a visitor from the USA who told me about, and sent me an audio course on, the Insight Time Management System (sadly, I can find no current reference to this).
Had God answered my prayer?
When I received this course I had to make a decision – was this God’s answer or not?’ I decided to believe it was and followed the System to the letter. This has significantly changed my life and effectiveness. I thank God for that chance meeting and this visitor’s faithfulness in following through the brief discussion we had. This was the only time I met him!
As I talk to people I find that my experience is very common – Time Management is a major challenge for many people. I hear statements like ‘there never seem to be enough hours in the day’ and ‘I just don’t seem to have time to do such-and-such’.
There is hope!
What I shall try to do over this series is to share my experience and give some very practical and fool-proof ways of managing your diary on a daily basis. I shall not be addressing issues such as life goals and longer term planning related to them in any depth, vital as these subjects are. However, through this series I want to help you in your day to day life. If you follow what I teach I can promise you that you will considerably increase your effectiveness and sense of being in control of your daily activities. First, I would like you to watch this video.
Introduction to Time Management from Newfrontiers on Vimeo.
Follow the rules
From this video you can see that we shall be looking at such practical matters as planning and setting priorities. These may be relatively familiar concepts to you or you may find them foreign. Whichever is true let me urge you to pay close and diligent attention to what I shall write and follow it rigorously.
Once you have embraced the principles into your thinking you can make your own adjustments – but only then. If you make changes to the ‘how tos’ too early eg ‘Nigel’s needs are different from mine so I will adopt only part of what he says’, you will miss out! So don’t do it! And don’t get discouraged. Some say it takes 6 months to embrace a habit and, at first, it will not only feel like hard work but you may even have a short season of lower effectiveness (though I doubt it).
But I do encourage you to persevere – you will not regret it!
Tags: Administration, Christian, Planning, Time Management
I have been writing this blog for about 6 months and am aware of a growing following, so some may have missed the early material. To help you find that material it seems appropriate at the turn of the year to Index these 6 months. Clicking on the Topic will take you to the first in the series.
There have been 3 main series on Biblical Administration and The Poor. There are also some Ministry Reports and National Reports, and two on Conference Administration which punctuate these Series.
Series
June 17th – Aug 29th Lessons from Jesus the Administrator in Mark 6. Jesus - The Administrator!
Sept 3rd – Oct 22nd Some ‘good practice’ Indicators when ministering with the Poor. The Poor deserve the Best - part 1
Oct 26th - Dec 15th The gift of administration in 1 Cor12, the practice of administration and characteristics of the Administrator in Acts 6, and more characteristics of the Administrator in 1 Tim 3. Biblical Administration - part 1
Ministry Reports
Nov 27th Ministry Report 1 - Money Advice
Dec 17th Ministry Report 2 – HIV/AIDS in the Mumbai slums
National Reports
Jun 28th Zimbabwe - a caring response
Oct 7th Crises in Africa (including video)
Nov 16th Famine in Kenya (including video)
Conference Administration
July 8th Administration helps God-encounters
Sept 9th Conference planning
The next series on Time Management will begin in the New Year.
Tags: Administration, Christian, Church, Famine, HIV, Poor, The Poor
I am taking a break from my blog over Christmas in order to focus on celebrating with my family. However, in wishing you a very happy Christmas I would like to share with you some photos of stars I discovered on the Hubble Telescope site. Since stars feature in the Christmas story it seems appropriate to ’sign off’ for this year with some of these beautiful examples of Creation.
This is a very small sample. But what a stimulus to worship!! I trust you will enjoy them. Why not visit the Hubble site to see more - they are amazing and tell of the incredible Creator God we have as our Father!
Happy Christmas and may 2010 be a year full of joy and fruitfulness for each one of you.
Eigth anniversary image of Hubble's smash hits
Hubble and Chandra composite of the galaxy cluster macs
Gravitational lens detail in abell 370
Three moons cast shadows on Jupiter
Dying star hd 44179
Dust band around the nucleus of black eye galaxy m64
Giant disk of cold gas and dust fuels ~ possible black hole at the centre
Light echo illuminates dust around supergiant star v838
Hubble irtf composite image of Jupiter storms
Saturns dynamic auroras
Spiral galaxy m100
Planetary nebula ngc 7009
The great red spot - an ancient strom in Jupiter's atmosphere
The Pluto system on Feb 15 2006
Face-on false light image of dust disk around star
The eagle has risen stellar spire in the eagle nebula
A string of cosmic pearls surrounds an exploding star
Jesus, the Bright and Morning Star!
Acknowledgement from the Hubble site:
Material credited to STScI on this site was created, authored, and/or prepared for NASA under Contract NAS5-26555. It may be freely used as in the public domain in accordance with NASA’s contract.
