Quickest is Rarely the Best Choice

You can have it good, fast, or easy. But you can only pick two.

We’ve seen this statement. We chuckle over it and nod in agreement. But ministry staff doesn’t seem to get it.

I talk to Church Communicators regularly and they often have complaints like “I’d love to do more to communicate the great stuff happening at my church but there’s never enough time to do it all!”

It seems that senior leadership, other staff, and parishioners want everything fast. Because they put it off; you have to prioritize to get it done fast.

Quickest is rarely the best choice.

Oh, it can be done. It’ll require a scramble where you risk burning out your staff or volunteers in order to create something that seems to work. But it’s not the best choice.

Can I get a quick communication’s plan? Or a quick social media post? Or a quick idea for the next sermon series? A quick SEO result? A quick bulletin change? And the list goes on and on.

No. No. No. No. No. Quickest is rarely the best choice.

If you keep doing everything in a quick time frame, you’ll end up creating monsters. Everyone always expecting something from you quickly. And then more and more, things will pile up.

Here are 3 ways to stop the madness:

1. Create margin. You may be able to do something in 2 hours. But allow more time with your deadlines. Just don’t abuse the extra time. Everything doesn’t take priority on your task list so some things require more time.
2. Create a process. With senior leadership endorsing it, create a time frame process for everything that comes your way including details of what’s required for the project’s creation and approval. And once you have more time to work on things, do things better. Demonstrate the value in having more time to conduct your art.
3. Create an acceptable way to say no. Figure this one out and you should write a book about it. This is tough. But if you don’t have the ability to say no, you’re going to get sick, burned out, or worse. You can’t always be a yes person. Start slow. Just… say… no.

Keep in mind that all ministry is about empowering people and getting projects to be done. Be careful in your process that you don’t become the person that only says no. Instead say, “let’s figure out how we can get more time to do an even better job the next time”. Quickest rarely gets the job done best.