I am still thinking through my working practices and offer some Work-in-progress ideas...
Meetings are important because they are a prime face to face encounter, and yet we either treat them with disdain ("tut, more meetings!") or we undervalue them. I think we undervalue structured meetings in several ways;
- we try to cram in too much work (because we don't want too many meetings) so the few meetings we have are seen as a huge burden
- we undervalue the informal meetings - this is something we are trying to do more of here, especially the "let's have no specific agenda other than issues on our minds and sit around the kitchen table with some wine" type of meeting
- we under-prepare both in terms of getting the content right, but also under-prepare ourselves. Only once can I recall actually having the time and space to get ready for an evening meeting by sitting down for 20 minutes with my eyes closed (those who criticise meetings as badly led would probably also criticise the idea that the Vicar is having a quick nap when the Vicar should be doing something)
- we fail to post-process from these meetings; that is we tend not to allow space afterwards to talk to people (we're too busy trying to put trestle tables away because its so late) or to go through our notes and properly identify our next actions. This is a killer, because the next meeting of this group then suffers! The next morning is too late because the new day is full of business of its own.
The first casualty of overwork is creativity. When one starts in a new place there is a huge amount to do, and all the good will and the getting to know people is vital, but eventually one will arrive in overdraft in ones personality and spiritual bank account. The easiest thing to dump overboard in order to prevent the ship from going under is time spent being creative. Therefore its easier to read the set words from the book, or to repeat the formulae from last time and so forth.
The second casualty of overwork is settling for too little as being sufficient. I notice in myself as the pressure builds and time becomes short that I downscale my expectations, and hand in hand with this is often a moving of the target from the macro to the micro. Thus we comfort ourselves that the few who were present at something were enough or individual need obscures the large-scale need of the whole body. Certainly we have to live in a tension of supporting individuals, but when I hear my fellow Clergy telling me how their Churches are going purely in terms of individuals needs (as opposed to problems caused by individuals) then I worry about the big picture demanding too much effort and therefore being sidelined.
When ones definition of "what is work" is so nebulous, how do you know when you are not working? This, for me, is the biggy. At one level this is not a problem; if I read a book normally some idea will spark, or a story or item will be suitable for recycling in teaching - this for me is one of the joys of this role. At another level it can be what damages health, family relationships and Churches. I don't sit and calculate the number of hours I work each week (it would probably depress me) but I know how little space I have for family, let alone old friends or hobbies. In my old working pattern I could bring the laptop and mobile home at weekends and do the tidying up or preparatory work for the Monday to Friday's business. Now, in sharp contrast, I have no bookend time (as I've heard it referred to), no space in which to wind down by knocking a few items to-dos off the list, processing my inbox of items and think.
Good working practices can only get us so far. It certainly helps to have an elegantly simple way of listing the things needing to be sorted out, but (in my experience at least) being efficient can only carve out a certain bit of extra time. Most of what we are doing is spiritual, although I wonder how much a strong spiritual platform from which we can work is actually down to good efficient routines as well (regularly reading the Bible in a disciplined way - "what is it saying", not "what would I like it to say") and a rhythm of prayer which is not simply based on how I am feeling today.
Recent Comments