I’ve been thinking lately about the vagaries of the average church vision statement. Mission, vision, something that staff and layleaders and parishioners slave over. Is the wording right? Does this get the message across? Is this what we believe?

So as not to pick on any church, I will pick on all, because your vision statement likely suffers from one, if not all three, of these points.

1. Your vision statement is too long: seriously, I’m not going to memorize point 2, subpoint 4.
2. Your vision is vague: it’s a nice idea, but what are we going to do exactly to see this through.
3. Your vision is fluffy: “devoted to”, “passion for”, “pursuit of”. Do you talk like that to your mother? Do you talk like that to your Dad? see item #2.

If I started a church, it necessarily, would have a Vision Statement. I mean, you have to have content for the snazzy website, yeah?

Well here it is:

Jesus.

Concise. Focused. There is nothing you can add to that vision that would make it better. And if you really want to subtract something from it, can you call yourself a gospel-focused church?

This is not meant as complaining or even really critiquing, but a reminder.  We rightly think about what we are doing, we pray about where we are going, and we seek and run after God’s heart. But are we letting our vision get in the way of God’s vision?

“And this wise man asked me to stop. He said, Stop asking God to bless what you’re doing. Get involved in what God is doing — because it’s already blessed.”
- Paul “Bono Vox” Hewitt, U2

Jesus, be Thou my vision. Peace.

About a year or so ago a friend sent me a Time Magazine spread comparing morning people to night owls. And though I write this at 2am, it seems I am neither.

I have come to the conclusion that my most productive hours are between 10 and 2. That’s between 10am and 2pm and between 10pm and 2am. Those are my sweet spots. You see it’s not that I am this anti-corporate hate-all-things-9-to-5 Four Hour Work Week reader. Ok, I kind of am. But it’s the way I’m wired… and could be the way you’re wired too.

I just don’t believe we were meant to be enclosed in our cubicles 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Luckily I work with a team that spans 4 countries, almost covers all 24-hours of the day between just 10 people, has part-timers, a full-time 4 day work week-er, and a fearless leader that has zero reservations about me working from home/remotely/in my pajamas until a client meeting.

My proposal is an exercise in flexibility. The split-day shift. 4 to 6 hours in the office followed by 4 to 6 hours at home. Think of the benefits.

• increased productivity – I know you’re all falling asleep after lunch just like me. If you’re working 12 hour days there’s a good chance 3 to 4 of them are wasted on trying to get moving. How about stopping during the day so you can tackle a problem with a clear head? How about just cutting the fluff time out and working only when you’re focused?
• less traffic – Everyones productive sweet spots vary. That means in a split-day shift not everyone is rushing to work at exactly the same times.
• healthier families – Imagine dropping your kids off at school and picking them up after your first shift and just hanging out for the afternoon. You can’t do that with your 14 hour solid work day, but you could accomplish it with a 7/7 split.

So I’m an idealist and as much as I would love to see the above things, I realize this won’t work for everyone. Not everyone works behind a computer where they can just pick up their work and go anywhere. It wouldn’t make sense for the financial markets to open and close and open and close. But here’s to hoping I will always have a job and that some day you’ll get a job where a split-day shift works…

Freemium: one of the single most ridiculous Web 2.0 terms ever.

You may not be familiar with the term freemium, but… you are. The term coined by Web 2.0-er Jarid Lukin, is articulated by a venture capitalist as giving “your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.”

Along with a plethora of mobile apps, Skype, Flickr, and Dropbox all operate on a freemium model. And with the success of the freemium model for companies like these, many startups have followed suit.

There’s just one big hurdle to jump.

Skype, Flickr, and Dropbox all offer awesome products. In fact, I am or have been a premium subscriber to each of those services at some point in time. The product rocks. What you get free already has an intrinsic value.

But the issue for so many web startups is that their free sucks. When your free product is worth exactly what your users are paying (pssssst, that’s nothing, worthless, zilch, you suck at life and you should end yourself) why would a user pay more for expanded features? You haven’t proven your worth to them, and the added benefits to subscribing to your Awesomr Pro Premium Plan become nothing more than bullet points on a subscription page.

As a web developer I have sorted through lots and lots of other people’s crappy code. I once paid for a PHP Classifieds Script that was full of invalid markup and a dysfunctional payment module. The solution seemed to be to pay even more for a third-party payment integrator. When I paid it seemed the integrator did not work either and when I emailed the developer I was offered a lame explanation and finger pointing at PayPal. Coincidentally, a disclaimer was placed on this fellows site the next day stating that the module didn’t actually work.

Tonight, I was once again faced with PHP scripts. In the course of hooking up a free add-on module, I realized that the company offering the module had purposely left out some features with the hopes that you would upgrade to a $40 “Gold Package” or spring for a $199 “Developer License”. “Your code is messy and really God awful”, I thought. “Why would I pay you?” So within 15 minutes I had hacked around to reach what the Gold Package would have supposedly given me and 2 hours later I was cleaning up code that I am fairly certain would not have been fixed with the Developer License.

So to all you want to be startup crazies: freemium only works when your free is premium, and not when your premium should be free.