Catalyst

Archive for June, 2010

Friday comes every seven days–and that’s a good thing.

Fridays are the end of the work week for most. (If it not yours, please adjust this post to fit your situation.) It launches us into rest, relaxation, and family time.

But not everyone likes Fridays. The specter of anxiety hangs as a pall over many Fridays. Jobs are not complete. Tasks procrastinated all week smell like dead fish. So some fill a briefcase and see if they can get to it over the weekend.

One of my goals each week is to get to Friday “clean.” It doesn’t always happen as I get last minute things on Thursday night or Friday. But the goal is to “clear the decks” so I can indeed re-create over Saturday.

I have learned that to have a great Friday afternoon experience, I have to do several things.

I have to plan my week. I need a blueprint of what is coming toward me. What’s on my calendar that needs attention? Is my task list reasonable? What tasks do I do on which day? These questions (usually on Sunday night or Monday morning) are my compass and sextant for the week’s journey. In a sense, Friday starts on Monday.

I work diligently to get work done in a timely manner. Procrastination is like a neck massage. It feels better to let it woo you into the sense of “it will get done. Just relax.” Yet tasks postponed muscle themselves into the times I really don’t want to work. My aim is to have it done by Friday morning. I cannot do a week’s worth of work in 4 hours. It takes a week.

I do a quick sweep on Friday. Friday morning is time for last minute checks. If I’ve done my work through the week, Friday becomes a calm day. I make a few last phone calls that have come in, clean up my email inbox, empty my voicemail on my phone. I feel confident that nothing is left hanging.

I enjoy Saturday. While I have plenty of household tasks to do on Saturday, they are enjoyable because my mind doesn’t flit toward the unfinished. I can let things “settle to earth.”

Friday afternoon should feel like Atlas taking your world onto his shoulders. If it’s not like that for you, examine your life and time. Where’s the leak? No one should come to Friday dreading the end of the week.

Enjoy the Friday afternoon experience.

The class of 2010 has now sat through hours of names read listening for their own. Students sweated bullets over finals (and sometimes standardized tests). Textbooks were closed, accounted for, and stored in the sauna of a dust-disturbed storeroom.

The moving of the tassel on the mortarboard signals the completion of school. It says, “you’re through, finished, completed. School (with its accompanying learning) is over.

Perhaps you need to rethink the tassel and just not bother because it’s a false alarm. Learning of a different kind is just beginning.

Mark Twain observed, “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” It’s a different kind–and longer–education.

The Greeks practices “praxis,” a philosophy that called for taking what you know and putting into action. How do we find the “praxis” of our lives today?

Find mentors. We grow when we have someone bigger, faster, smarter, and wiser than we are. The tragedy of young lives is they surround themselves with friends with the same level of ignorance and disdain the sage counsel of experience. Make sure your circle includes someone who can teach you something new.

Ask questions of others. Ask them other others. Too many times, we want to appear smart, so we nod in agreement when our mind is nothing more than a fuzzball. Stop and ask, “tell me more about that. I’m not sure I completely understand.”

Reflect on experience. Ask three critical questions to  improve anything.

• What happened?
• Why did it happen? (What did leader, speaker, teacher do to get the result that took place?)
• What would I have done differently?

Keep learning in the right tense. As a minister, I hear people say, “I already learned that in the Bible.” They think learning is a past-tense experience. Once you read it, know it, can feed it back, you don’t need to learn it again. Learning is really a present-tense experience. When you read the Bible, it’s not what you learned but what you are learning.

Let the schoolbooks back in storage. Take your mind out of storage and learn something. The great failure of many lives is that they live by what they learned rather than by what they are learning.