Do you wish you had more time and less stress?
Of course you do. But it’s possible to become so busy cranking out tasks that you never stop to ask the question, “Am I doing this the best possible way?”
The most productive, effective people don’t just do work. They also think about their work.
They engineer their goals into projects. They engineer those projects into systems in order to get it done the best way.
They don’t just randomly wake up in the morning and figure out what to do. They’re constantly tweaking, refining, and improving their systems in order to get more done with less stress and effort.
Systems for Worship Leaders
As a worship leader, this is so important. Every aspect of your role as a worship leader (whether you are part time, full time, or volunteer) is an individual system.
For example:
- Your songlist
- How you promote events
- Your rehearsal
- How you put on events
- Your scheduling
- How you introduce new songs
- Your discipleship strategy
- Your weekly communication
- Confrontation conversations
- Updating Planning Center
- How you plan services
- Evaluating your team members
- Auditions
- Training for your musicians
The list could continue. These are all systems that you should think through. Anything that needs to happen on a recurring basis should have a well thought out system of execution.
This is hard because many of us feel that we don’t have time to think about our work. We just have to get it done. But I’m here to tell you that you can’t afford not to do this.
If this week you focus on improving just one system, it will greatly improve your productivity and how much you enjoy what you do.
Nothing you do should be left to chance. I’m fully convinced that the most successful, productive people plan ahead. They don’t tackle things last minute. They inspect, review, and move the ball forward early in the game.
4 Reasons Why Systems Could Save Your Life
1. It Decreases Stress – When you set systems in motion, you don’t have to worry about what to do. This is what you do. You are a creator, inspector, and tweaker of systems.
2. It Empowers Others – When you have systems, you have a framework to disciple others and empower them to get involved.
3. It Ensures Excellence – When you determine how a task is supposed to be done, you can ensure that it’s done well each and every time.
4. It Frees You to Do What Only You Can Do – Great systems can keep you from just doing busywork and putting out “fires” all day. Once people get involved, you can focus on your greatest strength to the team.
The most important aspect of creating systems is getting detailed. You want to create your systems as if you pulled a random guy off the street, handed him the step-by-step document and he was able to accomplish it.
Just so you know, I’m doing this too. I’ve been historically terrible at creating systems. I’m in a season of intense tweaking, refining, and vision-casting. Let’s challenge one another, shall we?
Taking Action
So here’s what I want you to do:
1. Check out Work the System by Sam Carpenter. While it is a business book, the principles are more than relevant for what we do as worship leaders. So practical.
2. On a piece of paper, create a massive list of all the work that needs done in your worship ministry on a weekly basis. Are the systems clear? For those that are not, get incredibly detailed about how to accomplish that task. Create it for our friend off the street.
3. Focus on one system this week. Don’t try and revolutionize the world in a day. Just one system. Next week? Move on to the next.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.
Maybe you’ve never commented before. Now’s a great chance to introduce yourself to this worship leader community.
Question: What do you think creating systems would make possible for your ministry? Let us know in the comments!
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A note from David: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. That means, I receive a small commission if you purchase through those links. No pressure to use them, but if you decide to do so, thank you very much. That money helps to pay for the cost to run this site and enable me to continue providing high quality content for you. Thanks!
Great stuff and so needed. I always find that it’s so easy to just sort of float from Sunday to Sunday – going from task to task with no real sense of action – if I don’t have a system in place. A sort of “meta-system” that I recently had to revise is my general work week. I take Friday and Saturday off and Thursday is full of meetings so that means that M-W are of huge importance. I’ve got lists of weekly things that must be completed by the end of each day so that I don’t find myself sneaking work in on my days off.
Hey Joe, that seems like a great schedule. I find it’s great to batch meetings onto one day rather than spreading them out throughout the week. Meetings can definitely be a timesuck!