How Do You Stay Sane?

Last week I started reading Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky. The main premise behind the book is that creative people often are good at creating new and innovative ideas, but are bad at follow-through to reality. Belsky and his team researched various successful and creative people and teams to find out how they were able to successfully bring ideas from the brainstorming phase to reality (shipping it, selling it, publishing it, etc.). He lays out three common components of these successful “creatives” (a term I think he coined).

• Organization
• Community
• Leadership

I’ve only gotten through part of the section on organization. The organizational component seems to have some similarities with Getting Things Done (e.g. breaking projects down into action items).

This book is particularly interesting because Belsky is trying to bridge the gap between the creative and productive, a feat that I think can be hard to achieve. Getting Things Done tried to achieve a similar goal of helping the reader to sort out his organized (or disorganized) world so that he can actually accomplish stuff.

I think one of the biggest challenges that I have faced in transitioning to full-time ministry is execution, taking the ideas or projects from paper to completion. Because today’s strong dependency on e-mail and communication in general, as well as the fact that much of what I produce is intangible, it is easy to get to the end of the day without a clear idea of what was accomplished. I imagine part of the struggle is just being a rookie and not defining my goals, processes, and projects as clearly as I need.

I’d love to get your thoughts. What systems do you have in place to stay productive? And with all the varied requirements of ministry (pastoring people, doing administrative work, planning a year in advance, thinking of a sermon series, developing your skills, etc.) how do you do stuff and not feel like you’re drowning in a sea of projects?