Who Do I Ask When She's Out? Building Systems as a Team of One.
by Ashley Graham-Wilcox
Back in April, I said I'd become a little obsessed with one question: How are people actually getting their work done? Because my To Do list seems to only get longer, as the big projects get moved from one week’s list to the next’s, nudged aside by smaller, time-consuming tasks.
Most mainline church communicators aren't a department: These days, many churches consider themselves lucky if they have one person tasked with communications. We're one person… or one part-time person…. or a parish administrator who also does the website and takes photos when they can… or a volunteer squeezing Instagram in between carpool and dinner. Plenty of us, me included, split the week between more than one church or organization and try to give each one our best.
When you're working like that, "build better systems" sounds like advice for someone else — like, someone with a staff. But I'm coming to believe the opposite: The smaller and more part-time the team, the more the systems matter, because nobody is there to catch what slips on the days you're off (physically or metaphorically).
Here’s how I’m trying to build — and live into — systems that make my work + life more sustainable:
Decide once, then stop deciding. Our Caffeinated Church newsletter has a few standing segments, like Espresso Yourself and Refill & Rest. They're fun for readers, but they're also a gift to me. I never start from a blank page wondering what to put in. The shape is already there, and I just have to fill it. The same goes for our monthly workshops. Administrators' Café happens every month, so I'm not reinventing the calendar each time. I'm just choosing the next topic (Suggestions welcome!).
One good thing, many small pieces. For one church I work with, each Sunday's sermon becomes a podcast, a YouTube video, a newsletter segment, an Instagram and Facebook post, and a few short clips for Reels/Stories. It sounds like a lot — and it is about two hours every Monday — but it’s one source and one routine, done the same way every week. Before you go hunting for new content, see how far the good stuff you already have can stretch.
Make templates for the tired version of you. I've been building a set of brand guidelines and Canva templates for a parish, and I keep thinking about who will actually use them. Not the fresh, caffeinated person on Monday morning, but the person at 9 p.m. on Saturday who just found out the event moved. A good template means that person can make something that looks right without having to think about fonts.
Let tools do some of the heavy lifting. Our 3-part workshop with Katie Allred on AI reminded me that these tools can take real work off a small team's plate, especially drafts and repurposing. They work best when you already know your voice and your process. A system makes the tools more useful, not the other way around.
Build for the days you can’t be there. Some of those days are planned, and plenty aren’t: You come down with the flu the week the stewardship letters are supposed to go out. A family emergency calls you out of town. And sometimes, in the hardest version, the one person who knew where everything lived dies, and the church is left both grieving and guessing the website password. Churches go through this more often than we’d like to think. As a card-carrying member of the millennial sandwich generation, I know that on any given Tuesday, it’s equally likely that a sick kid might need to be picked up from school or a friend who just lost her mom might need someone to call the caterer for the Celebration of Life. So I'm trying to make sure the essentials don't truly depend on me, and sometimes that ‘s as simple as a clear answer to "Who do I ask when she's out?" The system holds the boundary, so I don't have to on willpower alone, never my strong suit.
☕ Final Thought
None of this has made my To Do list any shorter. (Will anything?) But it has changed what's on it, and how I feel at the end of each week. For those of us doing this alone or part-time, good systems are what make the work sustainable, for our churches and for us.
So I'll ask again: How are you getting it done? Bring your best system (or your biggest mess) to an Administrators' Café this fall, or send it my way. I'm still respectfully stealing systems that work.
