To-Do Lists

Every week of my ministry -- sometimes every second week -- I have set aside time one morning of the week to create a to-do list. This list then accompanies me everywhere I go. Early in my ministry, I would simply add items to this list and delete them as they were accomplished -- yet with more items to add than to delete (which is typical of ministry), my to-do list at one point grew to more than one-thousand items. Later in my ministry, I cut this list to two pages (seventy or eighty items on two sides of one sheet), and discarded the rest -- prioritising ten or twenty items, through prayer, which I treated as absolutely essential. OBSERVATION: To sketch this in more detail: I have first worked through accumulated correspondence, files, notes, and so on (just to decide what to do). Then I have reviewed my own scribbled reminders, accumulated during ministry day-to-day. Then I have sketched out forthcoming services and events. And finally, I have written up all points which the office secretary might implement. Such a to-do list is no small task. For instance, there will typically be around one-hundred pages of paper to review in such a session.