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Archives for March 2011

Unmanaged Time Often Flows Toward Your Weaknesses

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A good point from Gordon MacDonald in Ordering Your Private World:

Because I had not adequately defined a sense of mission in the early days of my work, and because I had not been ruthless enough with my weaknesses, I found that I normally invested inordinately large amounts of time doing things I was not good at, while the tasks I should have been able to do with excellence and effectiveness were preempted. . . .

So why did I spend almost 75 percent of my available time trying to administrate and relatively little time studying and preparing to preach when I was younger? Because unseized time will flow in the direction of one’s relative weaknesses. Since I knew I could preach an acceptable sermon with a minimum of preparation, I was actually doing less than my best in the pulpit. That is what happens when one does not evaluate this matter and do something drastic about it.

Getting the Little Stuff Done First May be Satisfying, But It's the Wrong Road

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Julie Morgenstern, in Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work:

Warming up your day by knocking off a bunch of quick, easy tasks is tempting, but it can provide you with a false sense of accomplishment.

The danger in this approach is that the bulk of your energy gets depleted over a bunch of insignificant tasks. First there’s email, then a couple of phone calls, then a meeting, then huddles with some direct reports and a quick sign-off on a project budget — then, guess what? It’s time for lunch!

To warm up after lunch, you start off with another round of email, then a client eats up your mid afternoon, and suddenly it’s 5 pm — and you never got around to, much less finished, the grant proposal — your day’s one-step-from-the-revenue-line priority. In fact, you can’t even remember what you did get done.

Solution: You must retrain yourself to choose the important over the quick, the tough over the easy, no matter how intimidating the project may be. Starting too far from the revenue line prevents you from producing the volume of revenue-generating work that your company actually relies on and pays you for.

Working from the bottom up puts you in a risky position — when that inevitable crisis appears, . . . how can you possibly handle it when you haven’t even gotten to your most important assignment yet!

Completely two or three tasks that directly make or save your company money far outweighs finishing twenty things that are three steps from the revenue line.

"My Boss Won't Let Me"

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Seth Godin, from Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?:

The single biggest objection to changing the way you approach your job is the certainty that your boss won’t let you do anything but be a cog.

Nine times out of ten, this isn’t true. One time out of ten, you should get a new job.

Let’s take the rare case first.

If you actually work for an organization that insists you be mediocre, that enforces conformity in all its employees, why stay? What are you building?

The work can’t possibly be enjoyable or challenging, your skills aren’t increasing, and your value in the marketplace decreases each day you stay there. And if history is any guide, your job there isn’t as stable as you think, because average companies making average products for average people are under huge strain.

Sure, it might be comfortable, and yes, you’ve been brainwashed into believing that this is what you’re supposed to do, but no, it’s not what you deserve.

The other case, though, is the common one. You think your boss won’t let you, at the very same moment that your boss can’t understand why you won’t contribute more insight or enthusiasm. In most non-cog jobs, the boss’s biggest lament is that her people won’t step up and bring their authentic selves to work.

What is the Wasted Life?

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John Piper, in Don’t Waste Your Life:

God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion.

God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.

Why Productivity Matters in Ministry: The Difference Between Seminary and Actual Ministry

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On Wednesday I asked what one thing about Getting Things Done you found to be most helpful. Thank you so much for all of your thoughts (both in the comments and by email). They have been really helpful!

Here is one comment from a reader that I especially wanted to highlight:

The whole concept/category of “knowledge work” was really helpful—never heard or thought along those lines previously. It helped to clarify practically why I struggle the way I do with productivity (my own heart issues obviously not addressed).

I wondered why I felt so incredibly productive in seminary and, well, the total opposite in ministry. Seminary was incredibly challenging, but it was so simple: just do what the professors assigned. All my tasks were clearly spelled out. Not so in ministry. As a self-employed “knowledge worker” with nobody handing me a syllabus, I was in quite a different position, and up to that point, I wasn’t able to clearly articulate why I felt so unproductive.

The label didn’t cure me—just clarified the problem. It helped to realize that I probably wasn’t the only one struggling.

I love this comment because of how it gets at one of the core challenges that I think many people in ministry experience — namely, the transition from seminary to full-time ministry and work.

This is the transition that actually got me interested in productivity in the first place. I went through seminary pretty fast — at one point I took 48 hours (= 16 classes) in a 9 month period. I did this without using a planner or even calendar (although I did write down a list of assignments once). One semester I completed all of my assignments within the first six weeks, and then had the rest of the semester almost entirely free from obligations (other than going to class; I used the time to work more and, I think, do more reading or something). I had never even heard of David Allen, and life worked great.

But then we moved back to Minneapolis (we had been at Southern Seminary in Louisville) and I started full-time at Desiring God. And my first task was not so small: launch a nationwide radio program while managing the church and conference bookstores at the same time. I found that my default practices for productivity just didn’t work. I realized I had to be more intentional and deliberate about how I got things done.

I had always read a lot. My focus up to that point had almost exclusively been theology. So I said to myself, “I’ll try to do the same thing with productivity — I’ll find some key books to read and try to develop an overall approach and system to keep track of what I have to do and stay focused on what is most important.”

At Desiring God, some people were reading Getting Things Done. So I picked that up. I also noticed that in the employee handbook for the church that they encouraged the use of Franklin Planners and would even pay $50 a year for you to get one and replace the pages each year. So I got one of those as well. This led to developing my own approach that merged what I took to be the best insights from David Allen and Stephen Covey, along with some of my own thinking.

Anyway, that’s how I got into productivity. I think the struggle I had is something that many other people also have experienced and continue to experience. And that’s why I resonate with Andrew’s comment above so much

Persevering, Not Just Enduring, to the End

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Jerry Bridges, in Stand: A Call for the Endurance of the Saints:

The word perseverance is very similar in meaning to the word endurance, and often we equat the two. But there can be a subtle difference.

The word endure means to stand firm, and that is the theme of this book. We are to stand firm. We’re not to be carried about with every wind of doctrine theologically. We’re not to go off to this and that and the other. We’re to stand firm.

But we need to do more than stand. We need to move forward. When Paul says, “I have finished the race” (2 Tim 4:7), obviously he was talking about motion. And perseverance means to keep going in spite of obstacles.

So when Paul says “I have finished the race,” basically he was saying, “I have persevered.” We do need to stand firm, and Scripture over and over exhorts us to stand firm. But remember, that’s more than just standing still. If we get that idea, we’ve missed the point.

We must move forward. We must persevere. We must be like Paul and say “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

A Chance to Be in My Book: What is the Best Thing You've Learned from Getting Things Done?

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A lot of people that I talk to say “I can’t do everything David Allen outlines in Getting Things Done, but I took away a few key ideas that have made a big impact.” And the main take-away they describe is usually very helpful.

So I’m thinking of having a call-out in the book that highlights the top things various people have taken away from Getting Things Done. I’ve been asking this question of some people I’ve interviewed for the book, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.

Just shoot me an email or add a comment below answering this question: “What is the most helpful thing you learned from Getting Things Done?”

Pursue Excellence, Not Being Elite

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A good interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

Crouch argues that “everyone should strive to make culture by humbly mastering a field that intersects with the world’s brokenness.” And he believes just that: everyone can make culture, not just the elite.

That seems to be a major difference between his book and James Davidson Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.

Wasn’t Mark using street language so as to communicate with common folks, not elites? Does the difference between street and elite play into the difference between your book, Culture Making, and James Davidson Hunter’s book To Change the World? He seems to argue that elites make culture, and you write more about everyone making culture. Is that a valid distinction? Yes, that’s so true. Dr. Hunter and I have different instincts. When you ask when I first made culture, I don’t think of my first publication in a national magazine. I think of the “ABC Song,” because that’s culture. Where does cultural influence come from? It’s very mysterious—the Holy Spirit can work through a lot of different vessels.

I think that’s a key difference.

I respect James Davidson Hunter’s book very much, and learned a lot from it. But I also think he makes some critical mistakes, chief among them being that he fails to take into sufficient account the changes brought about by the rise of the Internet. In many respects I think a helpful companion book would be Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?.

Coughing is Heckling

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A good post from Seth Godin the other day.

I would add also — as Seth does — that silence can be heckling, too.

For example, with our 16-month-old, we know that if there are certain behaviors that he shouldn’t be doing, one strategy to root them out is to ignore them. The things that you ignore tend to go away. The things that you reinforce you tend to get more of.

The problem is that if you are silent about good things, you can end up (inadvertently) stamping them out as well. And not just with toddlers. Here’s how Godin puts it:

. . . Just like it’s heckling when someone is tweeting during a meeting you’re running, or refusing to make eye contact during a sales call. Your work is an act of co-creation, and if the other party isn’t egging you on, engaging with you and doing their part, then it’s as if they’re actively tearing you down.

This is one reason, I think, that the Bible is replete with passages to encourage one another and build one another up. We are to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works” and “encourage one another” (Hebrews 10:24-25) and “speak only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29) and “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thessalonians 5:12).

If you aren’t actively building people up, there is a sense in which you may be inadvertently tearing them down. I don’t want to say that that is always the case, of course. But we should definitely be alert to the possibility that, sometimes at least, failure to encourage is to discourage. Our general bent toward one another should be to take every opportunity that we can (and makes sense) to build people up.

Here’s Godin’s whole post:

The other night I heard Keith Jarrett stop a concert mid-note. While the hall had been surprisingly silent during the performance, the song he was playing was quiet and downbeat and we (and especially he) could hear an increasing chorus of coughs.

“Coughs?,” you might wonder… “No one coughs on purpose. Anyway, there are thousands of people in the hall, of course there are going to be coughs.”

But how come no one was coughing during the introductions or the upbeat songs or during the awkward moments when Keith stopped playing?

No, a cough is not as overt or aggressive as shouting down the performer. Nevertheless, it’s heckling.

Just like it’s heckling when someone is tweeting during a meeting you’re running, or refusing to make eye contact during a sales call. Your work is an act of co-creation, and if the other party isn’t egging you on, engaging with you and doing their part, then it’s as if they’re actively tearing you down.

Yes, you’re a professional. So is Jarrett. A professional at Carnegie Hall has no business stopping a concert over some coughing. But in many ways, I’m glad he did. He made it clear that for him, it’s personal. It’s a useful message for all of us, a message about understanding that our responsibility goes beyond buying a ticket for the concert or warming a chair in the meeting. If we’re going to demand that our partners push to new levels, we have to go for the ride, all the way, or not at all.