Time Sheets

Dear Pastors

Time Sheets

Today I want to offer you a simple tool……..A Time Sheet.

Every job, every role and every position in an organisation will do one of two things over time. Either morph or deviate. It’s in the nature of things. It would be an exception if it didn’t.

Let me illustrate. When my first child was born I became a parent. It was a new role for me. It required certain tasks that demanded new skills. Then that child became a pre-schooler and my job as a parent had to morph…..to adapt to the new challenges and requirements of being a parent of a pre-schooler. Before long my child became a primary school kid and then a teenager and once again I had to adapt and adapt again so much so that when I compare what I did when he/she was a baby to what I am doing when my child was a teenager….well it was a completely different JD. If I wanted to be a good and attentive parent then I had to adapt, to adjust, to modify. I was still a parent right through the years but my job changed quite a bit.

To morph means to change smoothly by small gradual steps.

So it is in any ministry role. Life is dynamic, not static. The role that you started in even a year earlier has already morphed and changed but you may be largely unaware of it. When you started in your role as pastor you agreed to a job position or description (JD). A year or two on, the responsibilities and tasks stated on your JD and what you are actually doing day by day are not identical. You will be doing some tasks that are not on the JD and there will be other tasks stated on your JD that you are not doing. Generally speaking, if this goes on long enough it will cause some frustration and quite possibility a case of work overload. As a rule of thumb particularly in ministry jobs, JD’s accumulate more add-ons and very rarely subtractions.

At this point keeping a time sheet can be very helpful. A time sheet is a written record of what you did and how long it took. I would recommend you add a note every 30 minutes unless you working on a task that takes a longer ‘block’. Do this for 4 weeks and be sure you choose four fairly ‘routine’ weeks.

After the 4 weeks you will have a useful document that you can carefully analyse. You will now be able to answer four very important questions.

1. How many hours did I work?
2. When did I work those hours?
3. What did I actually do in those hours?
4. How does this compare with my JD?

Having done this you can now either make some adjustments yourself or use this ‘analyses’ as the basis for a discussion with your Board. The ultimate goal being is that you not only ‘work in your lane’ but that you work smarter not harder and so be a ‘good steward’ of the greatest resource we have, namely time.

Blessings
Alan