← The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 768 | The Leadership Time Trap: How to Multiply Results Without Adding Hours
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The Art of Leadership Network. Well, think about your week, right? What are you doing that doesn't require much from you, but also doesn't produce much for the kingdom? Now, you can spend. I say it doesn't require much, but you can spend, honestly, 10, 15 hours a week just spinning your wheels, doing administrivia. That doesn't go anywhere. So, you know, maybe it's social media disguised as staying connected, but you check your screen time and it's like, whew, that was a lot. Okay. Or lunch meetings with people who want to pick your brain but never apply anything and it never accomplishes anything. Or programs you keep running at your church because we've always done it, even though nobody's life is changing. See, all of that is energy that could be invested elsewhere. Same with admin tasks you do yourself because it's easier than training somebody else. Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast. Carrie here. I am so glad you joined us. And welcome to all of the new leaders that are joining us today. We're going to talk about your time. We're going to talk about the leadership time trap. It's something I've been caught in. It's something I counsel a lot of leaders. I see them trapped in it, and it's basically how to multiply results without adding hours. So if you're interested in that, I think you're going to appreciate today's episode. It's all about the time trap that so many of us find ourselves in. And I think technology has made this more complicated and not easier. So if you want to multiply results without adding hours, stay tuned. The framework I share with you is something that I'm calling the investment reward matrix, and it's built on two simple axes. The investment of time that something requires and the reward it produces. This is something that you can actually apply to all of your tasks. So a lot of pastors I talk to are exhausted. Doesn't matter whether you're leading a church of 50 or 5,000, it's tiring. And when I ask them what they accomplished this week, you know what? Sometimes they have difficulty articulating it. Yeah, maybe you got your sermon done, but, like, what else did you do with the other 45, 50 hours a week, more than that that you poured in? So sometimes when you really audit people's time, here's what church leaders do. Maybe you counseled some people, you attended a bunch of meetings, you prepared your message, you responded to emails, maybe you put out a fire, but you're not actually sure if Any of it moved the mission forward. Plus, so many leaders I talked to have worked way too many hours. They still haven't got their message done. It's crammed into Thursday night, Friday, Saturday. So I did write about a lot of this and how to fix it in my last book, at yout Best. It's all about getting time, energy and priorities working in your favor. But I'm always looking to optimize. So I got the nub of this idea that I'm sharing with you very recently. It was a casual mention from a church planter in New York City shout out to Aaron Chung from Exilic Church in Manhattan. And he talked about high energy, low return tasks and low energy high return tasks. And I've been thinking about that for months now since I heard that from Aaron. And I've taken that idea and turned it into a matrix that helped me think through my time. So this can help you decide whether you're going to agree or to spend a lot of your time on something or whether it's a really poor investment, whether it's going to produce a lot or a little. Hopefully this can help you figure out whole new categories of things that you can say no to. I am convinced that that is a hack. You talk to world class leaders, what do they say? The difference between a good leader and a great leader is often a great leader will say no to just about everything. So if you're listening to this podcast, let me paint this for you. If you're watching on YouTube or Spotify or I'll have the matrix on screen for you. So if you're listening, which many of you are, use your imagination. So I'm going to walk you through the matrix. Picture two axes crossing each other. So the vertical axis is investment and it runs from low to high. The horizontal access is reward and it goes from low to high. And so basically it's a two by two matrix. It creates four zones. And pretty much every single task is that you do in your ministry, honestly in your life, falls into one of these four categories. So I'm gonna call it the first one the clutter zone. That's low investment, low reward. Didn't put a lot of time into it. You don't get anything out of it. That's the clutter zone. And a lot of leaders have their lives cluttered up by these dumb tasks that really don't move the needle. Now on the other side, and this one's positive, the dream zone, it's low investment but high reward. So you didn't have to do a lot, but wow, did it ever move the needle. That's the dream zone. So we got the clutter zone, the dream zone. Then there's the burnout zone. This is where a lot of leaders get trapped. The burnout zone is high investment, low reward. You poured your heart into it. It took hours, didn't produce anything. Maybe just frustration, right? But then the sweet spot, I think, is the multiplication zone. And this is high investment, high reward. You put a lot of time into it, but it really moved the needle. So let's start with the first zone, the clutter zone. Low investment, low reward. This is the stuff that isn't killing you, okay? It's just sort of the tedium, the background noise of every day. It's not killing you, but it's really not helping you. So it's kind of like Easy street, but it's a trap. And this is what you should eliminate. These are the activities that have often become habits, but don't really serve the mission anymore. The report you produce, for example, that nobody reads, maybe it took you 30 minutes, but it had zero impact because nobody reads that report. Or maybe it's the meeting you attend out of obligation, but nothing ever happens out of that meeting. It's just like, yeah, we just do it. I don't know, we meet every Tuesday at 1:00 o', clock, that kind of thing. Or the meeting should have been 30 minutes, but it always runs 60. Another example, and this is where a lot of us drown these days, is all the emails and all the texts you respond to immediately, even though they're not urgent or important. Maybe you're in your inbox seven times a day or 17 times a day. So here's a practical example from my life for years, and this is much bigger than just handling emails. I was part of a denomination and I was on a denominational committee that met corporate quarterly. Not a huge time investment, just a few hours every few months. But honestly, after years of doing this, I couldn't point to a single significant outcome from all of those meetings. So it was denominational, it was a committee meeting, it was low investment, but it was also really low reward. And when I resigned from that committee, nobody seemed to notice. So think about your week, right? What are you doing that doesn't require much from you, but also doesn't produce much for the kingdom. Now, you can spend, I say it doesn't require much, but you can spend honestly, 10, 15 hours a week just spinning your wheels, doing administrivia. That doesn't go Anywhere. So maybe it's social media disguised as staying connected, but you check your screen time and it's like, whew, that was a lot. Or lunch meetings with people who want to pick your brain but never apply anything, and it never accomplishes anything. Or programs you keep running at at your church, because we've always done it, even though nobody's life is changing. See, all of that is energy that could be invested elsewhere. Same with admin tasks you do yourself. Cause it's easier than training somebody else. So here's what's so insidious about the clutter zone. These activities multiply when you're not paying attention, right? They're the ministry equivalent of junk collecting in your garage. None of it, you know, you don't really notice it. It's a box here, it's some sports gear here, pot. But collectively, it's just weighing you down and cluttering your calendar. And soon you can't park your car in the garage anymore, right? Danger of this zone is because the investment is low. You never feel a sense of urgency about eliminating it. It's kind of like, oh, yeah, that's what I do. I do a lot of email, right? I do a lot of text messages, I do a lot of social media. But going back to the car analogy, it's like a slow leak in your tire. Each one isn't a big deal, but collectively, soon you're not moving at full speed. Maybe you're not even driving. So that's the clutter zone. The next zone is the dream zone. Now, this one's good. Okay, it's low investment, but it's high reward. So on the low investment side, right? You also have the opposite. Low investment, low, low reward. But a low investment, high reward. Now, I call this the dream zone because not everything fits into this, but when it does, it's kind of magic. And you want to spend a lot of time in the zone. And this could be, for example. So what is a low investment but a high reward? Well, maybe it's your social media team going back into your archive and finding sermons that really resonated at the time. They're not timestamped. Maybe they're still evergreen. But you preached it two years ago and you post it to social media, or maybe you send it out via email and all of a sudden it goes viral. Okay, that's like low investment, low, high return. Maybe you reach a whole bunch of new people that way on social media. Some of them get baptized, some of them get introduced to Christ, right? Like I Said there isn't a ton of activity in this zone, but it's a pretty sweet spot if you could find it. It might also include activities like checking in for, let's say 15 minutes, 30 minutes, quick phone call, quick text, quick coffee with key leaders you've already developed who now multiply the ministry with without requiring your constant attention. This is a problem a lot of leaders have. What do we do? We spend a lot of our time with our lowest performers. Hey, you really gotta shape up, you really gotta do this. Who do we ignore? Our top performers, our best volunteers, our best donors, our best elders. And hey, why don't you spend 15 to 30 minutes just for a quick phone call with your best volunteer or your best donors and just say, man, we just wanna say thank you, really appreciate it. Now that is huge leverage because most of us are out fighting fires when they get a call like that goes a long way. So quick encouragement texts, even 30 seconds can be like, hey, thinking of you today, how can I pray for you, really appreciate you. So grateful for you and your family, right? That's 30 seconds of your life can have a life changing impact. Here's another example, right? Low investment, high reward. Develop leaders, running meetings. You used to lead, right? So you used to do this meeting, but you're like, you know, she's pretty good, she could really run this. You let her run it. Low investment, high reward. Or automated giving platforms you've optimized that have automated follow up. So if you get more of your church to move toward online automated giving, guess what? That solves a problem. It can be just a couple of minutes, it could be an email or whatever, but whew, all of a sudden you got impact. So another example, using systems you built years ago that now run smoothly with minimal input from you. So could be high investment to build the system, but once you've built it, it's just tweaking it and using it. So here's the key. You can't really start here. Like I said, I've given you a lot of examples. You can't really start here, okay? These are often dividends you collect on investments you made earlier. The question is, what investments are you making today that will move activities into this zone tomorrow? So not a lot of activities fit in this zone, but when they do, it's kind of like magic. Now we're going to go to the low reward, high investment side, okay? The burnout zone. This is where it gets painful. You want to avoid this zone at all costs. But as leaders, it's so easy to get stuck here. And this is the problem. These are activities that require a high investment but get a very low reward. This is where burnout lives. So I want to give you a personal example that might be a bit controversial. As our church grew, I had to rethink how I did weddings and funerals. When our church was really small and a handful of people pretty easy to do, there weren't a lot and I didn't have a lot to do. So it's like, yeah, I'll do your wedding. Yeah, I'll do your funeral. I'm not saying that weddings and funerals are not important, but as our church grew into hundreds and then thousands, you know, it just doesn't scale. So for me, they quickly became high investment and low reward for the broader mission of the church. Now, it meant a lot to the family in question, whether it was a wedding or a funeral. But here's what I began to realize. I was spending enormous emotional time and investment preparing for and conducting weddings and funerals for people who often had minimum connection to our church. Meanwhile, activities that would multiply the ministry, like developing leaders, great preaching, crystal clear vision, were getting my leftover energy. So I made a hard call. I'm not saying you have to do this. I'm just giving you an example from my life. I stopped doing almost all weddings and funerals. I trained other people to do them. I referred people out, and I focused my high investment on higher reward activities like sermon prep and vision casting. And you know what? The church didn't suffer. In fact, it thrived because I was investing in things that multiplied. So here's some other high investment, low reward activities. I see pastors stuck in all the time. Here's one. Counseling everybody. Some pastors spend 20 hours a week counseling. That's a high investment. Now, that may be your calling. I don't want to interfere with that. For me, it's not my calling. And sometimes you can get into a rut where you're counseling the same people year after year with no progress. And so that's a very low reward, but it's a very high investment. You know what a better investment is? Build a care system, turn train lay counselors, refer people to professional help, and save your time for people who are actually ready to change. Okay? Another example of high investment, low reward. The burnout zone. Meetings that accomplish nothing. We've hinted at that already, but there are some meetings that you are pouring a night a month into or three hours a week into. Honestly, when you look at it High investment. They're accomplishing nothing. Some of you abolished committees years ago, but you're still in 20 hours of staff meetings a week for no particular reason. Some are too long. You meet every week when you could meet every other week or once a month or. Honestly, there are some meetings that could have been a slack message, right? High investment, low reward. Here's another example. Hopefully you haven't done this, but a lot of people do this. Arguing with trolls on the Internet. You see a comment that just bothers you, and then you spend 30 minutes crafting the perfect response. They fire back, you respond again, and hours later, like a whole afternoon's gone by, nobody's mind has changed and you're frustrated and you've given your best energy to someone who was never open to dialogue in the first place. Here's another example. Responding to long emails with long answers. Listen, I get a lot of long emails as well. Sometimes they go on for pages with no break, right? It's like, woo. That's a lot. You know what the key is? Skim it, read it, say a prayer, send a short message back. That would be the best thing. Responding to long emails with long answers is a big problem. Here's two more quick examples. Trying to please everybody and meeting with chronically angry people. All right, you should meet with people who are angry with you. I think that's a good thing. But if they're chronically angry and you're always meeting with them, that's a problem. Here's the truth, okay? You have to be willing to stop doing things that matter to some people if they're preventing you from doing the things that matter to the mission. It's hard, but it's necessary. So if it's high investment, low reward, you've got to cut or minimize to every extent possible. Now we get to my favorite zone, the multiplication zone. Okay, the dream zone's great. Cause you don't have to do much, but you get a high reward. This is a bit different. This is high investment, high rewards. So let's talk about where real multiplication happens. This is where you build something that multiplies. Some of you might wonder, why is this my favorite zone? Not the dream zone, with low investment and high reward? Well, if everything was easy, just a little bit of investment, big payoff, everybody would be doing it. We'd live in a very different world. But as you know, no pain, no gain. The things most worth doing are often the hardest. So a few years ago, I started working out with weights. Hard, but worth it. I've been married for 35 years. There's a lot of investment from both my wife and I. A lot of hard work, some pain, totally worth it. And parents, you know this, right? Kids, high investment, high reward. So how does it translate into leadership? Well, for me, preaching well is squarely in this zone. Communicating well. But it's not just prepping for Sunday. It's the art of becoming an excellent communicator. So what you want to do, don't just get ready for Sunday. Study excellent preaching, improve your delivery, take some courses, attend a conference, get your reps in. Because that investment compounds over time. And it might take an enormous investment from you. Study, prayer preparation and delivery. But the reward over time can be massive. One well crafted message that can change hundreds of lives can set the direction of the church and multiply your leadership. Or down the road, it could change thousands of lives. Elder and team alignment is another high investment, high reward activity. Getting your elders, your board on the same page, developing your staff, having those crucial conversations about vision and values. Yeah, it can be exhausting. But when you get it right, everything else becomes so much easier. An aligned leadership team multiplies your effectiveness exponentially. So developing leaders is going to take your time. But if you've cut out the necessary meetings, you're now free to invest here. If you're not arguing with trolls on the Internet, you're pouring into people who need coaching, who require your attention but. But also have high potential. So that's what you can do. Now, building systems is multiplication at work. You're not just solving today's problems. You know, I had a leader who told me years ago, he says almost everything, if it shows up more than once, is a systems issue. And he's right. So if you've got a problem that keeps showing up, you have a systems issue. You might take a lot of time and energy to think through your system to fix it, but when you do it, guess what? Your system improves and, and everything gets better. So here's what I've learned. You can't spend all of your time in this zone. But if you want to grow, you got to spend as much time as possible in the multiplication zone. Yes, it's hard, but it can work well. And eventually some of those activities, when they get automated, can slide into the dream zone, right? Lower investment, maximum impact. So that's true of the leader you develop because now they're somebody who is really making a contribution with just a little bit of maintenance from you. The key is being strategic about your time in this zone. You gotta ask. Cause you wanna spend a lot of time here. Is this a high investment activity that's going to multiply? Is it building something that will eventually require less investment from me, or am I working hard just for the sake of working hard? For me, here are the five areas that are consistently in my multiplication zone. Okay, so my five that I consistently consider in the multiplication zone and a great use of that time writing sermons, books, content creation. This multiplies way beyond the time invested. For example, I posted videos a few years ago that are still getting hundreds, thousands of views. Years later, you can write a book that gets read. A decade later you can have a sermon series that continues to go well on YouTube, right? Keeps getting views, keeps getting new people into your church. So writing or content creation for me is huge. Second is vision. You want your vision to be crystal clear. If people don't know where you're going, nothing else matters. Third, we've already hinted at this team alignment. Are we all aligned around the mission and vision? A misaligned team is just a cancer in an organization. So I want to focus on team alignment. Are we all good? Are we all moving in the same direction? Fourth thing that I invest a lot of time in is a healthy culture. So your culture multiplies through everything you do. You can make it healthy. If you let it drift, it's gonna get unhealthy. So I work on that. And then finally, resources. Do you have the money you need to move the mission forward? A church that's slowly bleeding cash is not gonna have much of a future. All right, so you've gotta invest some time in that. Those are my big five. So what you wanna do is you wanna figure out your three to five high investment, high reward activities and then spend some time there. This is where the multiplication really happens. All right, so how do you use this in real life? Now you understand the four zones. What do you need to do? Let me give you a few practical steps. Step one, audit your ministry. Maybe look at last week, because it's pretty much in your memory. It's in your calendar. Seriously, like, pull it up right now. Pull up your calendar. And maybe you want to stop the car or stop your run. Take a look at it. Look at every meeting, every activity, every conversation that consumed your time. And be honest, which zone did it fall into? Because if it's in the clutter or the burnout zone, if you're in a place where it's really not going well, yeah, you want to eliminate that stuff. So don't skip this step because I think the ability to look very honestly at your life and say, am I really spinning my wheels? Am I really making high investments with low reward? Or just, you know, the clutter zone, Low investment, low reward. I guarantee you, when you map it out, you're going to be shocked at how much time you're probably spending in the wrong zones. I have to assess this myself. Step two is you want to maximize the dream zone and the multiplication zone. Ask yourself, what investments can I make today that will move activities into the dream zone in the future? Where can I invest 5, 10, 15, 20 hours of this week that are gonna produce results down the road? Hint your content, hint your team alignment. Okay, I've already talked about it, I'm not gonna go. But those are like obvious answers. And then step three, ruthlessly eliminate the burnout zone. This is where you gotta really get tough with yourself. What are you doing? You're like, but I love people. Yeah, but are you investing in the right people? Okay, yeah, but I really felt like I had to answer that long, long email from a troll. It's like, really? Did you, did you have to spend five hours on it? And then as we said, you wanna minimize the clutter zone. You wanna set aside an hour this week, do a purge, maybe resign from some committees or meetings that don't matter, cancel programs that nobody is actually interested in and think of it as spring cleaning for your ministry. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna get your time back. So here's what I wanna bring home. This investment reward matrix isn't just about productivity, it's about stewardship. Right? You have limited time, limited energy. You can't manufacture more hours in the day or more emotional capacity in your soul. You have what you have time wise. So the question is, how are you investing it? Are you spending it in your highest return activities or kind of squandering it? Because this is the stuff that came in. If this framework hit home for you, and if you're realizing, okay, I got some work to do, that's exactly why I created the Art of Leadership Academy. Inside the Academy, we help you do what this episode is all about. Multiplying your leadership without multiplying your hours, you're going to find in depth masterclasses, step by step frameworks and live coaching from me that will help you and your team move from exhaustion to effectiveness. We've got over 13,000 leaders in the academy now. And imagine having the time and clarity to live in your multiplication zone. That's where your investment creates exponential results. And that's what the leaders inside the academy are learning to do every day. So if you're ready to stop guessing and start leading with focus, click the link in the description wherever you're listening, or head to theartofleadershipacademy.com and you'll get instant access. Today, you'll not only get access to the resources, you'll also get access to a community of over 13,000 church leaders who've decided to invest their best energy with other leaders where it produces the biggest return. So I'd love to see you in the community. Make sure you click the link. One final thing to wrap this up. The pastors who thrive aren't the ones who work the hardest. They're the ones who figure out where to invest their hours. They're strategic because they know if they invest in certain areas, they're gonna see exponential results. And if they minimize, if they learn to say no to the things that distract, well, they're just gonna get better as leaders. Okay, I really hope this teaching was helpful. If this framework helped you share it with another pastor who needs to hear it. And I'll see you next time. Coming up, we've got Dr. Caroline Leaf on How AI is Damaging youg Mind. We are talking also about how the brain works and a whole lot more. J.D. greer, N.T. wright. My church Trends is coming up, so if you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. Thank you so much for listening. You can access this in the Art of Leadership Academy. That's where you're going to find the show notes and you'll also find the visuals for everything we talked about as well. So if you haven't joined the Academy yet, please do so. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope our time together today helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing. Hey, before we go today, just a quick word. Let's be honest. At a certain point, hustling harder doesn't help. You probably hit that wall, right?
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I'm not sure about you, but when things aren't going particularly well or growing particularly well and I'm stuck, my gut reaction is just to double down and go harder. But what I've learned over time is, you know what I need? I need an outside perspective. I need other voices to help me.
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Figure out what am I not seeing? Is there a better system, better strategy, like, where are my blind spots?
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And you know what? You only learn from others who have been there. And that's why I created the Art of Leadership Academy. It's an online community of growth minded leaders. It's growing every day and it's a very focused space where you can grow faster and lead more effectively. Now you'll get stuff like show notes for every episode, but even better than that, you get some quarterly free webinars with me, you get real dialogue with other church leaders. It's a troll free, I'm gonna say it. Weirdo free environment.
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Okay?
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You're not gonna get the kind of stuff you get on social media. We moderate the content very carefully and the community. So if that sounds like something you'd benefit from, real leaders trying to make real progress in real churches, I would love for you to join in. And you know what's super cool? You're gonna find people who are a step ahead of you, and you're gonna find people who are a step behind you. The people a step ahead of you are gonna help you. The people a step behind you, well, you can help them. And I'm in that community on a daily basis.
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So if that sounds like something you would love, it's totally free.
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No gimmicks, no tricks.
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Just sign up today.
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Visit theartofleadershipacademy.com or click the link in the description of this episode. A few clicks, you're in and I'll see you on the inside.