Mastering the Tools: Software for Organizing and Planning 3.24.2022

    We are called to preach. It can be hard work. It can be heart-rending. It can be rewarding. It can be exhilarating. It is work. Hard work. Preaching requires attention to detail and sensitivity to the emotional impact of words. Preaching well takes time. I’m not just speaking about years of experience, I mean lots of time every day, every week, every month. This month I have been inventorying the tools we use to prepare our sermons. Biblical Studies tools. Note-taking tools Writing tools. How do we find the long uninterrupted time to make the best use of those tools? That is today’s lesson.

    In the 1990s David Allen redefined personal productivity training with his Getting Things Done (GTD) method. I want to preface the rest of today’s essay by summarizing as briefly as I can the vast GTD ecosystem. It comes down to this. You really can only do one thing at a time. Regardless of what anyone says, they may juggle tasks, but only one has their attention at a time. The single most important lesson I took from GTD is that any task, for example studying, taking notes, preparing, and preaching a sermon, needs to be understood as a project, planned out and executed one step, one ticked-off checkbox at a time. You cannot do everything at once. That is no excuse for doing nothing. Plan well, make a good list, and do the first thing on the list. When it is complete do the next thing. After that do the third thing, and so on until you are finished. 

    I will talk about three classes of tools and only drop a few names. I have worked hard to be productive. I have written extensively on the subject and done my best to help others to be productive. You need a big picture organizing tool. I think that the best kind of tool for this is an outliner, you might choose a database or a purpose-built project manager. You need a To-do List manager. You need a calendar. 

• Outliner=Strategic/Logistic The big picture. 50,000 feet.

• To Do=Tactical. Order. Cumulative effect. Doing the right thing the right way.

• Calendar=Tactical/Logistic. When and where  will I do this task. 

    Much of what GTD teaches is an extension of basic common sense. The key idea is what makes the difference. Only one thing at a time. Everyone needs to adapt this insight or any other preferred method of organization to their own situation. One example of the contradictions I have always sensed at the heart of GTD is embodied in the insistence that only “hard landscape” items should go on your calendar. This seems profound. It is unsound. To be blunt, it’s nonsense. Every single thing you do is hard landscape (wait for it, wait for it, wait for it), When you’re doing it. Planning means specifically and unashamedly doing the correct next action. Planning is about sequencing the steps of a project. Scheduling is about deciding when you are going to do it. Execution? Doing it. Finishing. Delivering.  All the tools we have discussed throughout this month, all my ranting and raving about sermon calendars, and processes are pointless if you don’t keep some kind of a list of what you want to get done and a calendar for determining when you are going to do it. 

    I’m going to discuss tools in a moment. Before that, I want to share with you why I evolved some of these systems. All of us have heard the old joke that “preaching is easy, you only work one day a week.” It is not fair and accurate now, nor was it when I was just starting. I got tired of hearing it, so I began to document everything I did. Calendars and notepads have given way to electronic tools, but I have endeavored for more than 30 years to keep an accurate account of my work in ministry. Some of my records are disappeared because of various life transitions. My basic system now has been intact since 2008. I just pulled up today’s date from 2011.  I can see my ministry activities for that day. I was bi-vocational at the time so 8 hours of the day was “work”. I can also see that I did sermon work when I got home from my “day job”. Work hard. Document your work. Review your own performance. Take the initiative to strengthen your strengths and eliminate your weaknesses. 

    And now for tools. I’ve already mentioned Omni Outliner. My big picture planning is done there. Everything I will preach, write, or teach goes here on one big Sermon Calendar Outline. I have separate outlines for the other four areas of ministry: pastoral, planning, professional, and programming. The best to-do list I have ever used is Things by Cultured Code. It is an Apple ecosystem app that requires separate purchases for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. At first, that might seem expensive, but the pace and frequency of updates are extraordinary. The desktop version is at 3.15.14. The 3.15 update was released in September. That is 14 sub-updates in six months. The updates go far beyond bug-fixes as new features are debuted all the time. They use their own sync system, and it is flawless. I have used Things since 2012 and consider it, outside of Bible programs, the most important application on my devices. 

    Now your calendar. I would recommend three. I use them all in one combination or another. They each have strengths that I would miss if I went with a more streamlined approach. BusyCal is the heir to a venerable Macintosh calendaring heritage. I like it because I can use color-coded tags to give visual structure to my day. Fantastical is the new kid on the block. It came out of the blocks as a menu-bar calendar with the extra power of natural language parsing. It has evolved new views and some additional power. I use it because it is the fastest way to get new information into my calendar while working on my phone. I still use WeekCalendar for its very good agenda view. I began using this app in 2009 on an iPod touch. It has the best custom color/tag system, but its Mac App is a poor Catalyst implementation that lacks the power of the other two options. 

    A final word about planning. On Sunday morning I plan my week. I copy my task for next Sunday’s message onto my calendar, slotting in 30 minutes Sunday afternoon or evening. I then schedule from 9-12 noon and then from 12.42-3.00 on Monday to complete the sermon. Because I have planned far in advance and have already done a lot of preliminary work I'm never starting with a blank page. I will not do anything else Monday until my sermon is finished. Next, I use a weekly calendar view and slot in all my preaching/teaching/writing/study needs. We learn from Acts 6 that our primary task is the Word and prayer. So I make it my primary task in practice as well as theory. Next, I flesh out my week fitting in pastoral, planning, professional, and programming tasks in that order. You can only have one #1 task, one primary area of concentration. For the preacher that task is preaching. There will be emergencies. They should be taken on a case-by-case basis. "Something may come up" is not a plan. Your job is to be the best preacher preaching the best Biblically sound messages you can preach. Everything I have said and will ever say to you about preaching is based on this central assertion. No “yeah buts…” or “Bob, you just don’t understand” …or “my circumstances/expectations/environment are completely different.” I am too polite to drag out a hackneyed Tauro-scatological apothegm here, but it applies.  If you cannot or will not put your preaching first, please get out of the ministry.