Getting your pastoral life organisedPosts in this series
If you're going to be a well organised pastor, I really do think you have to embrace the use of lists. Otherwise your brain will run out of memory trying to keep up with all the things you need to do each day, week, month, year, decade.
I have three basic sets of lists stored in different formats on my computer.
The first list that I want to share with you today is my daily tasks list. These are items that I must do every day - yes, every day!
What sort of tasks go on a daily tasks list?
Mostly self-education tasks go on a daily tasks list. Although, I do have some tasks that are part of large projects that need to be chipped away at a day at a time - they are simply too large to do in one or two big hits.
So currently I have on an Excel spreadsheet the following tasks:
-Time of prayer - for which I go over a weekly prayer list kept in a Word document;
-Personal Bible reading;
-Bible memorisation;
-Bible translation work;
-Greek and Hebrew memorisation work;
-Readings from various books;
-Projects - like comparing changes between NIV 1984 with NIV 2011 (I'm going through every change 10 chapters a day).
How do you keep your list?
I keep my daily task list in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I find Excel works best for my everyday list because:
- Excel allows you to easily plot dates down the first column;
- Excel lets you fill in the tasks quickly by shading in the relevant cells;
- Excel allows tracking of the tasks - I can tell you what I read on what day - whereas if I deleted the tasks in another program each day, I wouldn't remember when I read what;
- Excel makes planning future tasks really simple - particularly those tasks that involve numbers. So for tasks that never change e.g. daily prayer time, you just select the little box in the right hand corner of cell and drag it down and the word 'Prayer' is copied into a cell for each day. And if you want to change numbers, you just select a bunch of cells together and then drag down and Excel will automatically continue the new cells with the same pattern - if you want to read 10 pages of a book each day, the page number you need to read up to is quickly calculated;
- Excel easily allows you to compact the list up by reducing column width size. I don't need to see the whole item each day - all I need to know is that P = prayer and so I'd better get praying. But if I ever forget what is in a particular cell, I just move the cursor to it and look at the formula bar at the top of the sheet.
An expanded Excel list could look like this:
A compacted Excel list could look like this:
Both lists tell me to:
-Pray;
-Read a chapter from Ezekiel;
-Memorise a verse from Romans;
-Read 10 pages from Packer's Knowing God.
But the second compacted list allows you to add more and more items without taking up too much room on your screen.
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