goal setting

I don’t know where I heard it, but I have never forgotten the saying, “If you aim for nothing, you will hit it every time.”

I love goal-setting. I love setting out to do something and then seeing it accomplished. Over the past several years I have seen myself really grow in my ability to set a goal and see it through. Don’t get me wrong, there were many a goals that I have set that I have never done anything with,  nevertheless, I have reached many of them as well.

The best goal-setting exercise I have ever learned I got from Jason Nordlund. To this day I don’t know anyone better at this than him. He may not of made it up but since he taught it to me, he gets the credit.

1)    Write down your top ten goals using the positive present tense.

2)    If you could only achieve one goal, which would it be?

3)    Write down ten ways to accomplish your #1 goal.

4)    Prioritize the ten ways and from this create an action item list.

5)    Write twenty ideas of how to perform your #1 priority to aid you in achieving your #1 goal.  Then repeat for #2 priority, etc.

I know this can get exhausting, but push yourself to put as much on paper without thinking too much about whether it makes sense or not. When you are done with this exercise you will have 200 potential action items for your number 1 goal you want to accomplish. No more sitting at your desk wondering what to do next! You may want to utilize mind-mapping for this exercise as well. You can read about that in a previous blog.

Have a productive 2009!

big day tomorrow!

I believe tomorrow is one of the greatest days in the history of The Oaks.

1. Over 80 people are being baptized at our Red Oak Campus.

2. Shane and Shane have their first day with us on our worship staff.

3. We open our Mesquite Campus–I can’t tell you how excited/nervous I am about this. It is going to be incredible. Richard Miller and his team have done such a great job of getting this building and area ready for what God wants to do in Mesquite.

I will update everyone tomorrow on the results.

Oh yeah, an honorable mention goes to McKenna who has her fourth birthday party tomorrow night.

twitter search for resource

Most people that know me know that I love connecting with people. Not just anyone, but people that have either a) similar interests as me or b) are an expert in something I want to know about. Well I’ve learned a new way to do this through the twitter search function. It is really cool.

Step 1: Go to twitter search

Step 2: Type in a word or phrase that interests you. (i.e. I am learning quite a bit about multi-site churches right now. So I searched “multi-site”)

Step 3: Click on the tab in the upper right corner that RSS Feed for this query.

Now you can with just a quick glance see what other people are writing about multi-site churches. I have already made three friends just today that have helped me with resources because of this search function.

It also is fun to type in your friends names and see if anyone is talking about them.

whiteboards, sticky notes, and oversized post-its

I had the unique experience to join 10 other churches in a Multi-Site Leadership Community this week.
–Christ Fellowship, Miami FL
–Flamingo Road
–McLean Bible Church, McLean VA
–Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, Menlo Park CA (John Ortberg is the pastor)
–Real Life Fellowship, Corpus Christi TX
–The Crossing, Quincy IL
–The Journey Fellowship, St. Louis MO
–The Oaks Fellowship, Red Oak TX
–Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington IL
–Woodside Bible Church, Troy MI

This was made possible by the Leadership Network. I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I was with what they were able to do in a couple of days. Here is the process they took us through as I saw it.

Step 1—Tell your story
This part helped us to know where we were all coming from

We used the game of "Life"

Step 2—Learn together
There were 8 learning teams. The three people from our church went to different teams. My team focused on collaboration. When we got in our group there were 8 people and we had four articles to read. There was only enough time to read one each. We did that and then reported our findings to the rest of our team. We then found commonalities and put together a picture/chart to share our findings with the rest of the community.

Step 3—Challenges/Opportunities
After that we split into our individual church groups. So Dan, Mark and I went to a corner and brainstormed our current challenges and opportunities.

After this was done we reported to the community. From that report we agreed on common themes in all the groups and formed teams to focus on those. I choose the “church merger” group. Dan went to “overall church structure,” and Mark went to “developing metrics.”

Mine was great. We discussed the growing trend of hurting churches partnering with well equipped, reproducible churches to have greater impact. Very interesting. It is what we just did with our Mesquite campus.

Step 4—Develop specific church plan
We will be in this leadership community for the next two years. So we (Justin, Dan, Mark) got together and set some two year goals that we would like to see happen. We then developed action items and 6 month check points. This way when we come back together in April we can be held accountable to what we are saying we want to do.

Step 5—Speak into it
We ended by displaying all the charts for everyone to see. We then were tasked individually with giving feedback/suggestion to the charts. We were handed 6 yellow sticky notes and were asked to write our idea on it and put it on the chart. I wrote things like,  “check out some books by Robert Webber,” (they were looking to add creative elements to service) and “I can email you information about our charter schools.” (they were looking for creative income streams)

I felt like I needed to get this information down so that I could process it better. I hope you find it helpful. I cannot say enough about The Leadership Network and their ability to bring great leaders together to collaborate and grow in their vision and effectiveness. I look forward to our next meeting in April.

a new way of thinking

I always find it interesting when I read something that puts into words practices that I have tried to implement in my life. I recently read an article on a new way of thinking on productivity and I wanted to comment on it.
Here are four of them that stuck out to me.
1.    Crank it out
Old School tells you to crank out tasks and that speed is essential to success. The more tasks you check off a day the better. Deep focus is the new order of the day. Clearing distraction and thinking about the task at hand. Intensity is valued about quantity.

2.    Minimize meetings and planning
The old school says to plan things out to the max. I have found over-planning actually paralyzes productivity. The biggest projects that I have ever completed turned into big projects because I just started working on them. Obviously planning is needed but not at the sacrifice of productivity.

3.    Multi-tasking
Multi-tasking is a myth. Multi-project and single-tasking is where it is at. Many times I am working on a task in one area only to find I am at a stand still. Either because I’m waiting on information from someone else or because the creative energy is gone on that task. I will move to another task in another project.

4.    Produce more
This is a whole other blog entry someday. Many times we find ourselves producing so much that we aren’t thinking. I am guilty of this. For some people this is what they should be doing. They are producers. But many out there have too many great idea’s to be constantly doing. I have made a priority in my life to keep my mind clear so that the ideas that I get paid for keep coming.

why i’m not voting for president

So as everyone knows, tomorrow is election day. I know the title of my post is why I’m not voting, I actually did that as a shameless way of getting people to read this blog. I actually AM voting, what I want to post about though is a reasons why I don’t want to vote.

I don’t want to vote…

1. as an excuse to complain about the President or our Country

How many times this voting season has someone told you, “If you don’t vote then you can’t complain about what is happening in America.” That is the lamest reason I have ever heard for voting. Using our system as some sort of complaining license. Vote because you feel like you can make a difference not so you can complain.

2. because I am fairly ignorant on political things

I feel like if you want to be an informed voter than you literally have to commit your life to learning and understanding what the issues are and where the candidates stand on each one. Everytime I think, “I would like to know more about this stuff,” I decide otherwise and go on about my day. When you start down that path, I feel like there is no turning back. Next thing you know I will be listening to talk radio at my desk and watching CNN at home. Ugh…

3. I feel like by voting for someone says I believe in everything they believe in.

There is no way either candidate gets even close to me feeling like we see eye to eye on even a majority of issues. I wish I could somehow create a candidate with the same belief of all the issues I care about.

4. people I admire and respect have completely different beliefs.

What do you do about Colin Powell endorsing Obama? He was my hero growing up.

Ok, that is my simple list. Have fun at the polls tomorrow.

mindmapping your way to productivity

I’m not really sure what it is about mindmapping, but I have found it to be an incredible tool to help me get my head around a project. I’m sure there has been psychological studies done on why that is, but I don’t know the details on that. All I know is it works.

My only wish is that my mindmap would somehow export into my omnifocus app and be able to be managed from there. As it is right now, I have just added another step to my project planning. Instead of just opening up my omnifocus inbox and start adding stuff for a project now I mindmap it and then take those items from my mindmap and input them into omnifocus. It is a little cumbersome.

Here is the link to the mindmapping online app that I use. It is free and has the capabilities to do collaboration with multiple users.

Never finish a book

All growing up you are told to read books and the expectation, especially in college, is that you finish the book you are reading. When I was at North Central University, you even had to sign a piece of paper saying that you read 100% of the book.

The older I get the more I realize how much of a waste it is for me to finish a book. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading and even more than that, I love learning. I just don’t think that you need to finish books in order to learn. At some point over the last several years I just decided that I’m not going to feel guilty anymore for starting a book and not finishing it.

I have never been able to master any speed reading techniques, but what I have learned to do is get what I want to get out of a book. Looking through the chapter titles and the section headers in those chapters I can usually easily recognize what I want to gain out of that particular book.

I thought since I am advocating not finishing books I would give you a couple of my great learning resources that have completely changed the way I view personal growth.

1. Executive Book Summaries–This is one of the greatest learning resources ever created. Every month I get the top three business/leadership books delivered to my door in print and audio. I can honestly say that I truly learn from these and they are easily accessible to me because they are tabbed with their subject for filing purposes. This $200 yearly investment is well worth it to anyone that wants to be in the know on the most current leadership thinking.

2. Google Reader–I know blogging has been around for a long time now, but for some reason I was late in the game on being a subscriber. Everyday when I have down time I open up my google reader and read the latest from everything from well known authors to unknown productivity guru’s who share their daily nuggets of insight.

My favorite right now is Seth Godin’s blog. I have read his books for years, but nothing is better than 250 words a day that are as up-to-date as they possibly can be from him.

For all those who have anguished in the guilt of not finishing books for years I hope this has been an encouragement to you.

Time Sucking

I have to hand it to the week in and week out preachers out there. I’m preaching at The Gathering for the first time in 2 1/2 years thus needing to write a message for the service. I forgot how much time it takes to write something that is worthwhile for people to listen to for 25 minutes.

As I was pondering (rather than writing) on how much time this takes I was reminded of a great quote from The Princess Bride. “I’ve just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five, but I really don’t know what that would do to you. So, let’s just start with what we have.”

So that is how I feel sermon writing is. “It has just sucked one week of my life away.” I guess that is why I love administration so much. I feel as if I get so much more done. God bless you preachers of the word!

Productivity Backsliding

As a teenager there were countless times I felt as if I was backsliding. In other words, there was something I knew I should do, I committed to doing it, and then 1 month, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour later I found myself not doing what I thought I should do. (See Romans 7:15)

Those “backsliding” moments were so frustrating as a young person. I felt as if it was impossible to get it RIGHT for any length of time. Every time there was a chance for recommitment, I thought to myself, why would I do that, I will just mess up again.

As you grow older and mature in the faith, you begin to realize that with every recommitment, you don’t start at zero. You are actually stronger than you were before. You also realize that it wasn’t so much backsliding as it was the process of becoming.

All of that as a backdrop to write about the same cycle that I feel like I am going in my quest for a great productivity system. Instead of calling it backsliding, it is more commonly known as falling off the wagon. Basically, when I feel like I have put in a good system for making sure I am productive in life and ministry and then 1 month, 1 week, 1 day, or 1 hour later I have found myself not doing what I wanted to be doing.

This is where that important lesson that I had to learn in my late teens and early 20’s comes in handy. As frustrating as it can be to come up short, I have to be ready to answer the productivity altar call and get back on the wagon. That is one of the strengths of the “Getting Things Done” system, the ability to pick up right where you left off.

So if you are struggling with your walk with God or your productivity system, don’t let your recent mess up stop you from going at it again, and know that you are further along than you were the last time.