About every three to six months I realize that I’m not using my life planning process to its fullest utility. What that means is whatever life planning process I’m using at the time–and since my twenties I have used nearly every life planning tool out there–I’m not using it fully or at all. Just the other day I quoted Benjamin Franklin again: Failing to plan is planning to fail. I know that. I know that. Yet, I either fail to plan intentionally, or I only use a portion of the planning process or I don’t do what I’ve planned.
I’m not saying that I make a great plan and then life interrupts it, which does happen from time to time. I’m saying I either don’t make the great plan in the first place, or I don’t follow through with it when I do. If you have an intuitive feeler personality with an extroverted bent and a perceiving style you may understand more of what I’m saying than if you are by nature more inclined to order and structure. I’m writing this post as much as a reminder to me as a reminder to all of you–planning is a major key to success and ultimately significance for us as leaders. Just yesterday, Pastor Brad, Pastor Mark and I sat down to review and revise our message planning schedule for December through August. We already had a plan, but the plan had missing parts and aspects we weren’t sure we wanted to include. The hour and a half we took to review and revise it will make a major difference in our effectiveness in those nine months.
We will surely make additional revisions, and we’re always open to significant events that happen in the world around us, but having a plan means we know the direction we’re going. We know how we are going to help the hundreds of people who call New Life Christian Ministries their church home come to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, or serve Him more effectively in the coming year. The process of planning itself helped me to take a next step forward in that process for myself, and it reminded me that what is important for the local church known as New Life is at least as important for each of us who are individual leaders. We must plan our lives or others will plan them for us.
That’s really the bottom line. I don’t want somebody else, circumstances, or the winds of culture planning your lives or mine. We must take the time on a regular basis to sit down and plan our lives–our days, weeks, months and years. I’ve said in past posts that it’s important to invest a time of planning each day, most likely that will be fifteen minutes to half an hour. Then we must take some time each week to review our week and plan the next that will take an hour or two. then we ought to take time each quarter and each year to review the past quarter or year and to plan the coming quarter and year. (After all, the unexamined life is not worth living, right?)
I know that everything I’ve written is true, but decades ago I read these words from Leo Buscaglia: To know and not yet to do is not yet to know. Writing these words to you is helping to anchor the importance of planning my life in my mind and heart. I’ve done a good job of life planning this week. That’s great, and I must follow that up with a weekly review and time for planning the week ahead on Saturday. That will need to be followed by planning day by day next week, and the next. If you think I’m a little OCD, that’s the problem–I’m not even a little OCD when it comes to planning. If this resonates with you, please, convince yourself to make the commitment to plan. We all know that until our own hearts are committed to something, there’s little chance than any outward mechanism is going to convince us to succeed.
If you’re already a planner, thank God for that. We all know that when we plan our work and work our plan, or more inclusively when we plan our lives and live our plan our effectiveness increases dramatically. Every moment is precious. My prayer is that we will plan them and then live them to God’s glory and our gain.
Here’s to leading better by planning our lives and living our plan–today!