RX 24 - Stewarding Your Productivity - TJ Peera

Transcribed Content

Thank you for your patience as we had technical difficulties. Stewarding your productivity. And I wasn't even presenting live. So why stewarding your productivity? Why did I even come up with this presentation? This presentation is gonna look a little different than your other presentations as there's gonna be I'll demo a little bit of how project management tool and rock can help you with productivity. But I'm also gonna give you a lot of tools and resources to take away. And the main reason why is it personally affected me. You guys go to all these sessions and there's a lot of cool rock things you can implement. And you're gonna be excited to go back and have a lot of work, but there's also the demands of ministry. They're gonna be coming at you at all angles saying, hey, kids ministry, student ministry, we need this. So how do you manage all that work? Last year, I was so busy. I had a lot of work. I lost trust because I dropped the ball a lot. I was working extra hours. I had unprocessed issues from meetings and conversations and undealt with emails. So I needed to do something about that. A little bit about me. My name is TJ. This is my wife and two daughters, five and 10. It's actually my wife's birthday today, and this presentation would not be possible without her because I hate putting presentations together, and she is amazing. So thank her for letting me be here today. We are Fairhaven Church. We are in the Dayton, Ohio area. We have four campuses, and we have about 80 plus on our staff team. I'm the director of data insights, so all things rock and connected to rock. We have about 25 for development. And I have a part time rock specialist that works with me and is a huge help. I couldn't do it without her. And we've been on rock for three years. So stewardship, it's the responsibility management of something entrusted to one's care. Productivity, the amount of work that could be accomplished in a specific environment over a specific period of time. We're employees. We need to get stuff done. Putting this in context of the church and our responsibilities and our roles is gospel driven productivity. Utilizing productivity practices and tools in service of God's purpose for us, which is what we do for the good of others in all areas of life to his glory. And you've heard that said, to God be the glory. This is by Matt Perman, what's best next. I'll hit on that resource a little bit later. So this stuck with me this last year. Natalie Runyon said, you are paid to do something specific, and your salary comes from tithes and offerings, not investors. When we waste time not doing the thing we're paid to do, we are wasting other people's worship. Let that sink in. We're not paid by for by profits of things we sell, but people are giving of their tithes and offerings. That's where our paychecks come from. So it's a big responsibility to be good stewards of our productivity and work on the things for God's kingdom and his mission because this is someone's worship. You probably didn't expect this, but productivity starts here. It starts with prayer. And we have a prayer problem. I like to think that we all are good prayer warriors, even though it wasn't one of the warriors he said yesterday. But if you look, there is a couple studies done. 200 Christian organizations that publicly touted a culture of prayer. There was a study done, and it was so horrendous they couldn't even publish it. 72% of pastors identify consistency in personal prayers as one of the greatest needs that they must address in their congregation. We see this with stressed being stressed at work, going stressed into meetings, having broken relationships, bringing that stress home. If you look at Barna Group, LifeWayer Christianity Today and type in prayer, you'll see reports that say we we lost that culture of prayer. We're not as strong at prayer as we need to be. So why does that matter? Prayer fuels our love for God, his people, and his mission in the world. Without regular connection to Jesus, the pressures of leadership can steal our joy, our strength, and our life. Out of organizations, so there's good data here too, that prioritize prayer, 9191% are more aligned with the mission of the organization. 85% believe God is more clearly accomplishing his work through the ministry. 78% of people are less stressed. And out of these organizations that prioritize prayer, 70% productivity increased. So there is a productivity increase when you are constantly praying. And if you look at the gospel messages, think about Jesus' life. As a demands for his ministry intensified, he had more work, he had more people following him, what did he do? Scriptures show us that he spent more time away to pray. He spent more time away with God as the minister as the ministry intensified. So should we not be following him? There's a lot of books, John Mark Homer's book, practicing the way. And they all say the same thing, Jesus prayed we should pray. So what should we do about it? Craft your day. Start when you pull into the parking lot. You're looking at your building. Maybe you're not at the parking lot, so you gotta do it at home. And just pray for the people there and for your work throughout the day. One of the things I did this last year, before we started really getting into prayer as a staff was I dedicated five minutes I want to get to a meeting five minutes early to pray for the people in that meeting that I was gonna be meeting with and for the work we are gonna be working on. And I can tell you the difference to when I didn't pray and the stresses that I had with you know, there's certain people on staff that sometimes you have conflict with. And I can tell you the times I prayed before I went into meeting and how much of a blessing it was to work with those people and how there was no conflict. It was easy when you're aligned with your relationship with God before meeting. Invite others to pray with you. Ask them to pray with you. You can't multiply by zero. And then one of the resources I'm gonna tell you guys to read, lead with prayer. This is a book by Ryan Skoog about the spiritual habits of world changing leaders. And this book was fantastic. We did it as a summer reading for our staff and just last week had a staff retreat. And it's something that we're focusing on as a staff in creating culture around prayer. So I highly recommend this book. They talk to Fortune 500 company people, prayer warriors and campus warriors like Francis Chan. And that's the common theme that they found is when these people are creating a culture of prayer where people are connected in relationship with God, they saw their mission change in organization. Another example, I like to make this personal. You guys all know John Edmundston. You guys know Rock and Spark. And I talked to John and asked him, how did prayer impact rock and spark in your environment that you're working in? And he told me a story about how when they first came to, left their church years ago, they kind of left the culture of prayer behind because and they they took it for granted when they were at the church. But also they had some how do we navigate prayer when people are coming from different churches and different backgrounds? What does it look like HR wise? But three years ago, they said, enough with that. We're praying. And they started praying with before their meetings. And they started talking about mission and vision and culture. And they started constantly praying in leadership. And if you guys would agree with me, in the last three years, we've seen rock just explode and take off. And he said there's a lot of intangibles we just can't see, but we know it was because as as result of prayer. And then he also said, within the last year, prayer they've been praying for talent. And he mentioned that this morning. And he said, we only have one position left. God brought us people as we prayed as a leadership team, and that's a testimony to us praying. So the whole and then he said, the whole rock project and rock community is intangible, but we can only give the glory to God, and that is why. And then a little personal story. My gosh my daughter, she's a bold gospel warrior. She's 10 years old in the public schools, is telling people why they need to be baptized and whatnot. And she had a she had a devotion recently, a couple weeks ago, and it was on the faith of a mustard seed. And she asked my wife, what does that mean? And my wife talked to her about it. That night, there was a big storm, and it was hitting the rain against her window, woke her up, and she said, God, I'm scared. I need you to make the rain go away. The rain stopped. She told my wife this on the way to work on the way to camp the next day. Guess what? Mom, I prayed like a mustard seed and the rain just stopped. Well, my wife thought that was so cool because she was like, I was awake during that storm and I physically heard the rain hit this side of the house and then all of a sudden hit this side of the house. So I can't help but to think that God answered her prayer right then and right there. Not only that, then God convicted me to talk to her. You know how you you know how you do this you know how you have those kids that you love all your kids but some of them just like you kind of butt heads with? That's this daughter. Like, I love her to death, but our personalities sometimes conflict. And he said, God told me on the way to dropping her off at camp the following day, ask your daughter to pray for you. I probably shouldn't I was nervous about even being here today because I neglected tooth work and getting my wisdom teeth out, and I had severe tooth pain, like, two weeks ago. So I said, Kaylee, you're a prayer warrior, and God, there's power in your prayers. Can you just pray for me? Can you pray about my tooth? She asked people at camp to pray for me. My tooth pain went away that night. And you can see, and I'll probably post a picture on Rocket chat when I get them taken extracted in a couple weeks here. It's it's bad. It's black. It's infected, but there's no pain. And I can only attribute that to prayer. Click. Back, forward. Do you mind running back and seeing if we can oh, is that too far? Okay. So get this quote. Florence Mowindi, and this is in his book. Is it an irony to be involved in God's work without consistently seeking his guidance? I mean, we are you guys all agree we're doing God's work even know we're we're supporting the ministries. We're doing God's work. So we should be in regular relationship and connection with him. Alright. Part two. Personal management. There's personal management and project management. We'll start with personal management. And that's managing your energy and time for the greatest effectiveness. First, you have to evaluate your approach to productivity. I had to figure out what's the best way to get things done. How do I and there's a lot of resources out there, and I realized that talking to people on Rocket Chat and Discord. And one of the best resources I found is what's best next by Matt Perman. This book is fantastic, and it goes and it puts real world productivity solutions within context of the gospel. So think about, have you ever heard of getting things done? He takes that methodology and puts a gospel twist on it. He talks about planning your week, delegating, procrastinating, managing email, overseeing projects. So I could probably give a whole presentation just on that book, and it would probably take three presentations. So I highly recommend this, what's best next, how the gospel transforms the way of getting things done. At Your Best is started off as, like, kind of like a TED talk or whatever that Christian TED talk thing is. I forget the name of it off the top of my head. But it's Carrie Newhof, and it actually did so good. He turned it into a book. It's a middle little book, and it talks about managing your time, but the energy is actually related to that time. Only three to five hours a day are we at our best for, with the most energy we need. So he talks about green, yellow, and red times of your day. So just to kinda give you a sneak peek at that. Green, you're at your best. You have the most energy, focus, and creativity. Yellow, you're productive but you're not at your peak. And red, you're tired and you struggle to focus. So out of those three to five hours in your day that you're green, that's where you're be working on development and all things rock. You can identify the yellow parts of your day. Those are the times you're gonna schedule meetings. You know, you don't need to be as focused. And then red, that's when you need to pray, that's when you need to eat, go for a walk. So I highly recommend that book. It's short, it's simple, and it really helps you understand your day and be able to craft how you work throughout the day around that. And you need to create once you've done those two things to understand your day, you need to create intentional space for focused conversation that minimizes the disruptions. Lot of you heard of candle Calendly, but Microsoft Bookings is pretty much the same thing. And if you're a Microsoft shop, it's really easy to get connected. But that's saying, you know what? These are my yellow times. Thursdays Tuesdays and Thursdays from twelve to one. Hey, you need to meet with me? Schedule some time there. And it's inevitable. People need to meet with you around that time, but around those times and they're gonna bug you at 09:00 in the morning when you're in your green. But at least you can start letting people know, hey, this is the best time to contact me and work with me. And then I didn't put this on there, but Mike Goodwin made a good point on Tuesday night. And I'm in my thirties and he said, tell your 30 year old self just to get it done. Just to do it, and if you do it wrong, you can try again. And that's something that stuck with me because I'm an altruist. I have to have everything perfect, out, and oftentimes, I would delay projects and stuff because it wasn't perfect. And my manager constantly tells me, TJ, just put it out there. Just get it done. So I thought that was interesting. I didn't get to sneak that in but Alright. So project management. Now that you understand yourself better, how do I manage the work that I need to do? How do I make it organized, visible, and trackable? We're gonna have a overwhelming amount of work and it was so for me, I had it coming in from multiple channels, multiple communications, multiple requests. Someone stopped me in the hallway. Someone stopped me during a staff meeting. They work chatted me. And I had work all over the place, and that's why I dropped the ball. So I had to figure out how do I how do I create clarity around all that work I was doing? And in my takeaway, you'll see our leadership does the entrepreneurial operating system, EOS. I can't tell you much about that because it starts at the top down. But from a ministry perspective, we have something called the next 90, which is a result of that, where for the next 90, our whole staff knows these are our core focus bullet points. Whether it's I wanna get 500 people involved in groups, a thousand people serving. We all know that whether you're in kids ministry, adult ministry, pastoral care, we're all focusing on that work, and that work takes priority. So that's been something that's really helped align our staff in knowing what is the most important thing to work on and how is our whole organization gonna align with that mission. And then organization. That's your management tools. So a lot of there's a lot of management tools out there. Which ones do I use? And I'm gonna recommend, if you're a big church or you're someone like Nine Embers Triumph and you're working with multiple different churches and locations, a tool like Asana, Trello, ClickUp, those are great tools, but there's a learning curve to them. And it might not be the best if you're a medium sized or smaller church. So I'm gonna be showing you guys how to do rock project management, and that's how what we use. But once the artwork is visible, then it makes you your work accountable. Every Friday, I meet with my direct report, and he's able to now see the work. Not my sticky notes, not the notes I have in my desk, not the emails and chats I have. He's able to actually see the work I have and hold me accountable to it. And he's able to see a big picture of the work. And it actually allows you to say, no. I can't work on that right now because that's not priority. It's not aligned with our mission. And a lot of people have a hard time saying no, but it's okay if you have that work visible or if you have to say yes. This is what's gonna hurt because of that. So making it visible allows you to say no. And then the last but not least, start simple. I don't know how many times kids ministry, student ministry, any of the ministries, I won't pick on kids ministry, ask me for things that they think they need. And they have this huge project, and we spend a lot of time working on it, extra hours working on it. I bug our partner about it. And then they start using it, and they're only using half of what we use. And it's we we spent all that time that we could have been working on other things. So start simple. Start simple with, hey, I'm gonna give you this. And then start using it. And once you start using it, we can go from there and add on to it. So that's one of my biggest things this last year I've learned. So project management, I told you I would be telling you something about how you can use Rock and some technical. So we use the Rock plugin for project management. Thank you, Dana Heiselbacher. I love this. A lot of people use it for many different purposes, and I'll show you guys that in my takeaway. But we have workflow forms where the staff enters the task. We have the project board which shows you what you have going on kind of Kanban style. I'll show you that. It shows it allows you to have your work visible, allows people to communicate on specific projects, and there's even a calendar function which I don't really use. So then I told you about those other tools. So what does this look like? This is the request forms on the left there. That simple HTML. I'm sure you guys can make it prettier looking with buttons and stuff. I don't have the time and it works. The staff would go and say, hey. I need some rock support. I need something done in rock. They click on rock support and a workflow entry form opens up. And this is fully customizable to attributes that you can use. So as you can see there, we have one for the request type and we have a fix. So since it's a workflow form, if it's a fix, it text me directly so I know, hey. Something's up. I'm not gonna wait until Monday to work on that. A maintenance item, something we do on a regular basis, and that goes to an email to another one of my coworkers who will then triage it and ask me if she needs help or she'll work on that. That might be a data view and event registration, those kind of items. And then new features and enhancements. Those will just fall in our project board, which you'll see that on Friday we can review and see how does that align with our priorities and do we have everything we need to accomplish that project. So this is the project list. So once all your projects get in there, it's a simple list of all the work you have. You can see we have a project type, which is rock. We have one for IT support. And we have one for our next campaign to manage all that work. We actually have one for staff onboarding and offboarding coming up and production. Now other teams are starting to say, wow. I really like how you have all the work in one place. We need that because someone stopped me in the hallway. I swear I didn't have a conversation with them. They said they had a conversation with me and there's projector that needed fixed and that got dropped. So they're gonna be using a simple form too. This is when you actually click into the project. So when you click into the project, you can see who it's assigned to, the details of the work, any attributes that you have in there. In the upper right is a task list that you can create for if it helps you break things down into smaller, I need to remember to do this. This is a huge project and it needs to be broken down into smaller pieces or you can have multiple people working on different parts of the project. You can actually create sub projects under the umbrella of this big project. You can see the participants. And then on the very bottom there, it's kinda hard to see on the screen, but it's a whole comment note section where you can communicate. You can say at Ryan Adams, and it'll tag him and communicate with him in that. And you can have communications all within one project so they're not an email and chat, and you can update it within there. And it will send you guys it'll send you an email and alert everybody, hey, there's something new. And just thinking about this, I won't be able to show my takeaway, but there are some cool there's a new feature that if you run on Microsoft Teams, you can actually have those messages and alerts go right into Microsoft Teams. And there's a recipe. It's on my takeaway for how to implement that. I haven't implemented it yet, but it looks really neat because I'm never gonna check my email when I do. It's oftentimes buried in there somewhere. This is where the magic happens. This is the project board. And I love this because I can see all the work. So the first one is inbox. That's where things initially fall, and we review on a regular basis. Backlog, we've already reviewed the items. They are awaiting to be worked on. Work in progress, you should never have as many as I do there, but a lot of those are 90% done and got hung up because we were on staff retreat last week, and I'm here this week. So they will get done. Nine members, they're our partner, So I like to know which work my my manager likes to know which work without going into Asana that they're currently working on. A waiting info would be just that. Some we're waiting on something. It can't be worked on, but it is one of the things we are working on. And then there's a last column here, which is completed. So at the end of the week, we just review, hey. What was what I've done this week? And my manager and anybody else can see that. Now this is security. There's a security role on this that only my team can see this. I don't want everybody else to see the work we're working on. The project list that was back two pages, anybody can see this. I don't care. They know the work that's going on. And oftentimes, they're like, oh, that's cool. Can you do that for us? So and oftentimes, they don't even have time to look at that. So they're not gonna go into the weeds. So I have a question for you guys going to our part three, the last part. And I'm gonna I'm gonna read it and then I'm gonna ask you guys. Do you think greater productivity is achieved through teaching others or by learning more yourself? So raise your hand if you think productivity greater productivity is achieved through teaching others. So if you're watching this, it's about 50% of the room. Raise your hand if you think greater productivity is achieved through teach or by learning more yourself. Not that many people. And lastly, raise your hand if you think both of these are true. Alright. That's a lot more of the room. And I hate these questions. My pastor does them during our staff meetings. I'm like, but both of them are true. And he's like, you have to choose one and argue and it's the worst. But both of them are true. Learning. Learn by teaching others. So I'm a big proponent of microlearning, finding ways for making it easier for your teams and others on your staff to learn by capturing small bits of information rather than devoting hours to one training. And maybe there's a purpose for having a onboarding a new employee and walking them through Rock, but you're gonna be learning new things every single day. The things are gonna be constantly changing. So you really need to break it down and make it smaller for them. That's how people like to consume data information nowadays. Think about Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. They like small bits of information. So an example of this is when someone asked me, we have a door divorced family in Rock. How do I handle that family? Well, I can say, you know, well, I I told them this is how you do it. And then I was like, oh, I gotta create a training for that. A simple simple thirty second training is all was needed. And because I know it's gonna be asking me again. But the old me used to say, that would be great to put in my person profile training and make it part of this big thing. No. People just create a small microlearning. It takes all but five minutes and those eventually add up and make it a lot bigger. And a lot of people, that's the best way they like to learn. ScribeHow. I put that in the resources. It's about $200 a year, but it saves us hours worth of work. There was a presentation I tagged on my resource guide after this that my takeaway guide that tags you to that presentation. And it literally saves us hours worth of work. You walk through whatever you need to do if you're showing somebody and you're just like, alright. Here's how you create an event registration. You click here. You type in this information. And as soon as you're done walking through that process, the AI generated model, like, goes through and creates a whole step by step guide. And you can just share that link with anybody. You could put it in your resources. It saved us so many so much time from copying and pasting and free formatting a page because it does all that work for you. So I highly recommend ScribeHow. It's it's normally about $2.75, but nonprofits get a 25% discount so you're around 200 at the end of the day. And then being proactive versus reactive. So it kind of goes with learning by teaching others because I want you to jump into serving ministry roles, not on a full time basis, but just go serve with kids in guest operations. See what the check-in process is like. Because oftentimes, if you go serve in that role one time, you're gonna find there's better ways to do this. I can't believe they've been doing it this way the whole time. This is what they told me they needed and I built it in a rock that way. But once you experience it yourself, you're gonna find sometimes better ways to do something. Or, actually, the way they asked me to build this could be done better. So be proactive. Jump in, serve in different ministries. You only have to do it one time. You don't have to do it all the time. But it is huge and it's been very effective for me to get a walk in their shoes and understand how they're using rock and make it better for them. Learning for your growth. Solo Learn. This is an app. I have it included in the takeaway. It is awesome. I was at the airport, and we had a lot longer delay than I would have liked. But that was an example of when I used it. Maybe someone's late for a meeting. It's just an app, and you can learn c sharp, HTML, all these different Python, all these different coding languages. And it was a huge it's just nice to have that extra time to sit down. You're gonna be on your phone anyways. The average person spends six hours on their phone a day. Why not do a little microlearning? And that that that's a microlearning example as well. Rocket chat. Get involved in the rocket chat community. I've learned so much through there. Been able to connect with people and learn even more. Reverse engineer code. That is one of my favorite things to do. After because now that someone built something for me, I know how that works. So I can go read through that code and be like, oh, now I see what that for loop does in that lava. And if I don't know what it does, I know how the process works so I can figure it out by looking at the lava code. Or I can ask whoever built it. Like, can you help me understand this? But I've learned so much because I know that process. I don't need to go try to read a manual that tells you what to do, but you don't really know how to do it or what it's doing. Reference manuals, micro learn those. You don't have to read a whole manual and say, I'm gonna spend an hour to read a manual. Read a chapter. And then take that chapter and teach others about it. Create a short five minute video or a short five minute reference manual for your staff just off of that one little piece. And just do that every day. And before you know it, you've read through a whole manual and created a whole training guideline for everything you've learned in that manual. And things constantly change with every version update. So it's nice to kind of refresh yourself on some of those some of that knowledge. And then one I was very hesitant to use was ChatGPT and Copilot. I was resistant to do it for so long, but it has saved me hours worth of work. Let me tell you one way I've used ChatGPT. I wanted this bubble on a page, and I needed it to hyperlink to another page. And I wanted to change colors when it did that so it looked pretty. I'm not the best with HTML and CSS. So I took a screenshot of that, plugged it into ChatGPT, and I said, hey. I need it to do this. It needs to be in this part of the box, and I need it to change colors. ChatGPT spit me out all that code. And I was like, wow, this is great. It wasn't perfect. I still needed to know how to navigate around that, but it allowed but it even taught me that. Like, the circle wasn't as rounded corners as I wanted. So I said, make the corners rounder on that button. Not only did it give me the new code, it actually taught me. It said, this is what you would do if you want to ever change this. So it taught me along the way. So now I'm using ChatGPT for everything from writing, revising my emails because I'm not the best with communicating and also asking it for helping me with build or looking at code. And then Copilot, my coworker uses. I haven't got into that too much. But what he told me is it is great if you're in a Microsoft account, OneDrive. It can read your PDFs and spit out summaries and questions. And it can read your Excel documents and you can have it create you reports off of that. So it's really good and nicely integrated with OneDrive and being able to use it to review files and create things off of that. So don't be hesitant to get into the AI world like I was. Get in it. You can Google, how do I use it? Actually, ChatJPGT is also really cool. You can have it you can talk to it. It can dictate. You can use voice dictation and talk to it about your day. And it will create a whole schedule for you if it's connected. So really cool. I highly recommend looking into that. Don't be afraid of it. Last thoughts. You guys probably already know this, but maybe you need to hear it because you're doing everything else. A restful night's sleep gets sets the stage for productivity, and a good breakfast fuels for a productive day. I'm a huge proponent of this because I do triathlons and it makes a huge difference. But you guys know that a restful night's sleep will make you less cranky, less stressed, less anxious the next day. A good breakfast fuels literally your body to be productive during the day. So just to recap, as we go into questions, I put a takeaway out there with many resources. I reference old, Rock Rx presentations that I thought were valuable. You can use Rock Pad project management for pastoral care. Tina did a great presentation on that. You can use it for onboarding and offboarding. Another South Carolina church, I think it was Eddie Holman's church present presented on that last year. So there's a lot of ways you can use Rock project management plugin beyond the scope of what I showed you there. So