Take Time to Think

In contrast to projects in your life, learning is much more open-ended.
I study every week to understand the particular text(s) from the Bible that I plan to teach each weekend. Some parts are easier for me to understand than others, and so there can be wide variations in the time necessary just to follow the ideas in the passage (=research). Once I know the basic stuff I can get from just careful observation and using appropriate resources, there is still thinking to be done. And thinking time must not overlap with other activity, it seems. When I'm too busy to think in my normal routine (and when I entertain myself in my free time), then the bathroom becomes the place where new ideas come. You've had a good idea in the shower, right? It might mean that we need more intentionally to devote time to thinking, meditating, not adding new inputs to our maxed-out mental processors.

Matt Perman cites a book to this effect:

Don’t confuse busyness with efficiency. An organization’s best people sometimes spend their most productive time seemingly daydreaming.

Busyness may, in fact, be counterproductive.

I love the next part.
“It is necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant,” says James D. Watson. He is a Nobel laureate who shared the prize with Francis Crick for successfully discovering the genetic code of DNA.

Define your Results

Several months ago, my friend Ben Reed led a crash course on developing a small group ministry in any church. A key point was define a 'win'. This was sage advice! No matter which of your responsibilities you are addressing, you should always define what results you want to achieve before you busy yourself with hard work that may or may not lead to a desirable result.

Seth Godin recently said too many people in business let "tactics drown out strategy." (His blog cracks me up and cuts me deep in 6-10 sentences.) Here's the potent insight:

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don't feel confident outlining one unless we're sure it's going to work. And the 'work' part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, "I'm going to post this." If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

BTW: Thanks for your thoughtful interaction in the comments. I hope to have a few fun Wesley posts up in the next day or two.