Just on Sundays...

"What do you mean you're 'a full-time' priest? Don't you guys only work on Sundays?"

"A Priest, huh? Is that an easy job or what? I mean you work like one day per week, right?!"

"You're a priest? So... what do you do the rest of the week?"

Most of these are typically followed by the patented Peter Griffin "nya-a-a-a" (from Family Guy) to demonstrate that the freakishly original and utterly hilarious comment was intended (though only partially) as a joke.

The truth of the matter is that few people really have any sense that the job of a priest is rated as one of the top three most stressful jobs, typically involving a 50-70 hour work week that spans six if not all seven days of the week and includes every major holiday as a major work day... no, my jocular passing acquaintances, this is not a job for the slight of spirit or the weak of nerve.

The good news is that I have an amazing colleague and mentor at St. ECWIW's who not only encourages a balance between ministry and personal life, but also insists on putting family first. I have it in my contract to only work five days per week in the office with at least one full 24 hour period off for my own Sabbath (if not two), and most weeks I actually take advantage of this strangely foreign time off to relax and spend quality time with my family -- for those of you who have not heard these terms before, I've linked them to a quick reference for you so you can find out what they might mean.

However, over the past few weeks I've been feeling increasingly stressed as I attempt to get my work done and still make time for family. Oddly moved to figure out why (curiously, not everyone is simply accustomed to feeling stressed out every moment of every day), I set about the task of figuring out how much work I'm supposed to be getting done in a typical week.

Since this little exercise had some surprising results, I thought I'd share them with you.

On an average Sunday I work from about 6:45am until about 8pm. While I realize that this is a typical work day for many people, it isn't healthy and you should stop it. For my own part, I enjoy Sundays and for most weeks -- and this is the REALLY important part for those of you who work 13-14 hours EVERY DAY -- I take that time back out of my hours on Monday by working a half day. I do, sadly, have to say "most weeks" because recently I've found that I quite simply have too much to get done to complete all of my work in a healthy work week.

The problem is that, as I discovered over the past few days, I have over 75 roles that I play ranging from the sacred to the mundane and even from the arcane to the profane. Within those 75+ roles, I have over 130 tasks -- both major and minor -- that I am currently attempting to accomplish in a single week.

Now it might seem that the 18 minutes and 28 seconds that a 40 hour week would provide for each of these tasks (I'm rounding to 130 tasks for simplicity sake) would be plenty of time, but when we consider that three of these tasks account for 13-14 hours of my week, it reduces the time for each remaining 127 tasks to 12 minutes, 17 seconds. Now additionally considering that at least two of the remaining tasks take up about 1.5-2 hours each, I find that I'm left with only 10 minutes and 33 seconds for each of the remaining 125 tasks, five of which I cannot complete in less than an hour (meetings of set duration, etc). Thus for the remaining 120 tasks, I have 8.5 minutes each to complete. Sadly, another ten of these tasks take at least a half hour to complete due to the limitations of technology that don't let me network the computer directly to my brain. Thus by early on Wednesday I find that I have just 12 hours left to complete the other 110 tasks that I have for the week. Now if I'm preaching Sunday, Thursday is out, so I have four hours to complete the same 110 tasks (since sermons aren't every week, I rounded them out of the 130 tasks).

So... on any given week, I have 6 and a half minutes each for 110 tasks that generally take at least 15 minutes each, except on weeks when I'm preaching on Sunday, at which point I have 2 minutes and 11 seconds for each task.

With a fairly new computer running a 2.66 GHz Celeron processor with about 512 MB of RAM (why? because I didn't pick the computer, that's why), it takes approximately 12 seconds to change from one task to the next (closing one file and opening another), adding an additional 8 seconds to save, and about 15-45 seconds for Norton to figure out that what I have created in the native environment is still as virus free as it was when I created the "new" file. It takes an additional 20-25 seconds for each new program to open and/or close, and about 45 minutes for the new version of iTunes and Quicktime to load (since this is now a daily occurrence, I can factor it in), which decreases processor efficiency by about 25% unless Norton is running an automatic update simultaneously, which takes up an additional 30-40% of the processor resources, decreasing overall efficiency by about 65%. Now this only happens when the computer has reset itself over the course of the previous night for an automatic update, which happens about once or twice per week, so I will only average this in for one day of the week. My own productivity and efficiency rating , however, is inversely proportional to the number of emails that have bounced because no one has alerted the church to their change of email address, and how much coffee the office administrator has had (resulting in longer conversations between tasks). Thus factoring technology and human productivity and efficiency ratings into the mix, I now have about 2 to 45 seconds left per task for the remaining 110 tasks. Considering that I complete an average of 125 of those 130 tasks per week, I'm not doing too badly (of course one of the dropped balls is one of the 2 hour tasks, so it really throws the average off ;o)

So this is a really long way of saying that I have come to realize this week that I'm doing too much... and that perhaps I need a faster computer.

Oh... ya... and that being a priest is not just a one day per week job (almost forgot the moral of the story).

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And for those who know me, there is no job in the world I'd rather be doing, nor a better place I could be doing it! But I could use a few more volunteers ... and that faster computer ;o)