What's Best Next

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Archives for September 2014

Getting Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day on Moody Radio South Florida

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I’ve started doing a weekly conversation on productivity on “Fresh Start with Eric and Audrey,” which airs on Moody Radio South Florida 6 am – 9 am ET each weekday. My segment typically airs on Tuesday mornings at 7:45 am ET.

During this time (usually about 5 minutes), we talk about various topics in productivity from a biblical perspective. The first one was today, and you can listen to the recording online. We talked about why productivity matters at all, and some basic concepts for managing email.

Over the next few weeks, we will talk a bit more about email, as well as about organizing space and multitasking.

Eric and Audrey are a lot of fun to talk to, and I’m really enjoying these segments!

You can continue to tune in each Tuesday morning at 7:45, directly at 89.3 FM if you live in south Florida, or by listening to the live stream online. (To hear the archives, just click on the “Fresh Start” banner.)

How What's Best Next Relates to Don't Waste Your Life and Radical

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This is something I cut from the introduction to What’s Best Next for space reasons, but which is very important to understanding the book. It discusses how What’s Best Next is in some sense a follow-up to and spin-off from John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life, and how it relates to other books similar to it, such as David Platt’s Radical. 

Both of those books have been very influential on me, and I think they do a good job of getting to the heart of what Jesus means when he says “follow me.” Productivity practices, in turn, exists to help us live out that call to follow Christ, because he calls us to follow him not off in the mountains by ourselves, but in the everyday context of the modern world — which is very complex and requires wisdom and skill to navigate.

 

If You Don’t Want to Waste Your Life, You Need to Know How to Get Things Done

The absence of practical instruction from a Christian perspective is especially significant given that, in the Christian realm, there are a ton of books exhorting us to live lives of radical sacrifice for the glory of God and good of others, while at the same time there is an extreme shortage of books that get concrete and specific about how to actually do that.

For example, one of my favorite books is Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper. Piper argues that the goal of life is to live with a single passion to “joyfully display God’s supreme excellence in all spheres of life.” Instead of just marking time or spending our lives on comfort and pleasure — whether traveling the world or staying at home watching clean PG-13 movies with the family every night — the call of Christ to us is to spend ourselves living radical lives of sacrificial love for the good of others and his glory. I agree with Piper, and this book shares the same vision.

Piper’s book is an incredible exhortation to live that life. But, once you have realized that living for the good of others to the glory of Jesus Christ is the purpose of life, a thousand questions are raised for the practical arena of your life. You know that you exist to proactively seek the good of others for the glory of God, but how do you go about that? Does it mean you have to go be a missionary? (Piper’s answer: no — though many should consider that.) If not, what does it look like in the midst of our daily lives right where we are at?

Further, seeking to live a life devoted to the good of others is going to make your life harder in many ways — busier, more challenging, more complex. How do you manage that? You need to know how. Simply having the aim of glorifying Christ in everything is not enough. We need to know how to translate that into the everyday.

And it translates in some very concrete ways, such as knowing how doing emails and going to meetings relates to your faith, knowing how to lead meetings well so that they actually serve people rather than tick them off, and how to stay on top of your email so that it doesn’t drown you in your quest to be a servant to others in all areas of life.

David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream and Francis Chan’s Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God give similar calls. I love these books and find them super helpful and important.[1]

In one sense, What’s Best Next is a follow-up to these books. Don’t Waste Your Life, Radical, and Crazy Love exhort us to live radical, risk-taking lives of love for the good of others. But how do you go about this in a practical sense, in the midst of the everyday, without being overwhelmed by all the new opportunities and demands this brings? And how do you live a life for the glory of God in the midst of your current life, which often consists of many mundane things? That brings us solidly into the realm of productivity. By zeroing in on the practical dimension of life, this book seeks to equip you in the how.

We can even say that in a very real sense, Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life (as well as these other books) is really a book on productivity. For it’s about orienting your life around God’s purposes so that you get the most important thing of all done with your life — namely, making much of God. That’s what Piper himself said to me once in an email when we were discussing my book. He wrote “as you might guess, I view all my books as books on productivity — that is, as books on getting the most important things done (not wasting your life), which is making much of God.”

As Don’t Waste Your Life is in a sense a book on productivity, What’s Best Next is also a book on not wasting your life. And it seeks to do this by first laying out a biblical vision for what we are even doing when we get things done (part one), and then getting into the details of how to go about getting things done effectively in daily life for the glory of God, good of others, and your joy (the rest of the book).

Knowing how to make the most of our time and lead our lives well needs to be seen as a component of Christian discipleship because it’s about how to serve others well.

[1] I would want to nuance Platt a bit in his chapter 6 on money and giving, but even there I affirm fully his call for Christians to be radically generous and sacrificial in their giving.

Steve Jobs: Find Work You Love

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Steve Jobs:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

Should Employers Ban Email After Work Hours?

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That’s the question asked by a new Gallup study.

If you read this blog much, you probably know that I think legislating behavior is a really, really bad idea. It usually doesn’t work, and on most non-ethical matters, it is generally a failure to treat people with dignity and respect. It is, in other words, parental. It is failing to treat employees like adults, which is far more significant issue than whether the policy is intended for employee’s “well being” or not.

So, what does the Gallup research say?

When you read the first page, it initially sounds like employees would be better off if employers did ban work email after work hours.

But then if you continue reading, you see that this conclusion results from a superficial look at the findings which fails to take into account employee engagement. 

Employee engagement is one of the most important things to manage for, and it is a wonderful thing that the Gallup study has, once again, born this out. If you have engaged employees, most other issues that companies often try to “fix” through intrusive and byzantine policies go away.

Here’s the gist of their conclusion:

These findings suggest that workers will view their company’s policy about mobile technology through the filter of their own engagement. Thus, instead of tinkering with their policies, companies would be better off developing a strategy to engage more of their employees.

And it’s worth reading the whole thing.

How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done – Slide Deck

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Here’s a slide deck to help introduce people to the theology of productivity that I give in What’s Best Next the book.

It can serve as a good refresher for those who have read the book, and also something that you can easily share with those who haven’t read the book.

Here’s the direct link to it on Slideshare.

(Note: I love slideshare! It makes it super easy to share and spread presentations.)

Remembering Warren Bennis

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Warren Bennis, one of the fathers of modern leadership thinking, died a few weeks ago. The NY Times gives a great summary of his thinking and impact. Here’s the start:

Warren G. Bennis, an eminent scholar and author who advised presidents and business executives on his academic specialty, the essence of successful leadership — a commodity he found in short supply in recent decades — died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 89.

The University of Southern California, where he had been a distinguished professor of business administration for more than 30 years, announced his death on Friday. He lived in Santa Monica, Calif.

Professor Bennis wrote more than 30 books on leadership, a subject that grabbed his attention early in life, when he led a platoon during World War II at the age of 19.

“I look at Peter Drucker as the father of management and Warren Bennis as the father of leadership,” William W. George, a professor at the Harvard Business School and a former chief executive of the medical device company Medtronic, said in an interview in 2009.

As a consultant, Professor Bennis was sought out by generations of business leaders, among them Howard D. Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, who regarded him as a mentor. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan all conferred with him.

It continues:

As an educator, he taught organizational studies at Harvard, Boston University and the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.

Professor Bennis believed in the adage that great leaders are not born but made, insisting that “the process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” he said in an interview in 2009.  Both, he said, were grounded in self-discovery.

In his influential book “On Becoming a Leader,” published in 1989, Professor Bennis wrote that a successful leader must first have a guiding vision of the task or mission to be accomplished and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failure. Another requirement, he said, is “a very particular passion for a vocation, a profession, a course of action.”

“The leader who communicates passion gives hope and inspiration to other people,” he wrote.

Integrity, he said, is imperative: “The leader never lies to himself, especially about himself, knows his flaws as well as his assets, and deals with them directly.”

So, too, are curiosity and daring: “The leader wonders about everything, wants to learn as much as he can, is willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. He does not worry about failure but embraces errors, knowing he will learn from them.”

But Professor Bennis said he found such leadership largely missing in the late 20th century in all quarters of society — in business, politics, academia and the military. In “On Becoming a Leader,” he took aim at corporate leadership, finding it particularly ineffectual and tracing its failings in part to corporate corruption, extravagant executive compensation and an undue emphasis on quarterly earnings over long-term benefits, both for the business itself and society at large.

He worried until recently about what he called a “leadership vacuum” in America, a problem he said was caused to a great extent by a lack of high-quality leadership training at the nation’s business schools.

And perhaps one of his most important points:

A dearth of visionary business leaders, he said, meant that companies were being led more by managers of the bottom line than by passionate, independent thinkers who could steer an organization effectively.

“We are at least halfway through the looking glass, on our way to utter chaos,” he wrote in “On Becoming a Leader.” “When the very model of a modern manager becomes C.E.O., he does not become a leader, he becomes a boss, and it is the bosses who have gotten America into its current fix.”

Read the rest.