In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir tell the story of St. John’s Regional Health Center in Missouri. St. John’s had thirty-two operating rooms which were always fully booked. That meant that they were routinely behind schedule, since every time an emergency came up—and emergencies came up a lot—a scheduled surgery got bumped. That was a problem: the hospital was losing efficiency simply because it spent a certain amount of its resources rescheduling surgeries and dealing with the fallout of rescheduling surgeries.
The hospital brought in an advisor who implemented a counterintuitive solution: he took one of the operating rooms out of the scheduling rotation. The staff was suspicious. As one surgeon put it, “We are already too busy, and they want to take something away from us. This is crazy.”
But, in fact, the advisor was not taking something away. He was giving them something.
Individual emergency surgeries were unpredictable; the hospital had no way to plan around that person needing an emergency appendectomy. But emergency surgeries in general were completely predictable. The hospital had them every day! By taking one room off of the schedule, the advisor had effectively given them a room precisely for unscheduled surgeries. If there was a magical day with no emergency surgeries, then the room would sit empty. But when there were emergency surgeries—and there were always emergency surgeries—the unscheduled room could be brought into use, and the schedule wouldn’t be disrupted. At least, not as much.
The advisor added slack—the resources needed to take care of the unexpected—to the system.1
Pastors are expected to work a lot. The United Church of Christ suggests that a full-time pastor should work an average of twelve to thirteen ‘units’ each week, where a unit is a block of three or four hours. That math works out to anywhere between thirty-six and fifty-four hours a week, so it helps to think about each unit as a morning, and afternoon, or an evening.2
The United Church of Christ also strongly encourages full-time pastors to take two days off per week. That means that a twelve-unit week should look something like this: five mornings, five afternoons, and two evenings of work. And a thirteen-unit week should, of course, have an additional evening of work. The details can vary—a pastor might work an additional evening but take another morning or afternoon off—but the point is that in a five-day work week that includes fifteen possible units, twelve to thirteen of them should be spent at work.3
You can probably already see the problems:
First, that only leaves two full days, plus up to three other units, for everything else in life. Just like everyone else, pastors need time for family events, housework, time with friends, hobbies, and straight-up rest.
Second, there is not a lot of time left over for the emergencies that crop up. Calls to the hospital, interpersonal conflicts between church members that boil over, funerals, and other unscheduled and unschedulable events don’t care whether we’re entering our fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth unit of work.
Third, many work events—scheduled and unscheduled—take up more than their fair share of time. A rough church meeting might only last for an hour, but two hours of work come out of it, plus an a couple of hours of processing it with colleagues, plus replaying the conversations in our heads and spiraling out. It is easy to let time that is supposed to be time off be consumed by the things that happened during our official work time.
Fourth, and finally, work and energy are not always neatly related. I might be a little weird in that I actually enjoy performing funerals. That work takes up time: meeting with the family, planning the service, leading the service, heading out to the cemetery, attending the lunch, and so on. It is also absolutely exhausting. The day of the funeral might have one unit of work on it, but that one unit does me in for the day, and nothing else will get done.
All of this was only compounded by the pandemic. Not only were there the additional responsibilities of online and individualized ministries, but things had to be completed on a different timetable.
For example, before the pandemic, I could work on a sermon over the course of a week: a draft might be done by Monday night, but the sermon didn’t have to take its final form until sometime on Saturday (or even Sunday morning). Once we were into the pandemic, the sermon had to be finished by Tuesday morning so that videos and podcasts could be recorded, edited, and uploaded on an internet connection that was too slow; hard copies of the manuscript could be mailed out to members who weren’t so computer-savvy; and a manuscript could be posted to the website.
And, of course, inertia carried the habits of the pandemic into the not-really-post-pandemic world.
The upshot of all of this is that, by the time we moved into the not-really-post-pandemic world, the lines between work and not-work had blurred.
On the one hand, I wasn’t really taking time off. Officially, I was taking one day off a week, but I spent that day zoning out, decompressing, and, often, processing things that were happening during my time on. And by the time I was ready to be present to the other parts of my life, the day was over and it was time to return to work.
On the other hand, I also wasn’t fully present to my work during my time on. I was easily overwhelmed by everything that needed to be done, distracted from the tasks at hand, and flitting between projects that needed my undivided attention.
I was, in a sense, spending my time in this murky place between time on and time off. I was never fully present to either. To use the story that I started this post with as a metaphor, I was running from one operating room to another, always behind schedule, trying desperately to keep things from falling apart even more.
And that meant that there was no room for one more thing. It didn’t matter whether it was something highly planned (e.g., a wedding, a leadership retreat, a wider church meeting), completely unexpected (e.g., a funeral, an interpersonal conflict boiling over, a hospital visit), or anywhere in-between. There simply weren’t places on the calendar to put things.
And that, in turn, meant that when I had a month or so with a wedding, a funeral, two burials, several wider church meetings, and more, plus all of my normal pastoral duties, I was overwhelmed. It was too much.
I’m doing a lot of things to help with this basic problem, and I’ll write about them in future posts. But one of the things that I am doing is bringing back the slack day.
I take one day off per week. At least, I’m learning to take one day off per week: twenty-four consecutive hours where I do not attend to work or work-related things unless they are really and truly emergencies. And that is, admittedly, hard. It means saying to others and to myself that this thing—whatever that thing might be—can wait until tomorrow.
But I also have one day per week that is unscheduled. If nothing comes up, then it can be my second day off for the week. But when things do come up—and something often comes up—it has three units of time that can absorb those things. Sometimes, that might mean that the unexpected gets scheduled for that day. More likely, it will mean that the things that are displaced by the unexpected get rescheduled for that day.
The slack day is my extra operating room: the space that can absorb the unexpected things that are bound to come up without disrupting the rest of the schedule or overwhelming the system. At least, not as much.
Mullainathan, Sendhil; Shafir, Eldar. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. New York: Times Books, 2013. Kindle edition. 183-186.
2023 Compensation Guidelines, Iowa Conference of the United Church of Christ, 1.III.A. https://ucctcm.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IA-2023-Compensation-Guidelines.pdf
2023 Compensation Guidelines, Iowa Conference of the United Church of Christ, 1.VI.B. https://ucctcm.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/IA-2023-Compensation-Guidelines.pdf