The 3 Steps You're Missing When Planning Anything—Including Sermon Prep
Photo by Dilyara Garifullina on Unsplash
Let’s say you’re planning a beautiful dinner party for special guests.
It won’t be that hard to pull off or take too much time. You figure:
Drive to the grocery store: 30 minutes
Grocery shopping: one hour
Drive home: 30 minutes
Cooking time: three hours
Total prep time: five hours
Easy! You’ve got this!
But here’s what actually happens.
Scour recipe books to create the perfect menu: one hour
Make grocery list: thirty minutes
Search for your phone before leaving the house: 10 minutes
There’s road construction on the way to the store: 45 minutes
It’s peak shopping hours with crowded aisles and long checkout lanes. Plus you run into a parishioner who was at the store searching for comfort food because she’d just come from the vet’s after putting her dog down, so total time in the grocery store: 2 hours
Load groceries into car: 15 minutes
To avoid the road construction on the way home you take the “scenic” route, but there was an interminably long train crossing. Return trip: one hour
Unload groceries and put them away: 30 minutes
Discover you forgot to buy a key ingredient so agonized about going back to the store: 20 minutes
Spouse calls with an urgent need: 15 minutes
A new recipe is more complicated than expected so you search for and watch YouTube video for the technique: 45 minutes
Actual, hands-on cooking time: 4 hours
Search the cupboards for table decorations: 20 minutes
Set the table: 30 minutes
Make the kitchen presentable: 45 minutes
Make yourself presentable: 30 minutes
Total prep time: 815 minutes, or 14 hours, 18 minutes.
And though the evening was as lovely as you’d hoped, you wonder whether the the stress from everything taking longer than you expected makes it worth ever holding another dinner party!
Going back through all the events above, I didn’t outline a catastrophe or an unrealistic scenario.
I included the tasks that weren’t included in the original estimate, the energy needed, and that you can count on a few things going sideways because they always do!
When we envision ourselves undertaking tasks under realistic circumstances, we’re far more likely to get closer to—yup, that’s right—reality.
Sermon prep is no different.
Consider these three strategies to bring your idealistic expectations in line with real life.
1. Use your five senses to envision every detail of what’s required
This is a big reason projects, including sermon prep, take longer than we expect: we don’t take into account every single step.
We are overly optimistic by lumping all the steps together and imagining ourselves engaged in the major part of the task.
We forget to consider the time needed to prepare for and clean up after the task.
For instance, imagine yourself reading the texts for your next sermon.
What do you see in your mind’s eye? Run through your five senses:
What do you see? The view out your window? Your computer screen? Others at the coffee shop you’ve gone to?
What do you smell? Coffee? Tea? Fresh flowers in the vase on your desk?
What do you taste? Biscotti? Scones? Iced water?
What do you hear? Silence? Music? The background buzz of café patrons? A knock on your office door, your phone buzzing, or pings from computer notifications (and are these what you want to hear)?
What do you touch? Computer keys? Pen? Paper? Napkin? What table or desk top?
Now what does it take for each of these things to be in the picture?
Each of these things require your decisions, effort, and cleaning up or putting away when you’re done with them.
Each step requires time and energy.
For a realistic estimate of time, every step needs to be accounted for.
2. Envision your not-best self
Just like we try to account for the time rush hour adds to driving, or peak shopping time that adds minutes to our errands, we also need to take into account the extra time required when we have to work against our natural energy rhythms.
The mistake we make is to envision our tasks being done when we’re at our most energetic and productive.
We fail to account for our personal energy “traffic jams” and “peak shopping hours” when we have to work at sub-optimal energy levels, making tasks take longer and demanding more energy.
For example, if you’re a morning person but the “traffic jams” of morning meetings means sermon prep waits until evening, that prep will probably take more time and effort, and deplete your energy faster.
Or if your best time of day is late afternoon but that’s your household’s “peak shopping hours.”
That’s when your spouse gets home from work and wants to talk about their day, and you’ve got to cook dinner and help the kids with homework.
Sermon prep has to shift making you work when you’re less than your best.
Take into account, then, whether your task will actually be done when you’re at your best, or less than that and how you could make that better.
For example, work it out with your spouse to take over the household for an hour while you optimize your energy for your sermon, or schedule morning meetings later in the day.
3. Envision the task when things go “wrong” (aka real life)
Note: That isn’t about what might go wrong but what will.
When we plan for the tasks ahead, we imagine it going perfectly and under ideal conditions.
Reality tells us that from road construction to trains, to forgetting items at the store, to searching for those darned candelabras, the unexpected always happens and adds hours to “the best laid plans.”
You know how it works—every. single. week.
The unexpected funeral
The unexpected pastoral crisis
The unexpected loss of electricity and downed internet
The “unexpected” meeting you forgot about
The unexpected cold that lays you flat for three days
The unexpected search for and resetting of forgotten internet passwords
The unexpected dead end for your sermon idea
Imagine how long it’s going to take when you get “lifed” because that’s how it almost always will play out.
Let’s get real!
When these three steps are taken into account, we stand a much higher chance of estimating how long sermon prep or any other task is actually going to take and we can plan accordingly.
If you’d like to reimagine your sermon prep for your real life, come and join us!