Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard who researches creativity in business found, “Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”

This makes sense.

It is why we love checklists, crossing things off and that feeling of a “zero inbox.”

For many of us though, depending on what you do, this is difficult.

If you are a stay at home mom, making progress on meaningful work is challenging as laundry and dishes pile up.

If you are creative, there is always one more tweak to the design, one more thing to check out.

As a pastor, everything I do is meaningful as it relates to people and sermons (or creating content).

The problem is that you can spend 6 – 8 hours working on a sermon and only have read some commentaries and things are fuzzy in your mind.

For many of us, the day ends with a feeling of “incomplete.” We look back and think, “I know I sent out emails, had conversations, sat in meetings, but what did I accomplish?”

One of the things that have helped me is setting up benchmarks around my tasks and goals.

For example, if you have 50 unread emails, make a goal of getting through 25 of them.

For a sermon, instead of making my only goal completing the sermon (which every pastor knows isn’t done until you preach it), make a goal of reading X number of commentaries, clarifying your big idea, working out your introduction or conclusion.

Doing this helps you see significant movement on your tasks.