Recently, I was checking in with a fellow leader to see how they were faring. They asked how I maintain balance between everything leadership requires, home and family, and my faith and ministry. Internally, I was thinking that after a decade of actively pursuing balance I have yet to achieve it for more than a few days at a time. The response I gave my friend was that it is an ever-moving target. That one must regularly assess if the focus and priority today is still correct or needs to be adjusted. Balance is about having the correct focus and priorities today, guiding us on a path to tomorrow’s goals. It’s simple to say but putting it into action can be a different story entirely. Most leaders are juggling today’s needs and tomorrow’s problems with the future of their organization and their own professional pursuits. It is easy for our priorities to slowly slip out of focus and takes a good bit of effort to be diligent in re-focusing ourselves when needed.
Planning for the future is a worthy endeavor and life habit. May I be honest? Sometimes, I get so caught up in thinking about the future, my goals, and the vision for my organization that I speed through the day, and week, and month as if each day isn’t important. I become so concerned with tomorrow’s problems that I miss today’s blessings. Tomorrow’s problems are important, but they shouldn’t be all-consuming for a leader. When I get stuck in this mental loop, I lose any sense of balance and start to unravel from the internal chaos caused by the misaligned focus. It’s like my priorities are fuzzy and I can’t quite make them out when I need them to be crystal clear. These moments require an honest assessment of current commitments, goals, and purpose. From these, priorities can be reset.
There are a multitude of important things for a leader to be thinking about at any given time, all of which are valuable. It can be challenging to assess which of those priorities are the correct focus for this moment: the order of importance tends to be fluid based on a variety of factors. What is important this week may pale in comparison to another need next week.
Determining what should be today’s priorities is often a daunting task. There are two main groups of focus from which our priorities can effectively flow:
First, as a Christian our main purpose in life is to love and glorify God. All decisions can be filtered through the lense of whether it glorifies God and whether or not it puts a priority in front of God in our life. The Bible is clear that God wants to be first place in our lives. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:3 When we choose a different priority over God, we have a priority problem. When we choose to attend a social activity and skip church, when we choose to spend tithe money on other interests, or when we choose sleep over reading our Bibles in the morning, we are putting God second place behind those priorities.
Second, we need to prioritize knowing what is going on today with our people, our clients, and our organization as a whole. Proverbs 27:23 provides the instruction, “Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds.” We need to be intentional about knowing where we stand today, or tomorrow’s plans will be thwarted. Taking time every day to have touch points with staff and to be available to both staff and clients is as much, if not more of, a priority than mentally living in the “what if” of the future. Invest in today. Not only do we need to know how our organization and people are doing today, we need to be looking for the blessings of today. How shameful is it to miss out on highlight moments that happen today because we are putting too much of our focus elsewhere? Be mentally engaged in the present, look for moments to be celebrated. We don’t get a do-over when we miss noticing today’s triumphs.
Finding balance is a life-long pursuit. When we find our priorities getting out of focus. When it feels like we are shooting in the dark on what we should be doing each day. When it feels like we worked so hard today but can’t tell what we actually got done. When we find ourselves working in chaos. It is time to re-focus our priorities.
Practically speaking, when I find my inner self is sitting in chaos, I start by getting organized. Sometimes that means pulling out every piece of paper floating around my office, putting it all in a pile, and making a fresh master to-do list. Then doing the same with my email inbox. Once I have a master list of absolutely everything that needs my attention, I like to look through my calendar and determine what upcoming commitments need to be considered. I’ll set my top three priorities for the week and month, and then start organizing the master to-do list accordingly. There is something very cathartic about knowing exactly what needs your attention and being able to decide which tasks will receive your attention. It’s hard to do so when you don’t actually know everything waiting for your attention. I find myself needing to reorganize on this level as often as every two months or so, depending on how fast I slip into the chaos of having out of focus priorities. Better to take a day to get our priorities back into focus than to continue spitting in the wind. Nothing good comes of that.
“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.” Proverbs 22:29
