managing time blocks-man journaling

3 Time Blocks Every Pastor Should Schedule in Their Week

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Ministry doesn’t have to be chaotic.
Sure, there will always be more to do than you have time to get done; there will always be interruptions, and until our Lord returns, there will always be spiritual warfare. But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, most of the craziness of ministry comes from our poor planning.

Thankfully, we can do something about this.

I’ve written previously about how to create a weekly schedule because it’s just so crucial to our task of redeeming the time. A weekly schedule redefines done. Instead of only offering the hopelessness of an endless list of tasks, projects, and goals, it gives you an achievable plan to follow. The weekly schedule defines a faithful week not by whether you checked everything off the list but by whether you faithfully put time into what you said you would.

But this doesn’t have to be complicated. Here, I want to suggest a minimum viable pastor’s schedule. You really just need to start with planning for three kinds of time in your week:

  • Grow Time
  • Goal Time
  • Grit Time

If you get these three on your calendar, you’ll have taken the first step toward tamer weeks and greater focus on what’s most important.

Grow Time

Thirty to sixty minutes, daily

Stagnation happens by degrees. We don’t typically fall into massive sin out of the blue, develop a weight problem overnight, or find ourselves in deep debt from just one bad money move. More often than not, our failure to be faithful in the most vital domains of life is a slow erosion. These big problems grow out of small neglect. Because when you don’t make time for growth, you are planning for decay.

Sadly, when life gets busy, the first things to get bumped from the calendar are often the very activities we need to grow. This includes our spiritual disciplines, which we need to maintain a vital walk with the Lord (John 15:5), but it may also consist of things like exercise, reading, and relationships. We put off growth habits for a few days; days become weeks, weeks become months, and months become years. Until one day, we look in the mirror and ask, “What happened?”

So, how do we counteract this entropic trend? You do it by scheduling grow time into your week. The best way to do this is by putting grow time first thing in the morning. Have a guarded thirty-to-sixty-minute block each morning in which you invest in habits that help you grow spiritually, intellectually, and physically.

I like to follow the acronym P.O.W.E.R. to plan my routine for grow time:

  • Prayer (Our Lord rose early to pray; why shouldn’t we?)
  • Organize (Make a plan for the day.)
  • Word (Read the Bible.)
  • Exercise (A full workout, a short walk, or light stretching to get the blood flowing.)
  • Read (Get through a few pages in a book.)

Doing this first thing in the morning makes it more likely that your grow time won’t be interrupted. But whenever you plan to have your grow time, do schedule it. Don’t have an “if-I-have-time” mentality. Schedule grow time into your week.

Goal Time

Two to three hours, one to three days per week

The next type of block to include in your weekly schedule is goal time. This is time dedicated to your priorities. These are the items on your list that are important for the long-term goals of your life and ministry but are often pushed aside by the tyranny of the urgent.

Here are some examples of goal time:

  • Your weekly plan for message prep. What days and times have you set aside to work on your teaching? Put it on the calendar and stick to the schedule.
  • Ministry initiatives. Have a larger project or other important goal? Don’t just hope it gets done; schedule goal time for your week. Even if it’s just a two-hour block once a week, you’ll be surprised at how much you can accomplish.
  • Personal goals. Perhaps you want to complete more schooling, desire to read a certain number of books this year, or maybe it’s a relationship or health goal. Whatever the case, the same truth applies: What gets scheduled gets done.

When it comes to goal time, long, uninterrupted blocks of deep work are best—at least two to three hours. Half-days work even better if you can manage it. There’s something about having the whole morning or afternoon to make significant progress on a God-glorifying goal.

Grit Time


Thirty to sixty minutes, two to five days per week

Both life and ministry involve a lot of administrative overhead. Emails, returning calls, paperwork, planning—these little minutiae tend to pile up and make us feel overwhelmed. If you have an overflowing inbox or a pile of unopened mail, it’s likely because you haven’t scheduled grit time into your weekly plan.

It’s called grit time because it is often tedious. These are the little tasks you must grit your teeth to do. And that’s precisely why this is the stuff we tend to let pile up and stress us out. Eventually, it gets so bad that we clear our calendar for the day and try to get through as much as possible. But even if you get to the bottom of the pile, the cycle will start over again if you haven’t scheduled grit time on the calendar.

Thirty minutes to an hour on weekdays is enough for most people to stay on top of admin tasks. But as with all our time blocks, the discipline is to schedule it and stick to the schedule!

Gift Time

We’ve talked about scheduling time in your week for grow time, goal time, and grit time. If you keep these three simple blocks each week, you’ll soon find you can stay on top of the most important things in just a few hours per day. The urgent stuff will fill in the gaps in your schedule by itself. That’s the power of a focused weekly schedule.

But what about the rest of your time? And more specifically, what about the time not dedicated to your work? I like to think of this leftover time as “gift time.” This is the time we have remaining after we have fulfilled our daily vocational duties. But we can make one of two errors when thinking about personal time.

First, we can think that the only proper way to spend any spare time we have is by working more. We spend every extra moment we have answering one more email, making one more tweak to Sunday’s message, or otherwise squeezing in a little more work. But this is a failure to recognize our finitude and need for rest. And often in doing so, we are neglecting our other responsibilities, like our families.

The second error we can make when it comes to personal time, however, is in treating it as “me time.” When we think of our time as an earned opportunity to selfishly indulge, we forget that even our downtime is not our own—it all belongs to God.

Both of these mentalities are corrected when we view personal time not as “extra work time” or “me time” but instead as “gift time.” God gives rest to those who labor (Exodus 20:8-11; Psalm 127:2), and we certainly need it. But the key word is gives. Downtime, therefore, should be received as a gift, with thanksgiving to God. That means we can enjoy our rest and recreation without guilt! And this is made all the easier when we know we have faithfully followed a schedule that has made time for all our duties.

Sometimes, though, we are called upon to go above and beyond, even in our downtime. When we view downtime as a gift instead of something we deserve, it can help us to willingly give of that gift to others. So, instead of begrudging opportunities to sacrificially give of our downtime to our families, church emergencies, or other surprise demands, we can give joyfully. Because we recognize that, in the end, all of our time is a gift to steward.

About The Author

Reagan Rose
Reagan Rose

Reagan Rose is the founder of Redeeming Productivity, a media ministry that helps Christians learn time management from a biblical perspective and the author of Redeeming Productivity: Getting More Done for the Glory of God.

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