Ready Set Grow Podcast
Welcome to Ready Set Grow, where we help pastors and church leaders break growth barriers, build healthy teams, and lead thriving churches.
Led by Scott and Hunter Wilson, Ready Set Grow equips pastors with proven frameworks like the 5 Shifts and the Middle Method system that create clarity, momentum, and sustainable growth.
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Ready Set Grow Podcast
This One Tool Will Transform Your Staff's Productivity | Ep 39
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If you want to learn more about how to make sustainable progress toward the vision and goals God has given you and your church, you can check out our Ready Set Grow Mastermind here: https://www.readysetgrowchurch.com/mastermind
Most church leaders know where they want to go. The mountain is clear.
What's not clear is what to do today.
So your team shows up, looks at a packed calendar, works hard all week — and somehow the big goals never quite move forward.
That's not a motivation problem. It's a system problem.
This episode breaks down the Weekly 3 and Daily 3 — a framework that takes your biggest goals and breaks them into clear, finishable steps every single week and every single day.
Inside:
- Why big goals are never accomplished through massive all-nighters — and what actually moves the needle instead
- How to "boss your calendar" instead of letting it boss you — and why most leaders are thinking about their week backwards
- The difference between fuzzy goals and clear ones — and the specific words to stop using (work on, continue, improve, make progress on) and the words to replace them with
- Why your most important work should be done before 1pm — and how to structure your day around your energy, not your schedule
- The shutdown ritual that eliminates Sunday-night anxiety and sets your team up to win before the week even starts
- Three things that happen when your whole team adopts this rhythm: you finish what you start, projects take less time than you think, and you can take on more than you ever thought possible
You don't need to climb the whole mountain today. You just need to make progress.
Intro: The Messy Middle Curriculum
SPEAKER_00Hey friends, today's episode is going to be a little bit different. What you're about to listen to comes from our middle method curriculum, which is a core pillar of our ready set growth framework that helps pastors and church leaders navigate the messy middle. Now, you might be asking yourself, what do you mean by the messy middle? The messy middle is that frustrating space between casting a vision and then actually seeing it happen. Because here's the truth, dude. Vision is exciting, but the messy middle, that's where the real work begins. Now, we originally created this training for leaders inside of the ReadySat Grow Mastermind, but dude, we just love the way that some of these turned out so much that we wanted to share a few of these conversations with you here on the podcast as well. So if you want to go deeper on any of this stuff, you can find the link to our mastermind in the description below. But for now, let's dive into today's episode.
The Dora Principle: Big Goals Through Small Steps
SPEAKER_02Now it's time to head into weekly three, daily three.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, I want to show you this visual here because this is like the metaphor that I always think about with weekly three, daily three. Is first of all, I kind of think like Dora the Explorer here, so I go Dora, where she kind of had it right here, where she had these big adventures that she wanted to go on, but it's broken down into these milestones. These uh, as long as I do this and navigate through the woods and the uh I go through the crocodiles and the lake, and then I can make it to grandma's house. Like that's that's how you think about this stuff. Like big goals are never accomplished through these massive marathon all-nighters, they're accomplished consistently through small steps over time. And small steps over time is how you can constantly chase in a sustainable way big goals often, right? So when I look at this uh picture here, I'm like, all right, here's where we're at today. Here's the small steps I'm taking. This is all I need to do today, this is what I need to do tomorrow, this is what I need to do next week, this is what I need to do the next week. And then I'm not surprised when I hit the big goal because I'm making progress every single week, right? See, most people never accomplish their big goals because they're emotionally overwhelmed by the size of the mountain. Yes. But big goals are never achieved
You Don't Need to Climb the Whole Mountain Today
SPEAKER_00all at once. Big goals are achieved through small, consistent steps taken every single day. And over time, uh basically, I what I would want people to understand is you don't need to climb the whole mountain today. You just need to make progress today towards the mountain.
SPEAKER_01I love that because as a leader, the two big things I want to know, and and I want to make sure everybody knows is do we have clear rocks? And secondly, are we good are are we getting those rocks completed? Yeah. Are they getting accomplished? Because if I know we have our clear rocks for the cycle, that's gonna keep us in alignment. We're going up this mountain, we're all going up this mountain, not people going, oh, but I want to go do this sideway thing. No, we're staying in alignment, and then I want to have accountability. So if we have alignment and everybody knows what it is, then we know as we're getting these things accomplished. I can, hey, we're on it, we're on it. And I don't have to wait till the end of the cycle to go, oh my gosh, why didn't we get this done? Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_00We know on the way we got it. You always say that I never want to be surprised. Like I don't want to be at the end of the cycle and be surprised. Like, what are you talking about? You didn't even work on it. And I think that's where the weekly three and daily three come in, don't you think? Exactly.
SPEAKER_01And when we learned being surprised. When we learned how to do weekly three and daily three, it took our productivity to a whole other level that I didn't even
How the Weekly 3 and Daily 3 Work Together
SPEAKER_01know we could accomplish. Yeah, it's very interesting.
SPEAKER_02So it actually becomes pretty linear in its approach.
SPEAKER_00It's a breakdown.
SPEAKER_02That's right. So think about it in this this way. Let me just take it through the steps. So you have in your cycle your three, your top three projects, your top top three rocks that you're going to accomplish. Okay. Then what that does is that feeds. Let's assume you've got a 12-week cycle here, okay? 90 days. That begins to feed. Okay, what are the three things I need to do in week one to get after the three things I've said need to get accomplished in the cycle. Yes. Then each week, my my weekly three feeds what's going to happen in the day. So let's assume you have a Sunday through Thursday schedule. Now I know, okay, based on what I've got to get done this week, here are the three things I need to get done on Sunday today. And then it just forces it down into I have this day. I'm looking at Monday. That's it. What do I need to get done today that are going to move my three weekly things I need to get done that are going to now influence me getting done these three things on the cycle.
SPEAKER_00And if you're not careful, because some people in like the analog world, especially, uh, like uh if you've ever gotten like a full focus planner or you've gotten like the high performance planner by Brendan Richard, or you know, whatever, like they have these ideas of like, okay, the top three, like I get it, I get it. But there is a way to approach us that is correct where you're chipping away at it, and there's a wrong way to approach us. I want to talk about when people do this well, this is what they're doing. Dad, can you talk about the first thing which is talking about how they boss their calendar?
Boss Your Calendar — Not the Other Way Around
SPEAKER_00Yeah, in other words, boss your calendar.
SPEAKER_01People get when they get this wrong, they think it's what's on my calendar this week. They're starting that way, like, okay, what's on my calendar this week? You're not thinking right. What you should be thinking is, what do I need to finish this week in order to keep my goals moving forward? So if I know what my cycle rocks are, then I'm not looking at what do I have this week on my calendar. Oh, wait, I got to have lunch with this guy, or man, I got to staff meeting. No, that's not what I'm doing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because basically it's like, okay, if I'm putting in there what's dominating my time this week, it doesn't necessarily translate of saying, okay, what's on my calendar this week doesn't necessarily translate to what does that have anything to do with your 90-day goals for the cycle.
SPEAKER_01And think about this as a pastor, a funeral's gonna happen. Okay. Somebody uh uh on your board got in the hospital, had a uh accident. We were just talking about that in between our break here, just talking about, hey, stuff is going to show up, and but you need to boss your calendar. And that means that it's gonna be Thursday, half my day is gonna be this funeral, but that's not that's not moving my my goal forward. So you're not gonna make that one of your weekly. That's not one of my weekly three. Yeah. My weekly three have to do with what do I need to do this week to move my major goal, my major cycle rock forward.
SPEAKER_00But you're even talking about that now is like, how are you thinking about like selecting your when you're writing it out? What kind of criteria are you thinking of?
SPEAKER_01I'm thinking, okay, it's easy to know when the three get done. Okay. So when I have my three route, I know when I got it done and when I didn't get it done. I also know that I can finish it this week. So I'm not trying to get a weekly three that I know I can't get done this week. Yes. You know, so that's what's the biggest thing. What is moving my goals forward? How do I know that they're gonna be done and I can finish it this week?
SPEAKER_00Okay, let's keep going on the writing because I think what happens next, when people get this right, they write their weekly, they write
Fuzzy Goals vs. Clear Goals: The Words That Matter
SPEAKER_00their weekly three clearly. That was like a tongue twister there. They write their weekly three clearly and not in a fuzzy way. There's people that write fuzzy goals and the people that write clear goals. There's no way that's what does that mean?
SPEAKER_02Show it give us an example of how that might look.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so let me show you an example. When people are first starting with this, when they're not used to writing clearly, they write in a fuzzy way of just like whatever first comes to mind. And usually whatever first comes to mind needs to get workshopped and refined into something that is actually a good weekly three, a clear weekly three. So, you know, I I meet pastors at the beginning, they're like, I'm gonna work on my message. Okay, what if we go? I'm gonna complete the outline of my message and get feedback. You know why that's better? Because I know exactly did I or did I not create the outline and did I or did I not get feedback?
SPEAKER_02Because work on your message could be you spent 30 seconds working on your message. Cool.
SPEAKER_00Or you're probably gonna work on your message until you deliver the message. So it's like, when is it ever gonna get done? Yeah, right. The next thing is make progress on the budget. Okay. Kind of same thing here. It's like I'm gonna make progress on the budget until forever, you know, there's never not a budget.
SPEAKER_02So you're forcing a function to call out specificity on this.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So I would write something more like finalize the Q3 budget proposal, right? Improve accountability. Okay, well, we always need to do accountability, right? So maybe a way I could improve it, I'm gonna refine that and say, I'm gonna implement the weekly three system in our base camp that we're using now. It's like, okay, that's you did that and you got it done by the end of the week, right? So I think what happens here is what you're noticing is the words that you use matter. And so let me show you some examples and you can take this as like, okay, I'm gonna stop using words like work on, continue, improve, make progress on. Because those things never actually get completed. Work on, okay, you're always gonna work on it. Continue, continue until what? Right? Improve, make progress on. No, we don't want that. What we want is words like this. I'm gonna complete it because did you or did you not complete it? Right. Draft, approve, launch this, did I or did I not launch this? Outline, schedule, deliver, or propose. They become really binary. Yes. Did I or did I not? It's very clear now to know. So you make you want to make sure that you're writing clear weekly three and daily three. And the next one is you got to make sure that they get done by one. Can you explain that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a that's a phrase that helps us
Done by One: Work When You Have the Most Energy
SPEAKER_02understand we want the most important things to get done when we have the right amount of energy to get it done. For us, and not for everybody, but for us, typically that means done by one. So it maybe it doesn't take till one, but getting it done by one is where we want to really focus because it just ends up being that for our team, man, we can get a lot done between about eight and one. And then it starts kind of uh getting a little bit more and more difficult.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for us, and you know, some people are like the night owls or whatever, and that's cool. Yeah, it's great. You basically what we're trying to optimize for is you should get your most important work done when you have the most energy. That's right. And for us, everybody on our team has the most energy in the morning time. So we're gonna make sure that everybody is doing their daily three and weekly three stuff when they have the most energy. So we're locking in these like power zone, these prime hours.
SPEAKER_01It doesn't mean that when we have a meeting after one, it's not important. It just means it's not needing my energy at the level of creating things, yeah, uh brainstorming, uh, you know, getting these big or writing that we do.
SPEAKER_00We talk about there's maker time and manager time. Manager time of coordination uh and stuff is really happening in the afternoons and our maker time, the things that we're doing in our daily, three and weekly three, the things that we're creating, yeah, uh is done when we have the most energy,
Plan Tomorrow, Today: The Shutdown Ritual
SPEAKER_00and that's in the morning. Also, um, what we find is that people that do this really, really well, they plan tomorrow today. Yes. They don't start their day with uh uh cloudiness of like, what do I need to work on?
SPEAKER_02No, and honestly, this has been so helpful. So, I mean, we've all worked together for years. Scott, you and I have been working together for 35 years. Eventually, I'm gonna get my stuff done. So the reason why we've been able to stay together is by and large, I get my stuff done and don't need a lot of micromanaging. But I will say personally, for me, it has been very helpful to at the end of the day look at what I must do tomorrow. I sleep better. I don't wake up in the morning uh stressed out, going, oh gosh, what do I need to put on the plan today? Yeah, I already know, I've already decided.
SPEAKER_00Cal Newport calls this a shutdown ritual, which is what you're talking about. Yeah. Is I know how to cleanly turn the power down. I'm not only closing my laptop, I'm closing my work brain down when I have a shutdown ritual of saying, I have completed my work, I am done, and I have clarity about what I'm gonna start with when I open the laptop.
SPEAKER_02I think it's super, super helpful, especially for visionary leaders.
SPEAKER_01Let me just put it that way is now that I do it all the time, I'll go like, man, why is my brain still freaking out over everything? I just feel like I have so much stuff to do. It's because I haven't sat down and reflected on what I did complete today that I said I was gonna do, and what am I gonna do tomorrow? Yeah. Otherwise, you have this open loop going in your head of all the things you've got to do, and it can be overwhelming.
SPEAKER_00Let me show you how to do this shutdown ritual. So you might be looking at, okay, I heard what Mark said. We're gonna do the cycle three, and then we need to go into weekly three of like what do I need to do this week? What do I need to do today now, after I've written my weekly three, and they all need to sync up, right? When do I actually do this stuff? This is when you do that stuff. You do weekly three in your weekly planning, and you do your daily three at the daily shutdown. So let me show you what that looks like. We follow uh R E P S reps. These are our reps that we're putting in every single day and every single week. Yep. I said you need to plan tomorrow today. You also need to plan next week this week. Yeah. It's kind of the same principle here. So you're gonna see that these are two uh repetitive things of reps, and it's at the daily level or the weekly level, but it's pretty much the same question. So I'll just do the daily and you can see the weekly over here. So the reflect starts with what went well today. So this is a place to get into the gratitude uh portion. I also like doing uh shout-outs to people that I worked with today. So I would do like had a great recording session with at Scott and at Mark today. I do the at because we write it in bass camp and I want them to get personally notified that, like, man, I had a great session with you. You're a genius, you're amazing. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And for you, I know that that that's a very important component for you to call out your wins, especially in a season where there's a lot going on, for you to actually recognize, no, I am winning. I am accomplishing some stuff here.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's especially on the evaluate of what I did that day. I want to shout other people, I want to give a shout out to other people, but I also want to say, I am winning because it helps me in my head on this evaluate. Did I do my daily three? Yes, yes, yes. I always go win, win, win. Because what I'm trying to do is to train my brain to think about the gain and not the gap, to train myself to go, wait, I am winning. I am because I always feel like I've got so much stuff to do that I've got to go, I did what I was supposed to do, and I'm winning on this.
SPEAKER_00There's always gonna be more work to do. Uh, there's always gonna be stuff. So, what we do in the evaluate is we're looking at the daily three that we committed to, and we're uh basically giving a color gauge of red, yellow, or green. How did we do on the things that we said we wanted to do today? Right. So, in this, so not every day is just green, green, green, green, green. Like, you know, I don't even want that to be true because I don't want people to just be playing it safe and doing things they know they can do and just are like, I want you to be challenging yourself. I want you to be pursuing things that we've never done before to get results we've never gotten before. And when you're doing things you've never done before, not always every day is gonna go great. So sometimes you do like, I got a green today. I got three greens, I got two yellows and one green. Today was a lot harder than I thought. I overestimated what I could do, you know? So the evaluate is did you or did you not do your daily three? The plan is saying what's tomorrow's daily three, or next week's. And then strengthen is I'm always looking at my own performance and thinking to myself, what are the patterns, what are the habits, what are the things that are happening in the environment that I'm engaging in? And you know what? I'm finding that I get distracted when I go to a coffee shop and there's so many of my friends there, I can't help myself but get distracted. Maybe something I'm gonna try tomorrow is I'm gonna try to wear headphones and do like a pomodoro method. I'm gonna do 45 minutes of intense focus, don't talk to me, and then I'll do a break where I talk to people because that energizes me. It's like, okay, cool, why don't you run that experiment?
Why Going Public With Your Goals Changes Everything
SPEAKER_00That's what we're doing in the strength in. What are things that I can do to improve in this area?
SPEAKER_01So, what I think is the power move on this that's really taken it to another level for us is that we go public with this. So I know what your three are for the week. I know what your three are for today, I know yours, you know mine. We're all because it's on our base camp. Now, you may have to have another way of doing it where I don't know if it's a group chat or whatever you have going on. But we made it public. But it's public. We all know what it is. And then every day in the afternoon in our shutdown, we're reporting on whether we did it or not, and that's public, and I all we all see it.
SPEAKER_02Well, even in the hallway yesterday, you said, Hey, how did you do on that uh that particular thing? Well, the reason you knew that is because you had read my daily three.
SPEAKER_00That said you were working on it.
SPEAKER_02That said I was gonna be working on it, and you said, How did it go? And then we started giggling, and I said, Dude, it didn't. I ended up doing all these other things around it, but I'm gonna get to it. But that's that's super, super.
SPEAKER_01I also want to say on here though, that it's very important that when we're doing that weekly three, like you said, hey, you know, we're we're doing it the day before, the week before. For me, that I think for most of us it's Sunday night for the week that at least that's what I do. Y'all may do it differently, but I think we put it on there like this is what I'm doing this week. We're posting that, and so that's thinking for this week and evaluating the week before.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I find that most people are doing their weekly as a shutdown ritual on Friday or their last day of work, whatever that is, Thursday or whatever. Uh, or they're doing it before the week starts on like a Sunday evening, getting prepared for the week. Um, but I love this public thing that you said, Dad, because I think what happens is what I found is this is I'm not a scientist and I haven't run the official experiment, but what I found is there's a commitment effect. I'm gonna do this because I said I would. And I'm telling you, man, when you have made your commitments public to other people that you're working with and we're all on the same team, people are doing the things that they committed to because they want to be a good team member. I've just seen it skyrocketing.
SPEAKER_02It goes way past, it goes past the accountability as task management, and it really becomes relationship management. Yes. I want the team to be able to trust me in what I say. Know that I'm reliable.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna do what I said I would. Let me say one more thing as being a lead pastor in this uh role that if you're a lead pastor or you're a driver, you're listening to this, you need to model this, not just first of all, you need to model it. Okay, you can't ask everybody else to go public with it and you're not going public with it. Don't go, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah, y'all go do this. Yeah, yeah. The second thing, and by the way, I've had some lead pastors balk on it because they go in, like, I don't want to do that, okay? I don't want to, I don't have to do all that. Okay, y'all do it, but I don't want to. I got my own thing and I'm doing it, okay? Yeah, first of all, you need to model it, okay? But second of all, I promise you this. You think you're productive right now. Try this whole deal of weekly three and daily three and see it go to another level of when you're planning out your week before the week and evaluating it every time, and then you're doing it every day the day before. Here's what I'm gonna do. And then at the end of the day, report it. I promise you, your productivity is gonna go to a whole other level and it's gonna be awesome.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Last thing on this that I think is a pro move for everybody doing this is if you have people reporting to you, because a lot of people ask, like, do I need to read everybody's thing every week? Like every weekly three. I need to read everybody's daily three. No, no, not necessarily, but I would definitely pay attention to the people that are your direct reports. Yes. The people that report to you, I would pay attention to what they're doing. And as a catch, it's not like, hey, you wrote a stupid daily three today. I don't think you should work on like maybe you do that. I I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. What I would do is I would add it as a recurring agenda item as a part of your weekly one-on-ones. A lot of people do one-on-ones with their people that there are their direct reports, right? I would do, hey man, how's it going on your weekly three and daily three? Let's look back on all the stuff that you did. And that's a great time to look at are you committing to things that are chipping away at your bigger goals, or are you just filling up your calendar with whatever's on your calendar? And it's also a great time for the reverse, where the person that's writing those daily threes knowing on Tuesday, I have my one-on-one with Mark, and he's gonna look at it.
SPEAKER_01He's gonna look at it. I mean, think about how powerful that is to just say, and I'm not so it's not like, man, why are you uh helicopter uh doing this? No, no, it's just how we function. Yeah, so it's already built in. Hey, let's look it up. It can be way to go, dude. I'm telling you, look at how we just went to the city. Mark's every day you're winning, you're doing it.
SPEAKER_02And we've always been an organization, we've always been a team that's really outcomes. Yeah. Uh there's very little micromanaging. If we have to micromanage, you're probably not gonna make it on the team. Yeah. But even as an organization and a team that's very outcome focused in the way that we operate, this has helped increase our focus, our alignment, and our relational accountability with each other in product.
SPEAKER_01And what about people who aren't doing well? Like I'm saying, people who are struggling, or they're going like, I don't know why you're on my case all the time. I I just can't get everything done, or whatever. And you're going, like, well, let's go through uh your daily three and weekly three.
SPEAKER_00Do you know who are the people that want a lot of people to be holding them accountable? The people that are winning. Because they want to see, do you see the contribution that I'm making? Right. Most of the time, the people that are complaining about the accountability are the people that are scared of don't want to be held to that standard. And so I think that's something you need to talk about because the winners don't mind you looking at seeing their accomplished checklist. In fact, they kind of get like, why do I keep doing this if you're never gonna tell me I did good? Yeah. So I think in this, I just want to give a final thought here on the weekly three, daily three, because you're thinking to yourself, oh, I don't know if we want to implement this. Maybe. I I what I found in this, like you said, dad, the productivity can go to the next level. And it's not just about you, it's about your whole team doing the same work together
Three Things That Happen When Your Team Does This
SPEAKER_00to chip away at the bigger level goals. But I found when teams implement the weekly three and daily three, there's three huge things that happen that become a part of the cultural norm. Number one is you consistently finish what you start. If you guys have a boy that cries wolf type of culture right now, of like, we say we're gonna do something, but we don't really follow through, or like uh, you know, we can't really finish what we start. It's kind of like the New Year's resolutions type of effect of like we commit big, but honestly, I don't even want to cast this vision again, even though I have this big dream, I feel like God's telling us because I'm scared we're not gonna follow through. Weekly three, daily three really helps you build a cultural norm of we're gonna finish what we start. Number two is projects take a lot less time than you think they do. Most people are terrible at estimating how long things take because they can't really figure out the whole roadmap. They're just thinking, ooh, that feels like a big mountain I have to climb. But when you take these steps, weekly three, daily three, weekly three, daily three, weekly three, daily three, they take a lot less time than you think. And when you build that as a cultural norm, what you figure out inside of your growth plans is you can take on more rocks per cycle. You know what happens when you take on more rocks and you actually get those rocks done because they take less time than you think, is you're able to get to your goals faster than you ever thought you would, which means God can trust you with big dreams because you are faithful with the small things that He's giving you. You know what's the small things? Just a weekly three. Just a daily three. And it's being faithful and faithful and faithful with those weekly three, with those daily threes, that it adds up and compounds over time to create an organization that is more effective than you ever thought was possible in an organization.
