I mentioned last week that I’m working on a book on productivity, and that I’d give more details soon. Here’s a 40,000 foot, very rough, initial snapshot.
Some people might ask, “another book on productivity?” Rest assured, I’m not interested in repeating cliches. I’ll be making connections that I don’t see other people making, but which I think are absolutely necessary to how we think about productivity.
I want to do two things in this book. First, I want to give the theological basis for productivity. The question I’m asking is “how should we think about productivity as Christians?” There are some very surprising things here. More specifically, I’m going to mine the relationship between productivity and the gospel, so that we can have a gospel-oriented approach to our productivity. Believe me, this matters (and I’ll be showing why).
After giving the theological foundations for how to think about productivity, I’m then going to give a practical, simple approach to managing your life and work effectively. In particular, I’m going to try to present an overall approach that solves some of the snags that you run into with both GTD and Franklin-Covey (the two most well-known approaches to productivity).
Both of those approaches are fantastically helpful. But both have a few snags that can easily lead you to spend more time than you ought to managing your system rather than actually getting things done or just taking time to think and be with people. Maybe these snags flow from how we use them (or how I have used them!) or the way technology has increased our pace in just the last few years, but regardless, I think that we have need now for an updated approach (that is kept as simple as possible).
I’ll be covering some of the highlights of this in my workshop this fall at the Desiring God National Conference. You can glean part of my perspective from my title there: Zealous for Good Works: Rethinking Productivity in Light of Justification by Faith Alone.