Welcome back to our three-part series on Knowing Your WIP. If you’re just joining us, go back and check out Part 1 and Part 2—otherwise, none of this will make sense! Also, if you haven’t completed the Fresh Challenges in those posts, now’s a great time to pause and do that first. You’ll need what you learned for this next step.
First off, if you’ve stuck with this all the way through—thank you. This is where everything comes together. My hope is that this post helps you better understand how you work, how to manage your priorities, and ultimately, how to feel less stressed in the process.
In Part 1, your Fresh Challenge was to list all of your Just In Time work. These are the things you need to do right when you need to do them. You can’t really do them early, and you definitely can’t be late—because ministry, events, and Sundays don’t wait. Over the last few weeks, you’ve been linking those tasks and tracking how long they take each week.
Now grab that list—you’ll need it.
In Part 2, your Fresh Challenge was to identify the projects, events, trainings, etc. that you’re currently working on or plan to do in the next few months. You also estimated how long each of those would take. These stickies (or digital notes) are where your Work In Progress (WIP) comes from—but they don’t determine your WIP limit.
Grab those stickies, too.
But before we dive in, we need to cover one last concept: Priorities and the Backlog.
At first glance, everything might feel important. But the truth is, not all tasks are equal. Part of managing your time well is learning to prioritize. One helpful framework for evaluating your work is to look at it through the lens of:
- Value – What brings the most impact or benefit?
- Time – How long will it take?
- Effort – How much energy or focus does it require?
This matters because:
- Some tasks take a lot of time but require very little effort.
- Some tasks bring high value but demand both time and effort.
- Some things are just time drains—low value, high effort.
For your Just in Time work, the goal is to complete the highest-priority tasks each week. For example, sending lesson emails to your volunteers may be a low-effort task, but it’s high value—without it, they’re not prepared to teach. Whether that takes you 5 minutes or 50 depends on your admin style, but if it takes longer, it should be scheduled early in the week so it’s not forgotten.
The same principle applies to project work. You have to ask: What’s needed most right now? A policy update that affects your whole team or an event coming up in 30 days is probably a higher priority than something with no deadline. But you can’t do everything, so you need a Backlog. This is a place to store your unstarted projects or work, to draw from when you have time. It should be an organized list based on your priorities and anything new that comes up should be placed in the Backlog first.
Let’s get hands-on.
Now that you have your work listed and time estimates assigned, it’s time to organize and prioritize. You can download the Two Week Sprint Worksheet or download all the Know Your WIP Series Worksheets to help you bring it all together.
Here’s how:
- Create Your Schedule View: Print off a simple two-week calendar or use a planner. Assume a typical 40-hour workweek (Monday–Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.). This becomes your Sprint—a focused two-week window to plan and complete your work.
- Break the Week into Focus Blocks: Divide each day into 2–3 hour blocks. These are your deep work sessions where you’ll focus without multitasking.
- Schedule Your JIT Work First: Add the high-priority Just in Time tasks early in the week (Monday–Wednesday). Your energy’s higher, and you’ll get ahead of last-minute surprises.
- Group Similar Tasks Together: Reduce task-switching by batching similar tasks. This increases your efficiency and mental flow.
- 5. Account for Non-Negotiables: Block out time for meetings, Sunday ministry prep, lunch, breaks—anything already on your calendar.
- Look at What’s Left: The remaining open blocks are your WIP window—the space you can use for project work.
Now ask: What projects from my list can I realistically complete in this available time?
- Choose Only What Fits: If you have 20 hours left, only choose projects that total 20 hours or less.
- Leave Buffer Time: Don’t max out your calendar. If you have 20 free hours, only plan for 16. Use the rest as a buffer—for emergencies, interruptions, or conversations that matter.
- Backlog the Rest: Move remaining stickies (projects) to a “Backlog” pile. Sort them by priority. You’ll pull from this list in future sprints.
By the end of this exercise, you’ve officially applied a WIP limit—congrats! 🎉
You’ve:
- Scheduled your highest-priority Just in Time work
- Chosen only the project work you can realistically complete
- Moved the rest into a prioritized Backlog
From here on out, whenever you finish early or gain time, you can go to your Backlog and pull in the next-best priority item.
Fresh Challenge
Now repeat this process across a few sprints. You’ll learn what’s working, what keeps getting in your way, and how to adjust your expectations. You may find that some projects span more than one sprint, and that’s completely fine. This isn’t about perfection—it’s about sustainability.
And if you want to dive deeper, look into Agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and the concept of Work In Progress (WIP). These tools can give even more structure to the system you’re building.
Let’s keep growing—one sprint at a time.
Fresh Ministry Consulting 