“Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.” — The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I know pastors who struggle all week to answer the question: What should I preach next Sunday?
Don’t be fooled by their confident demeanor as they step behind the pulpit; just a few short hours before they were sweating bullets praying that something would finally come together.
I was that guy for many years.
Monday morning I’d be reading my Bible and something interesting would stand out and I’d think, “That will preach!” And off to the races I’d go trying to tease out a sermon outline.
But then Tuesday would come. Maybe it was my Bible reading again, or a book I was reading or a message I heard and just like that yesterday’s great idea looked like chopped liver compared to this new gourmet spiritual feast.
Did I mention Wednesday and Thursday? You guessed it, a couple more great ideas presented themselves. And by Saturday I was still desperately trying to sift through all the sermon ideas to find that nugget that would inspire and instruct my congregation on Sunday.
Then one day it dawned on me, surely God knows what He wants preached earlier than a few days or even hours before service time.
Surely, God, being omniscient, knows what He wants preached this time next year! So why am I living like this—drained from trying to decide what I should preach next Sunday.
That’s when I prayerfully began creating a little machine – a little sermon building machine. Or if you feel better we’ll call it a system or process that I began using to help me plan, develop, and produce a steady diet of sermons to minister to the needs of my congregation.
It was game-changer.
Preachers are not the only ones who do this.
The daily stream of repeat-decisions that people torture themselves with is almost endless.
Everything from stressing out over what to wear to being surprised when the low-fuel light starts blinking while they’re rushing to the next appointment that they’re running late for because they left the office late because they had to take care of a last-minute commitment they had made earlier that day without checking their calendar.
And on and on it goes, day after day.
Dear friend, there’s a better way.
Create little machines to do your deciding for you.
Machines? You ask.
Call them templates or checklist if you like.
Call them routines and habits that you simply do without much thought or mindfulness.
Call them whatever you like but decide once and be done with it.
(Boringly predictable is good.)
Of course occasionally the machine may have to be tweaked or even scrapped (for a better machine). But do insist on not wasting time and energy making decisions that only need to be made once.
The ONE THING for today: One of the underlying themes of this series on decision-making is that thinking is hard work. You only have the capacity to make a few good decisions each day. To leverage your life to the fullest don’t waste your mental fire-power on decisions that should be only be made once.
There has been a lot of research on this. Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, is a good place to start.
Gawande shows that checklists save time, resources, and lives.
For the entire series on How to Make Great Decisions follow the following links:
- Does this decision even need to be made? See: Before Making That Decision
- Does this decision need to be made now? See: Wait a Minute!
- Am I the one who must make this decision? See: Pass the Buck Every Chance You Get
- If I make this decision, what will be the next decision that must be made? See: Before You Throw that Stone
- The person who can make the decision will. See: You Don’t Get to Make that Decision
- To not make a decision is a decision and sometimes that’s okay. See: Is it Okay to Do Nothing?
The ONE THING 