www.pianoplayingdave.com

I have always been the quintessential night owl. I pulled more all-nighters in college than anyone else I knew. I slept on the floor of my office countless hours while editing the Tsunami and Sudan videos. And I did it all without hardly an ounce of caffeine.

I never drink pop or coffee, so where did my late-night fuel come from you ask? From being in the zone of course. When the distractions of the day die down, when phone calls and e-mails stop coming in, when everyone else is in bed, and it’s only me and my video editing software awake in the world…that’s when the magic happens. I get in the zone and I get it done. Some of my best work has emerged from this 10 pm to 2 am creative golden hour…

There is no question that my most natural rhythm is to edit late at night. But this natural rhythm kind of butts heads against the rest of the world. For instance, I have recently made relationships and local church involvement a higher priority, and this is resulting in a lot of hanging out with friends at night, playing in a worship band at night, etc., etc. These things are great, but the only problem is that if I’m in a life rhythm where I work late, sleep in, don’t show up to work until late, and work late again….then suddenly my personal life and work life are totally butting heads against each other in the evening, and at a certain point, one of them loses out to the other. For my first year and a half or so working at EFCA, my personal life was losing out. For the past month and a half, my work life was losing out. I was just trying to do two things at once, and it wasn’t working.

This was frustrating me like crazy, and I didn’t know what to do about it. So this weekend I contacted a couple good friends to get their feedback on what to do about this nighttime dilemma. And you’ll never guess what they said…

“Why don’t you start working during normal business hours?”

What?! Normal business hours?! What kind of nonsense is that? Seriously!

Well, maybe there is a reason that “normal business hours” exist, and maybe my dilemma hits it on the nose. I’m just a bachelor with no family responsibilities whatsoever, and if it’s already this hard for me to balance a personal and work life in the evenings, then imagine how much harder it will be a couple years down the line when I’m married. And imagine how much harder it will be a few later when I have kids…

No question…if I’m going to be a present husband and father, I need to get a handle on this now.

And so yes, I can hardly believe I’m writing this, but I’m actually trying to shift my life rhythm to one where I actually show up to work at 8 or 9 am, and where I work until dinner time.

A couple steps I’m taking to make this exciting journey into the mysterious realm people call a “normal life” …

1. I’m talking through my schedule with a few people to help me get more of a handle on it and process it.

2. And for the past couple days, I have been logging my every activity the entire day. I write down what I do, how long I do it, and then just a few comments like, “I was in the zone” or “I was zoning out.” The point of this is to help me analyze trends in my day…see if there’s time earlier in the day that I can better capitalize on….basically, I’m just trying to figure out, “Is it possible for me to get in the zone during the normal working hours?” Surprisingly, I found that when I showed up to work by 10:00 this morning, I kind of got in a little bit of a zone the first couple hours. And then come 7:00 in the evening, I actually started zoning out big time. So maybe there is hope in the long run…

In the mean time, I’m honestly not too worried about getting a handle on this too soon here. Growth sometimes comes in spurts, but a lot of times it is just gradual. And though I would love to just say, “OK, I’m going to start working from 8-6 every day henceforth, no exceptions,” I know that I could not effectively make that shift over night. But I truly believe that if I am diligent about talking through my schedule with others, analyzing it, and trying to maximize its daily effectiveness…then I really could get to this point in the next few months. And some day my wife and kids will thank me for it.

Signing off,
The Artist Formerly Known as Night Owl

Ad-vo-cate – noun – a person who pleads on someone else’s behalf.

I just realized earlier this week that I think my greatest passion in life is advocacy. Sure, I love traveling to exotic places, filming different people, capturing events on camera…but when it comes down to it, when I sit down to edit the things I have filmed, the films that I get most excited about are the ones where I am not promoting a program, or promoting an idea, but where I am promoting people – telling their story and calling others to take action on their behalf.

I recently heard Gary Haugen from the International Justice Mission speak. Simply put, his organization saves people. They investigate where children are bound in sex slavery, and they free them. It’s a simple, straight-forward concept. People are in slavery. International Justice Mission frees them.

And yet despite its simplicity, I sat in silence for probably 10 to 15 minute after Gary spoke. I could not get over the absolute purity, rightness, and power of this idea: children are in slavery – and we free them. Slavery. Freedom.

After Gary spoke, the worship band at the conference played a song with the following lyrics…

“Our Savior, He can move the mountains,
My God is mighty to save, mighty to save.
Forever, author of salvation,
He rose and conquered the grave, Jesus conquered the grave.”

…and as they played this song, images of child slaves around the world being freed played on the screen. It was so unbelievably moving.

I think maybe this captures why I am so passionate about advocacy. That somehow through my films, I am fostering this to happen. It might not be a slave/free dichotomy. But it may be starving/fed, naked/clothed, orphaned/loved. If I can step up to the plate on someone else’s behalf and cause this to happen, what greater thing can there be in the world? What more powerful thing can there be?

I often get overwhelmed by the mess of the world. The deception, the hypocrisy, the selfishness. It’s in all of us, and we’re so capable of treating others like dirt. I watched “United 93″ last night, and when the terrorists took over the plane, I literally started shaking and sobbing. In July, when Israel started bombing Lebanon, I was infuriated. Right now, I’m struggling with unwarranted anger at a number of people, and I’m frustrated to no end with myself about this. Why is there this angst, this groaning of creation, this fury?

Yet somehow in the midst of all this turmoil, when I simply quiet my soul and reflect on the notion of a single person moving from a place of bondage to a place of freedom, I know that this is right. And if I can help make this happen for others, there is no greater thing. How can I most effectively devote my life to this?

My Sudan video has definitely been my biggest advocacy film yet, but I’m excited to do a couple more of them next year. One in the Middle East, and one on AIDS orphans in Africa. I am particularly excited about the AIDS orphan video, if for no other reason than that I will be living out James 1:27 – to look after widows and orphans in their distress.

With having such a passion for advocacy, I’m just so thankful that Christ is an advocate for me. Sometimes I feel like such a mess, and yet Christ is there to plead on my behalf, and free me. What comfort.

Have you ever heard that analogy asking how many stones you can fit into a jar? First you put in a couple big stones, and it would seem the jar is full. But soon you realize that you can subsequently fit many small pebbles in the jar around those big stones. Again it seems that the jar is now full. However you can still fit a couple scoops of sand around the small pebbles. And then lastly, you can still fit water in the jar.

The point of the story is that if you start with your “big stones” and focus on them, and then add the smaller items later, you can easily fit the big stones and a number of smaller items into the jar. But if you started with the sand and pebbles, and then tried to put the big stones in, it’d never work. Big stones can’t fit around the cracks of pebbles as easily as pebbles can fit around the cracks of big stones.

The same goes for our lives and how much we do and accomplish in a given day/month/year. The stones are like tasks we are trying to accomplish, and the jar is our time. Focus on the big tasks, and you’ll get them done. Focus on the small tangent tasks and they’ll eat up so much of your time that you’ll never get the big tasks done.

I had heard this analogy so many times in the past, that it was almost getting to the point of being cliche for me. However, the analogy took on a whole new meaning when I actually started asking myself what the “big stones” in my life were, and if I was actually focusing on them or letting little pebbles run the show.

Back in January of this year, I decided to get proactive about my big stones, and selected 10 Key Result Areas (KRAs) for the year. These were nothing more than my carefully thought-through, carefully prayed-over chief goals for the year – the things that I absolutely had to accomplish by December 31, 2006, no questions asked.

A few of my 2006 Key Result Areas:

1. Get involved in a local church, stay involved, and join a worship band there. Check.

2. Become competent at scoring movies with Logic Pro, my music composition program of choice. Check.

3. Create a rock-solid financial budget which I abide by. Check.

4. Spend quality time with life-long friends on a regular basis. Continually making this a priority.

There are many more KRAs that I had for this year, covering all aspects of life (mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, recreational, relational, etc.), but this is just a small sampling of them. The main theme of my 2006 KRAs was simply to find balance and a degree of structure in my life. 2005 was a year of flying by the seat of my pants as I traveled all over the world, and pulled endless all-nighters at the office. 2006 has intentionally been a more low-key year in order to build a more solid foundation moving forward. In 2007, I will begin traveling a lot again, but I will be more grounded and effective this time around.

All in all, it is amazing to see how many “big stones” I have actually accomplished by carefully choosing my big goals for the year, by regularly referring to them, and by having several people hold me accountable to them. My KRAs just become a natural grid through which I view any task that comes before me – “Does this fit into my KRAs or not?” If it does, I jump into it with full abandon – if it doesn’t, I simply don’t make it a top priority. Do that for 10-12 months, and you’ll be amazed how many of your big goals you actually start accomplishing.

If anyone is interested to learn more about my approach to KRAs, feel free to shoot me an e-mail, and I can let you know more about them.

-Dave

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cambrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh?