Schedule a Weekly Worry Hour
During my week at The One Institute I made a new friend, Rob Armstrong–a financial representative from Illinois. Rob told me about a habit he practices that caught my attention. This is something his father taught him to do: Schedule a Weekly Worry Hour.
For about 4 weeks I’ve been giving this worry hour thing a try, and I think I will stick with it. We’ll see how it goes over the coming months. If you want to minimize worry in your life, you might want to give this a try. Below is an explanation of HOW I do it and WHY I do it.
HOW I Do It:
I always carry a small notepad in my pocket. I carry one that Lukas Naugle designed, but any notepad will do. This notepad triples as my to-do list, my write-down-ideas-that-pop-into-my-head-list, and my Worry Hour list.
As I move throughout my week/day, whenever I notice that a worrisome thought is getting a hold on my attention, I pull out my notepad and write down what it is I’m worrying about (I summarize the worry in one sentence). I use the back page of the notepad for this.
Once I write that worry into my notepad I make the firm decision to not worry about it again until my appointed “worry hour.”
11:30am Wednesday is my worry hour. I have this scheduled on my calendar. Each Wednesday at 11:30am I pull out my notepad, look at what’s written on that back page, and then I force myself to worry about it. By this time many of my worries from the week have lost their power. So far I haven’t practiced a full worry hour, it’s been more like 20-30 minutes of ruminating on what’s written on the list: worrying and ruminating that eventually graduates into prayer.
After I’ve “worried,” I tear out and throw away that sheet of paper, write down “Worry Hour” as the heading on the new back page of my notepad, and start moving through the rest of my day/week, writing down worries if they occur.
WHY I Do It:
Because some uptight Bible college student in the Midwest is reading this and concluding that I’m condoning worry, I must give the theological, personal, and practical reasons why I’m trying out this Worry Hour habit.
The Bible is clear: worry is sin.
My experience is clear: worry is no fun.
The pragmatics are clear: worry doesn’t help.
So, I’m committed to giving worry less of a foothold in my week. I’ve come to greatly despise worry. It’s a dark sin. It’s the fruit of unbelief. It’s evidence of not valuing and trusting my Heavenly Father. Plus, as I said above, worry is just annoying and unhelpful (note that Jesus also attacks worry at this level in the Sermon on the Mount).
So, one method among many for subtracting the amount of time I worry each week is to carve out a one-hour space in my week for worrying. For how I’m wired, this method is helpful. Knowing I have that one-hour slot in my week devoted to worry has resulted in me worrying less throughout the week. It’s a way of proving my trust in God, to write down that worry and then move on with what it was I was doing.
It’s a bit of a paradox, but scheduling worry results in less worry.
And less worry glorifies God. Less worry is more fun. Less worry helps.
*Note: When I meet with God in the mornings to read Scripture and pray this involves taking time to cast my cares on the Lord, and those cares may overlap with some of what’s written on the back page of the notebook. But I do my best to not give mental space to worry during these morning sessions. I’ve grown to tell the difference between praying about something so that I truly cast it onto God’s shoulders and prayer that is merely a worry rehearsal that only makes worry worse.
Piper Productivity
John Piper on the productivity practices of a leader:
A leader does not like clutter. He likes to know where and when things are for quick access and use. His favorite shape is the straight line, not the circle. He groans in meetings that do not move from premises to conclusions but rather go in irrelevant circles. When something must be done he sees a three-step plan for getting it done and lays it out. A leader sees the links between a board decision and its implementation. He sees ways to use time to the full and shapes his schedule to maximize his usefulness. He saves himself large blocks of time for his major productive activities. He uses little pieces of time lest they go to waste. (For example, what do you do while you are brushing your teeth? Could you set a magazine on the towel rack and read an article?) A leader takes time to plan his days and weeks and months and years. Even though it is God who ultimately directs the steps of the leader, he should plan his path. A leader is not a jellyfish that gets tossed around by the waves, nor is he an oyster that is immovable. The leader is the dolphin of the sea and can swim against the stream or with the stream as he plans.
HT: Matt Perman
Creativity is Messy
Creativity is not neat. It is not orderly. When we are being creative we don’t know what is going to happen next. When we are being creative a great deal of what we do is wrong. When we are being creative we are not efficient.
-Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, p. 163
Distraction Enhances Creativity
Wired Magazine: How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive.
Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation.
Read the whole article.
A Great Man is One Sentence
In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, on of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. ‘A great man,’ she told him, ‘is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’ Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.
…One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.
-Daniel Pink, Drive, pp. 154-155
Completing 2009; Beginning 2010
Last year, on the first day of 2009, my wife and I made a “What Happened in 2008″ list. We wrote down every significant event in our lives that we could think of from 2008 (birth of our second child, trips we took, major lessons God taught us, that hilarious night we’ll never forget, etc.). After making that list, we then began to talk, pray, and dream about 2009 and set some goals for 2009.
This year, we did the same thing. Today we wrote a 3 page “What Happened in 2009″ list. We then asked ourselves some questions and did some praying and dreaming for 2010. We’re finding that this new tradition gives a great sense of cohesiveness, history, and focus to our life together. In the future I imagine it will be helpful to look back at these “what happened” lists and remind ourselves of how God was at work in our lives in the past.
I got this idea from productivity guru David Allen. If you’re wanting to do something like this, below is an excerpt from Allen’s latest newsletter that can help jump start your listing and thinking. We don’t use all of Allen’s prompts and questions, and we have added questions of our own, but we’ve found that many of Allen’s prompts and questions generate great discussion in bringing closure to the old year and focus to the new year.
…here are some questions that can guide you in your 2009 review and 2010 goal setting. When I go through these kinds of questions I like to consider my answers in several areas:
Physical
Emotional
Mental
Spiritual
Financial
Family
Community Service
Fun / creativity / recreationCOMPLETING AND REMEMBERING 2009
Review the list of all completed projects
What was your biggest triumph in 2009?
What was the smartest decision you made in 2009?
What one word best sums up and describes your 2009 experience?
What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2009?
What was the most loving service you performed in 2009?
What is your biggest piece of unfinished business in 2009?
What are you most happy about completing in 2009?
Who were the three people that had the greatest impact on your life in 2009?
What was the biggest risk you took in 2009?
What was the biggest surprise in 2009?
What important relationship improved the most in 2009?
What compliment would you liked to have received in 2009?
What compliment would you liked to have given in 2009?
What else do you need to do or say to be complete with 2009?CREATING THE NEW YEAR
What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2010?
What advice would you like to give yourself in 2010?
What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2010?
What would you be most happy about completing in 2010?
What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2010?
What would you most like to change about yourself in 2010?
What are you looking forward to learning in 2010?
What do you think your biggest risk will be in 2010?
What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving in 2010?
What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore in 2010?
What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that in 2010?
Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving in 2010?
What one word would you like to have as your theme in 2010?
Waiting
…waiting is living through those moments when you do not understand what God is doing and you have no power to change your circumstances for the better.
…waiting will always reveal the true character of your heart.
Theoretical faith is always easier than practical, functional faith, and when we are faced with the challenge of waiting it can be disturbing to realize how little of that real-life faith we have.
Your heart is always exposed by the way you wait.
Waiting is hard precisely because it calls us to live by faith and not by sight.
Waiting, therefore, is not a sign that your world is out of control. Rather, it is a sign that your world is under the wise and infinitely attentive control of a God of fathomless wisdom and boundless love. This means you can rest as you wait, not because you like to wait, but because you trust the One who is calling you to wait.
The wait itself is a gift…Waiting is about what you will become as you wait.
You see, waiting is not an interruption of God’s plan. It is his plan.
Waiting is not just about what I get at the end of the wait, but about who I become as I wait.
Quotes taken from chapter 9 of Paul Tripp, Broken-Down House: Living Productively in a World Gone Bad.
The Value of a Wandering Mind
Clive Thompson always has interesting things to say. His latest piece in Wired is thought provoking. Perhaps it’s a good thing for our minds to wander.
Our modern info-culture lionizes those who possess laserlike focus, particularly at work. Drifting off into a reverie is considered the enemy of productivity, which is partly why some companies control employee access to the Internet…
But what if we’re wrong about daydreaming? What if it’s crucial to solving problems in our personal lives and at work?
Brain scientists are beginning to suspect that it is. And if they’re right, we might need to rethink the way we work — perhaps even develop tools that actually encourage mental drift.
For years, brain scientists viewed a wandering mind as merely a lapse in cognition. But recent studies have found that we lose concentration shockingly often. A 2007 study by Michael Kane of the University of North Carolina found that our minds drift away from our tasks fully one-third of the time. And this suggests that daydreaming can actually be useful — because if it were such a bad thing, it’s unlikely that we’d do it so often.
Why do our minds wander? Brain-scanning technology has uncovered some clues. It turns out that when your mind drifts, your temporal lobes — which are associated with processing long-term memories — become busier. So when you float off into a reverie, you’re actually doing important data-storage work.
Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though. Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving. The upshot, says Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who is studying this area, is that your idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work, tackling your hairiest long-term tasks — projects you’ve been trying to address for months, the arc of your career, the state of your marriage. “Mind-wandering is actually a very involved task,” Schooler says. “You leave the here and now and focus on more remote concerns that nevertheless might be more important. We’ve been focusing on the downside of this, but we need to think about the upside.”
Checking Email 2x a Day
While on vacation I did some thinking, praying, and goal setting for my life and my work. One of the goals I set calls for a change in how I use email as a pastor. Preparing for 2 weeks of vacation, I made a decision to not check email once during vacation. I loved it.
During my time away I realized how easily email can:
1) distract me/get me off task from the work I’m doing (how email can lead to an unwise use to time)
2) act as a default to-do list instead of my prepared to-d0 list (how email can control me, instead of me controlling email)
So, my new goal is to check email only 2-3x a day. I’m 3 days into my experiment. So far, so good.
I check email 1x in the morning, somewhere around 10am. This gives me a few hours in the morning to focus on solid blocks of work. Around 10am I tackle my inbox.
I next check email once or twice in the afternoon. At about 2 or 3pm, me and my inbox go at it again. Many of those emails have something to do with the morning email session. I also might pay my inbox a quick visit right before I leave the office for the day.
For several months not I’ve also been leaving my laptop at the office most days so that I have a cleaner break from work, so that email doesn’t punctuate my evening at home with my family. My wife loves this. I dig it too.
This doesn’t mean that I only send email 2-3x a day. Throughout the work day I’m still sending original emails as needed (making sure at those times to avert my eyes and not even look at my inbox).
We’ll see how this new goal/experiment goes. I can see this becoming a habit. Visiting my inbox only 2-3x a day is feeling about right.
Thoughts? What are you doing with email?
