Work less to do more
Dec 8, 2009 • By David Murray • 0 CommentsCan we learn from the computer game industry? I think so. Here is a fascinating article in pdf format from this gaming design website.
Most important points are:- 60 hour+ weeks deliver a brief increase in productivity but you need recovery time right after or productivity plummets.
- When overwork becomes the norm, people think they’re more productive. They aren’t.
- Knowledge workers should only work 35 hours/week.
- One of the main proponents of the 40-hour work week was Kellogg’s. Not out of idealism but because it increased productivity for them.
The Power of Moral Clarity
Dec 7, 2009 • By David Murray • 0 Comments
These points would make the basis for a great homiletics lecture or even a sermon.
1. The biggest threat to freedom is not military aggression, but moral ambiguity and sophistry.
2. You do not follow the principles of “how to win friends and influence people” with criminal regimes. They are different.
3. The most powerful weapon against criminal regimes is publicly spoken moral clarity.
4. There are often opponents to moral clarity from within our own walls — including people with a narrowly pragmatic view of the world and people who simply should know better.
As a preacher, what would you substitute for “criminal regimes”?
Improving Pastoral Productivity
Dec 7, 2009 • By David Murray • 0 Comments
Ever got to the end of a busy day and felt you did nothing? Here are some good tips for how to avoid this which can be easily transferred to pastoral ministry.
If you can, early in the day, do one or two things that have lasting value, you’ll be taking steps in the right direction–even if the entire rest of the day is shot.
Here are some things that may be important tasks to do early in the day:
- Read a chapter of a book - If you are trying to get better at what you do, reading is probably going to be a pretty important activity. Spending some time reading before the day gets started makes sure you are making incremental progress.
- Networking — Keeping in contact with your business acquaintances is a very valuable activity, but one that is often pushed to “tomorrow”. Spending 30 minutes sending emails, making phone calls or sending out birthday cards can go a long ways toward keeping you in touch.
- Practicing — We tend to think of practice as something that is reserved for athletes and musicians, but if your job requires a skill, there is probably a way to practice it. The trick is to practice something that helps you get better at what you do.
- Writing — Writing can be a very good way to develop your thoughts and perspective on something. Spending a few minutes on a regular basis writing about a topic where you want to become better will deepen your understanding.
Freshen up your preaching
Dec 7, 2009 • By David Murray • 2 Comments
How do people like Steve Jobs , Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell keep coming up with fresh ideas. Harvard Business School did the research and found their five secrets of innovation here.
Obviously we don’t want to be theological innovators. However, I could not help thinking that some of these “secrets” could help freshen up our preaching.1. Associating
“What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.”
These behaviors are powerfully enhanced by a capacity to ask provocative, challenging questions of the world around them.”
“To improve your questioning skills, Gregersen recommends identifying a problem and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. He says that over that period the questions will change, and so will your understanding and approach to the problem.”
The best exegetes of Scripture are those who ask the best questions of Scripture. We can learn better interrogation techniques by forcing ourselves to ask better questions.
3. Observing
“The way they act is to observe actively, like an anthropologist, and they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions.”
“To build your observation skills, identify a business, customer, supplier, or client, and spend a day or two watching how they work so you can better understand the issues they have to deal with.”
Preachers should learn to observe the world and interact with people outside their normal range of contact. Is it possible to spend a day with someone in your congregation as they go about their working life?
4. Experimenting“For them, everything is to be experimented upon — for example, if they walk into a bookstore and they’re used to reading history they might try psychology.”
Why not pick a subject area - theological or non-theological - that you have not read much on and make it a focus for the next year.
One of the most encouraging statistics in this study for us plodders who are not blessed with fertile imaginations is that “creativity is close to 80% learned and acquired. We found that it’s like exercising muscles - if you engage in the actions you build the skills.” Hope that might help some of us preachers and writers who may be stuck in a bit of a rut of sameness and staleness.From good to great
Dec 2, 2009 • By David Murray • 0 CommentsJim Collins wrote the bestseller business book From Good to Great. Here is how he divides his time:
Scrawled on a whiteboard in the conference room of Collins’ Boulder, Colorado office is a simple formula:
Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%
Collins decided years ago that a “big goal” in his life was to spend half of his working time on creative work — thinking, researching, and writing — a third of his time on teaching, and then cram everything else into the last 20%. The numbers on the whiteboard are a snapshot of his current distribution. (He tracks his time with a stop watch and monitors his progress in a spreadsheet.)
You can read the rest of the article here. Lessons for Pastors?
