Office Hours?

by vernsanders on September 6, 2011

The discipline of writing a blog is such that, if you take it seriously, you end up doing as much reading as you do writing. Yesterday was Labor Day, and I ended up doing a lot of reading out of books (remember those? you hold them in your hand…). Today I started with one of my new favorite bloggers, Justin Wise, and discovered that he has figured out a way to do what I’ve been wanting to do for some time, but had not figured out how. Follow along…

Here’s the dilemma: the more things that Creator does to help people in their ministry, the more time I spend chained to my desk. That’s because, as you know, the first rule of getting things done is that if you can’t delegate, there is a finite amount of information/stuff/projects you can manage at all, let alone well. So as Creator grows, I find myself doing more “managing” rather than “doing,” and combining that with the amount of writing, means that I don’t get out as much as I used to.

<That’s about to change somewhat, by the way, as Creator has been invited to design and present content at the Church Musician Summit conferences on a regular basis, beginning with October conferences in Westlake, and Scottsdale. If you are in the area, please consider attending.>

Much of what I now do on the writing side involves a kind of “brain dump” in that I try to let my readers know what I know, in part because enough people have told me that what I know is useful. But in this day and age, content is only useful if it is current, and when you are chained to a desk, so to speak, there is a danger of what you know getting to be “who cares?” information. So I’ve been thinking about how I might just be available to help people with questions they have, or things that they are dealing with. Part of that comes from my basic core value of being a teacher.

So I thought about having an open conference call once in a while, and just talking with folks. There are problems with this, of course, not the least of which is that sometimes one person wants to turn a group discussion into a dialogue about something that might not be interesting to the whole group.

And then along comes Justin, with one of those sound-of-forehead-slapping ideas: office hours. Of course. I did this when I was an academic. Why didn’t I think of that?

I’m working out the details, which I hope to let you know about in my next post (Friday, if all goes well). I expect to do a beta for a while, and if everything goes well, make a bigger announcement toward the end of the month in my regularly scheduled Monday Morning Email. In the meantime, watch this space. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Ipod shuffle status: 3179 (Boots of Spanish Leather – Nanci Griffith [I’ve always love Dylan’s original of this, but Griffith’s version is very good)  of 7875

Get my EBook The Choir in Modern Worship

twitter-logo

fb-logo

{ 1 trackback }

Office Hours!
September 9, 2011 at 7:16 am

{ 0 comments… add one now }

Previous post:

Next post: