Thinking long term

The temptation in ministry is always to focus on the immediate at the expense of the strategic or the long term. The immediate challenges of today and later in the week need to be attended too! We cannot spend our days with our head in the clouds, dreaming of a wonderful future whilst the tasks of today stack up. And yet what mostly happens is that the dreaming, the long term thinking disappears. Which is deeply problematic. Without that intentional long term thinking we can lose sight of why we are doing what we are doing. So we need to do both, we need to attend to the here and now and we need to from time to time lift our view to the horizon. How do we do this practically?