Hope you folks in the U.S. have a wonderful Labor Day… We’re making a special outing to Wolf Trap to see Cathy Rigby in Peter Pan, but mostly we’ll be getting the kids ready for school. Margaret goes to kindergarten! Amazing.
Watch the sheet music go by as Miles Davis and his bandmates play “So What.”
~
Samuel Morse’s Reversal of Fortune—Smithsonian
It wasn’t until after he failed as an artist that Morse revolutionized communications by inventing the telegraph.
Let’s hear it for Plan B!
~
David Allen on Dealing with Interruptions—GTD
That cheap three-sided piece of plastic on your desk holds the key.
~
Finding Time (to Write)—Anne Lamott
No one needs to watch the news every night, unless one is married to the anchor. Otherwise, you are mostly going to learn more than you need to know about where the local fires are, and how rainy it has been: so rainy! That is half an hour, a few days a week, I tell my students. You could commit to writing one page a night, which, over a year, is most of a book.
Discussion of the HBO special “Talking Funny” with Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis CK. Interesting connections between their process and other creative processes. Plus there’s a link to the special, available in four parts on YouTube.
The Myth of Self Control
From Andrew Sullivan’s blog. “Dan Ariely sees the psychology of self control at work in the tale of Ulysses and the sirens.”
Mom Gets the Right Things Done with the Natural Planning Model
I first read this as “natural family planning,” for which the jokes write themselves. But this is a Getting Things Done post about how to apply the principles of GTD to one’s home/family life, not just work life. The more I get into GTD the more I realize it is really a process of discernment at its core.
Beware the Metaphor
We’ve always known language is powerful, now we have a study that demonstrates one aspect of this:
Researchers asked students to read one of two crime reports. In the first report, crime was described as a “wild beast preying on the city” and “lurking in neighborhoods.”
Guess which group suggested more jails and getting “tougher on crime,” and which suggested more social reforms such as improving education?
This study is not surprising, but it does solidify my intense dislike for cable news and its swooshes and logos and Super Scary Music.
Fidelia’s Sisters: How Do You Do It?
A nice column from a minister-mom that provides an honest look at what it’s really like to engage on those two vocations.
A Benedictine Paradigm for Congregational Life
In all our talk about being missional and the church not existing for its own sake, we can get out of whack as we fail to nurture our own spiritual lives. The Benedictine Rule can show us how to find balance and faithfulness between inward journey and outward service.
Some stuff that crossed my ‘desk’ this week that I found interesting:
What Gets in the Way of Delegating?
As our session begins a new way of doing our work, appropriate delegation will be essential. This has some good ways of thinking about what stands in the way of delegating.
Asking Questions
A recent study pitted students in a library against students using Google. Both groups had to answer a set of questions. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist was overjoyed at the results:
It took them 7 minutes to answer the questions on Google and 22 minutes to answer them in the library. Think about all the time saved! Thirty years ago, getting answers was really expensive, so we asked very few questions. Now getting answers is cheap, so we ask billions of questions a day, like “what is Jennifer Aniston having for breakfast?” We would have never asked that 30 years ago.
Nicholas Carr isn’t satisfied:
…Maybe the question we should be asking, not of Google but of ourselves, is what types of questions the Net is encouraging us to ask. Should human thought be gauged by its output or by its quality?
Interesting stuff.
What Use Is Poetry, Really?
On the first day of National Poetry Month: a review of Wendell Berry’s recent book about William Carlos Williams. Essential reading for the poetically inclined.
The Surprising Truth about Addiction
Smoking is at the top of the charts in terms of difficulty of quitting. But the majority of ex-smokers quit without any aid––neither nicotine patches nor gum, Smokenders groups nor hypnotism. (Don’t take my word for it; at your next social gathering, ask how many people have quit smoking on their own.) In fact, as many cigarette smokers quit on their own, an even higher percentage of heroin and cocaine addicts and alcoholics quit without treatment. It is simply more difficult to keep these habits going through adulthood. It’s hard to go to Disney World with your family while you are shooting heroin. Addicts who quit on their own typically report that they did so in order to achieve normalcy.
Tools for Thinking
I find David Brooks to be kind of a pinhead, but this is pretty interesting stuff.
A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?
The Origins of Good Ideas
We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition.
But ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.
Homemade malted milk balls, peanut butter cups, and more. I am pretty “meh” about Valentine’s Day but this post could make me a believer.
Tackling a Science Project with GTD
It’s enough to overwhelm the children and the parents. Instead of letting the stress get to me, I decided to apply the principles I learned from Getting Things Done and show my daughter that projects don’t have to give us headaches. Here’s what we did.
This was a timely post for me, since Caroline finished her “Pueblo Project” this week. We used some GTD principles in the planning of it. Thinking about it in those terms helped us get it done without much last-minute stress and helped redeem the project in my mind (I was grumbling loudly to myself about it).
Being able to plan one’s time is an important life skill, even though being able to mold Model Magic onto a cardboard box isn’t.
From the New Yorker, an interesting (long) overview of recent books about the Internet and its effect on our brains, social lives, and psyches. He divides the books into three basic approaches: the Never-Betters (technology is GREAT!), Better-Nevers (the Internet is destroying our lives), and Ever-Wasers (the Internet is no different than any new technology). I disagree with Gopnik’s placement of Hamlet’s Blackberry in the Better-Never. I think he is an Ever-Waser. Otherwise, great article. Money quote:
The digital world is new, and the real gains and losses of the Internet era are to be found not in altered neurons or empathy tests but in the small changes in mood, life, manners, feelings it creates—in the texture of the age. There is, for instance, a simple, spooky sense in which the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live—as if one went to sleep every night in the college stacks, surrounded by pamphlets and polemics and possibilities. There is the sociology section, the science section, old sheet music and menus, and you can go to the periodicals room anytime and read old issues of the New Statesman. (And you can whisper loudly to a friend in the next carrel to get the hockey scores.) To see that that is so is at least to drain some of the melodrama from the subject. It is odd and new to be living in the library; but there isn’t anything odd and new about the library.
On the other hand…
Fighting a Social Media Addiction
This link is from last year but I was reminded of it recently. College students were asked to abstain from social media for 24 hours.
“I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening,” one student said. Another student had to fight the urge to check e-mail: “I noticed physically, that I began to fidget, as if I was addicted to my iPod and other media devices, and maybe I am.”
I take social media Sabbaths pretty regularly, and I get so much out of the practice, but I’ve experienced the twitchiness that can set in. I suspect that these students were simply asked to abstain without being given any tools or strategies for dealing with the “withdrawal.” That is the key. For example, instead of fiddling with my iPhone at a particularly long stoplight, I look out the window and intentionally notice five new things about my surroundings. It’s a small exercise in vision and discernment. It’s not enough simply to unplug. Or perhaps I should say, it’s difficult to say No to technology without a bigger Yes driving you.
I love hearing how other pastors put sermons together. Advance planning or seat of the pants? Or something in between? Writing on Thursday or Saturday night? It’s all good.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me to hear that I have a process. I don’t follow it slavishly and it probably works as I intend it to less than half the time. But the Spirit works as much through intentional planning as the spontaneous lightbulb moment. This I believe. (In fact, I think planning makes space for the lightbulb moment to happen, but hey, I’m a J on the Myers-Briggs, I would think that.)
I’m doing a lot more series these days, and about 6 weeks to 2 months before the series begins, I’ll set aside a few hours or a half-day to plan. I put together a packet of papers with one page for each Sunday/topic/text. There is space on the paper for me to brainstorm specific items:
resources I already have for this text (papers from the Well preaching group I’m in, maybe a sermon from the last time I preached the scripture)
images
quotes (e.g. for the bulletin cover)
spiritual practice/insert—I’ve been doing half-page study guides for people to take with them and use the following week. These include questions, things to try, additional quotes. I’m not sure how sustainable this is long-term, and I don’t do them for every series/season… but I think they add a lot. They also give me a place to put stuff that didn’t make it into the sermon :-
liturgy
hymns
I keep this with me at all times, so as I read stuff in the news, or ideas occur to me, I can capture them on the sheet. I also look through my Evernote files to see if there is material there that I can use.
Then this is what I do each week… ideally. *ahem*
Tuesday is a big sermon/worship day. I read the scripture text, jot down some notes, and figure out what is stirring within me. I re-familiarize myself with what’s in the planning packet. I also write the order of worship, but hopefully I’m not starting from scratch, thanks (again) to my planning packet. Lately I’m also writing the bulletin insert, called the GPS (grow pray study), on Tuesday. Getting it done on Tuesday means our part-time administrative assistant can copy and collate it in the bulletin, so it saves me time to get it done early, but this makes for a very full day.
Wednesday: I create a .doc for the sermon. That’s all I do that day for worship. But having a document ready, with the header and the text and all that jazz, is the equivalent of parking downhill when it comes to actually writing on Thursday. I will also do a little reading based on the previous day’s work—commentaries, Well papers, etc. But no writing. This is a blatant psychological trick I play: I don’t usually feel like sermonating on Wednesday, but Surely I can get the document set up in Microsoft Word! That takes five minutes! And read this article? No problem!
Thursday: I write a sermon draft. My goal is not necessarily to have it done, but to reach a place that if [random cataclysmic occurrence] happened over the weekend, the sermon is basically preachable.
Friday I finish the draft and write the prayers of the people. I also choose the hymns for the following week, which I give to my organist on Sunday so he has a week to prepare.
Saturday is our family’s Sabbath day so I do my level best to have the sermon done on Friday. That makes for some late Friday nights sometimes, but I prefer those to late Saturday nights.
A friend of mine posted on Facebook today that she’s “getting it all done 30 minutes at a time” (paraphrased). I say Amen to that. Preaching is a huge task and a humbling responsibility. The perfectionism and the immensity of this weekly task can be crippling for me. So that’s why I break it into chunks. And I know I’m not alone.
So how do you do it? Non-preachers, how do you “chunk” your work?
