do something concrete.

Yesterday a friend said to me,

“I’m busy. I’m gone all day and it takes an hour each way to get to work. But I’d like to do something that’s ministry.”

Ministry is a church word. It means that a person wants to do something around church, related to church. It usually means being a Sunday school teacher or being an usher or shoveling the driveway or being on a committee.

I don’t like that meaning. I like to push people out of the building, help them work in lives.

I said, “What delights you? What do you love to do?”

“Sleep,” my friend said, smiling. She’s got good reason. She works hard and has much on her heart.

“If we ever start a nap ministry, I’ll call you,” I said. “Do you like to send cards?”

“I used to.”

“Send cards to two people this week and then ask me the question again next week.”

We agreed on two names of people who could benefit from her touch and I walked away.

In the past I would have said, “let me think about it and get back to you.” In the past I would have said, “let’s look at a brochure.” In the past I would have taken the burden of involvement on my shoulders.

But the most important thing for her to do is to actually do something. This week. That will help someone else. In her timeframe.

I think that having written about Switch the day before helped. Scripting the critical moves in this case meant helping my friend move from a vague “I want to do something” to “here’s what I can do this week.”

Make it clear. Make it simple. Make it doable.

Then help someone do something.

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Also see Put it on the list

Make a list, check it twice

I feel like I’m being remarkably unproductive these says. I know that part of it is that I am talking with people…and that has little short-term productivity, though huge long-term potential impact. However, today I had great hope.

I made a list.

And then, halfway through the day, I realized that my work had been too fragmented. I had pieces of several things done (and a great meeting) but nothing finished. I also had a very messy 3×5 card.

So I tried this.

1. I created a mousepad for my optical mouse out of an 11×17 sheet of paper.
(I have a glass-topped desk and an optical just doesn’t work.)

2. I wrote all over it during a meeting.

3. When my first list wasn’t working, I created a new list right on my mousepad/worksheet.

4. I just started working through the list.

A couple things aren’t done but they will take reflective time which I have tomorrow. The rest of the list got pretty well done.

Why talk about it? Because odd habits actually work sometimes. I can’t carry around the mousepad, but it puts my list in the middle of my workspace where I can be reminded even when I’m online. And that’s a really helpful thing.

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protopage praise

I started using Protopage a couple weeks ago. The best way to describe it is as a web-based portable desktop. You create a free page, like this. Then you can customize it with a variety of specialized boxes, or widgets. These include boxes for entering links, weather, pictures, webpages, and, my favorite…the sticky note.

I am working to bring some organization to my life drawing on Getting Things Done, by David Allen and ideas I’m gleaning from others (Chris Brogan, life-hacks, pastor-hacks) Drawing on the idea of one in-box for everything that has to get done, I have made the protopage sticky note the heart of my organization for the past two weeks, and it may be helping. At the beginning of the process I started one for the day. As I completed items I crossed them off, as I thought of items I added them. When today became tomorrow, I added that date to the label of the note. At the end of the week, I duplicated the note, deleted all the completed items, redated the new one for the new week, and moved ahead.

Here’s why protopage has been so helpful:

• Same list can be accessed at home, at work, at different computers at work. Anything that happens in between those places gets added to the list the next time I sit down. And I sit at a terminal way too often.
• the sticky note approach fits with how I think.
• the list of favorite links saves me a tremendous amount of time because I can have it anywhere I am on a computer.
• I can have one main page as my workspace and then have several additional pages for old lists, for brainstorming, for keeping quotes.
• I can have coffee beans as the background.

Here’s what I don’t know: How well my life is being backed up! I can print the lists, which helps, but I don’t have the files…protopage does. and I have to investigate this. However, this is a hack that has been tremendous…and I can’t remember who mentioned it.

technorati tags:protopage, productivity, gtd

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What happens to time.

This is a great posting about trying to capture our time.

This is a great posting about our time being stolen.

While the writer of both probably sleeps too little and talks a lot, his point is very well taken. We’ve got to redeem the time because we are in the middle of evil days,

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Time management vs productivity

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/the-myth-of-productivity-advice.html

about ministry and productivity

The idea of a blog with the motto, "Less time on tasks…more time on people" is probablly worth looking at. Also, Bob's church, Evergreen, in portland OR is something I want to followup with, as is Joomla which is the content driver for his website.

Just some stuff to remember.