This is really fantastic. It is well worth the 4 minutes. You can learn more about the Summit and find more videos here.
6 Lessons from What’s Best Next
I really enjoyed this review of What’s Best Next by Luke Simmons over at Faithful and Fruitful, a blog dedicated to equipping ministry leaders to be more faithful and fruitful.
He so well captures six key lessons from the book, which I underscore:
- The gospel makes productivity about love
- Everyday life provides many opportunities for good works that honor God
- Know what’s important and put it first
- Systems trump intentions
- Weekly planning is crucial
- Plan your day
Being Gospel-Centered at Work
More and more people are asking today the important question, “How does the gospel relate to my work?”
There is a lot that can be said on this, and for the best treatment out there I recommend Tim Keller’s excellent book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work.
But for immediate application, if you are looking for a few simple ways to begin letting the gospel impact your work right now, here are two things that go to the heart of it:
- Do your work from acceptance with God, not for acceptance with God. Realize you are fully accepted in Christ apart from anything you do, through faith alone. Hence, you do not have to fall into the grueling race of working to prove yourself or validate your worth.
- Do your work for the good of others. Because God accepts us apart from our works, we are free to truly do it for others. This is a simple but radical shift. It means seeing your work as a way of serving and benefitting people, not just a way to make money or accomplish your goals. Do your work truly from love, from a good will toward others, just as everything in the Christian life is to be done from love (1 Corinthians 16:14). This is what it means to be “rendering service with a good will” (Ephesians 6:7).
Emailing with Empathy
This is a great post at the 99U. It starts:
When speaking face-to-face, it’s the verbal and nonverbal social cues that allow us to gauge the best way to arrange our wording in order to get our point across clearly. In email, we don’t get such real-time feedback. Once our message is in the hand of the recipient, we’ve lost all control.
This, of course, often leads to miscommunications, guessed intentions, and a total unawareness of whether an email was typed in red-faced anger or while sipping a martini by a pool. What really leads to those miscommunications is a lack of empathy….
“The most important thing is understanding each other’s language,” founder Drew D’Agostino said. “It’s not me completely adapting the way I communicate with you, but being aware and considerate of how you communicate best. Everybody’s different, and if we can just learn to recognize the communication styles of each other we can create much clearer interactions and productive communications.”
So how do we write emails that enable empathy—especially with people we might have never met in person before? And how can we be more empathetic when reading the emails of others? We asked D’Agostino to share Crystal’s best tips on how to bring more empathy to emails; both in the ones we receive and in the ones we send.
4 Reasons Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Are Making the World a Better Place
This is an excellent post by Michael Hyatt. He begins:
It’s popular to complain about social media and talk about how it is destroying our culture, but what if the exact opposite is true?
I joined Twitter on April 6, 2008. A friend urged me to check it out. He was already using it and loved it. So after some initial eye-rolling, I tried it and fell in love with the medium too.
It wasn’t long at all before I discovered that Twitter is one of the most powerful communication tools ever invented. It also wasn’t long before I got an earful from critics who said social media was bad news.
He goes on to discuss some of that pushback, and then shows how the critics had it backward. He gives four reasons that, contrary to the criticisms that social media is making the world more selfish, it is actually making the world more generous and a better place.
8 Characteristics of GLS Leaders
As many of you know, the Global Leadership Summit was last week. It looks like it was another great year, as always.
Here is a great summary of a message Bill Hybels gave on the types of leaders the Global Leadership Summit is seeking to raise up.
I think he gave it before the actual summit to a meeting with their international partners. Nonetheless, it is useful for everyone as it summarizes very well the vision of the entire summit.
8 Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers
It’s from a few years ago, but it remains very solid stuff. This is a quick, excellent summary of what good management is.
Crowdfunding Project #3: Short Ebook on Gospel-Driven Productivity
For the last few days, I’ve been taking you back into the kitchen of our GoFundMe campaign. So far we’ve looked at the first two projects this is helping support: an online course on gospel-driven productivity, and the online build-out of the resource library.
The third project is a short ebook on gospel-driven productivity — that is, on how to get things done, with less friction and frustration, but in a gospel-centered way (which most current resources on productivity completely leave out).
My book What’s Best Next gives the comprehensive perspective on this. But people have also asked for a shorter, quick hit version of those concepts so they can get going quickly. That’s what this ebook will aim to do. It will be about 25-40 pages, giving an overview of what it means to understand productivity in a biblical way, and then outlining the simple systems you can put in place to keep your focus on the most important things and get them done.
If you have already given to the campaign, thank you! And if you’re still thinking about it or just hearing about it now for the first time, your involvement would be a huge help. You can be involved by giving at the GoFundMe page and/or sharing it by email, twitter, or Facebook. Thank you so much!
Crowdfunding Project #2: The Online Resource Library
Thank you to everyone who has been giving to and sharing our online funding campaign. Please keep it up! Even a simple tweet or Facebook share makes a big difference.
Yesterday I took you back into the kitchen with the online course. Today I want to do the same with a second project, the online resources.
Expanding the Resource Library
You may have noticed the “resource library” section in the global navigation for this site. That is where I post more detailed and long-term articles, as opposed to the general blog posts which are more front-burner and timely (for the most part).
You may also have noticed that there are more categories than there are resources. That’s because this section is under construction. I have between 600 – 1,000 articles I want to post. These articles are on all aspects of theology, leadership, productivity, and management, from a biblical point of view. Once we get them up, the site will hopefully be able to serve you as a large on-going resource site on these subjects, similar to how Desiring God is such a helpful resource site on theology.
What Kinds of Articles?
Someone recently asked me, “how can you possibly have 1,000 unpublished articles?” The answer is threefold.
First, I used to answer theological correspondence for John Piper. I kept many of the more substantial responses I wrote for people on important subjects in theology and Christian living. That totals about 300-400 I think. (Since some of these are short, I don’t always include them in the full count of articles, hence I usually am thinking in terms of 600 articles; but there are about 1,000 units.) These emails were written before this blog, which is why they are not up yet.
Second, in college I wrote a bunch of articles on all aspects of Christian theology and apologetics as I was learning those subjects. I put those articles on the website Justin Taylor and I started together in college, way back in the early days of the Internet. They have been there ever since, and my plan is to move them over here so that everything is in one spot.
Third, over the last 8 years or so I’ve written many articles on leadership and management from a biblical viewpoint, as I have been developing my thinking on the subjects. These articles outline biblical leadership philosophies that also utilize the best of secular research (such as Jim Collins and others), and also develop systems for implementing these principles in your organization (performance management, hiring, meetings that are better than movies, and many other things).
You can see an example of what I’m doing in the “web strategy” category, where I’ve already posted most of my resources on that subject.
I’m also posting the audio and video of my messages over the years, whenever I have it, so this will be multimedia as well.
A Comprehensive Tool for Free
My plan is to get all of these resources posted so that this site can be a comprehensive tool for you, serving you both with fresh content through the blog and a large amount of ongoing foundational content through the resource library. And I want all of this available to you for free.
To make it available for free, of course, costs time and money on my side, getting things posted and set up. Which is a big reason for the financial appeal. If this vision is exciting and compelling to you, would you consider a gift?
Crowdfunding Project #1: The Online Video Course
Yesterday I announced this funding campaign to invite your help in supporting these three projects:
- An online productivity course helping individuals and teams who learn best through audio/video content
- A new, short ebook on Gospel-Driven Productivity that will be more accessible than What’s Best Next
- The posting of over 600 articles on theology, leadership, and productivity to this site
Today I’m going to bring you into the kitchen and share about the online course. Tomorrow I’ll tell you more about the book.
The Basic Concept
People have a variety of learning styles, and many learn best when they can interact with the content in multiple ways. The online course will be designed with this in mind.
In the course, I’ll walk through everything you need to know to reduce stress and increase productivity in a session-by-session format. I’m excited to be able to incorporate a lot of principles and practical content that I couldn’t fit into the book.
Each lesson will accent application; it will be designed to help you absorb and integrate the content as effectively as possible. And, I’m designing it (of course!) to be able to fit into your busy schedules. So you’ll learn more, in an efficient way, and get a jumpstart in applying it in your life.
Think of it like a training program for your job, except you don’t have to take an extensive amount of time away and can do it at your own pace. Plus, it will be a lot of fun! I don’t like boring things, so I’m going to work hard to make this course engaging and interesting.
Productivity is More than Tips and Tools
A central feature of the course is that productivity is about way more than tips and tools. Those things are important, and I will teach many of them, but productivity is actually first a result of worldview. It needs to be on a biblical foundation and pursued with consistent biblical principles. The course will provide those biblical worldview foundations so that you can be truly productive, as well as give you the tips and tricks and tactics that can really help you get moving.
Free Access for a Gift of $100
Your financial support is an essential part to helping me produce this content swiftly. So if you can, check out the GoFundMe page to learn more about the campaign and how you can support.
Any gift over $25 will get you a free copy of the book (more on this tomorrow), and gifts of $100 or more will trigger free access to the online course when it’s ready (estimated value of $250).