People often say that “doing less” and “saying no” is the key to productivity. But this advice actually doesn’t work — unless you include with it the necessary corollary.
When you do that, you have perhaps the guiding concept for being effective.
Archives for May 2018
Productivity, the Gospel, and the City
Last week I blogged about the upcoming conference, The Gospel and Our Cities. I’m excited for it because I love the three things it is about: the gospel, cities, and gospel movements.
But since the focus of this blog is productivity, we need to ask this question: What do cities, the gospel, and productivity have to do with one another?
Everything.
In fact, if we don’t connect cities to our understanding of how the gospel advances, we will be much less productive in our work and ministry.
Productive Christians Care About All of Society
First, we need to understand the in the Christian view, productivity is not just about our own effectiveness and peace of mind. Rather, a gospel-minded Christian also cares about their community and all of society. Our aim is not just (or chiefly) to make ourselves better off; our aim is to see society better off because the greatest command is to love God with your whole heart and your neighbor as yourself. Further, our concern for the surrounding culture is holistic: we want to both serve the common good and see the gospel advance.
How are we doing with this?
Christians Are Not Being Productive Enough in Serving the Culture
We might think we are doing well. But in To Change the World, James Davidson Hunter argues that, as Christians, our impact is far less than our numbers would lead one to expect. There are more than 50 million evangelicals in the United States, and more than 86% of Americans have some type of faith commitment. Yet, as he points out, “our culture — business culture, law and government, the academic world, popular entertainment — is intensely materialistic and secular.”
In other words, in spite of our numbers, we are not being “productive” in serving and renewing the culture. Our impact is far less than you would expect from our numbers.
Why is that?
To Change This, We Need to Reach Cities
It’s because, contrary to popular belief, culture is not simply the result of the number of people who hold to a certain view. Rather, culture is created in networks and institutions. Hence, you cannot change culture if you are absent from those networks and institutions. Since evangelicals are largely absent from the centers where culture is created, our impact on the culture has been small — even though our numbers are very large.
This is one reason it is crucial that more Christians move into cities and work in cities. For, as Tim Keller argues in “To Transform a City”:
People who live in large urban cultural centers, occupying jobs in the arts, business, academia, publishing, the helping professions, and the media, tend to have a disproportionate impact on how things are done in our culture.
Hence, if as Christians we are going to have a greater impact on the culture, we need to have an impact on the city.
Our Aim is Holistic Impact
What kind of impact do we want to have on the city? We don’t believe in imposing a Christian worldview. Rather, as mentioned earlier, our aim is twofold: to further the common good and advance the gospel. When it comes to the common good, the aim is to make things better socially and economically, as well as in the spiritual dimension. To bring justice, truth, beauty, respect, and generosity more to bear in all aspects of life. Leading from respect and service rather than command and control; making more usability products; and treating employees with generosity and trust are all examples of things that further the common good.
When it comes to the advance of the gospel, this means more people coming to faith in Christ and following him fully. This matters in itself — it is not simply for the goal of culture change. But it will have an impact on the culture when people come to faith and see that faith relates to all of life, and is not just individual pietism.
So the impact we seek to have is more people coming to faith and, in turn, living out their faith holistically in all of life — including in the institutions where culture is shaped and formed. Further, this cannot happen to a large extent across the nation if we ignore cities. For cities is where most of the people are, and cities are where most culture is forged.
It Takes a Gospel Movement to Reach a City
How can we do better at reaching cities with the gospel? In his article “What is God’s Global Urban Mission?” (get it by subscribing to the City to City conference mailing list at the conference website), Tim Keller notes:
What it takes to reach a city is a city-wide gospel movement, which means the number of Christians across the city is growing faster than the population, and therefore, a growing percentage of the people of that city are connecting with gospel-centered churches and are finding faith in Jesus Christ. That will eventually have an impact on the whole life of the city. That’s what I mean by a city-wide gospel movement.
In other words, it takes more than just one church or a few committed Christians to reach a city. It takes a movement of Christians, including churches of all kinds of denominations and styles.
How Do You Build a Gospel Movement in Your City?
That’s where I think we need to do a lot more work as Christians.
A great place to start is by attending Redeemer City to City’s upcoming fall conference, The Gospel and Our Cities. It is in Chicago this October 18-20. By attending, you will not only learn about the city, creating gospel movements, urban challenges, faith and work, and more; you will also have a chance to meet others in your city and develop the networks necessary for a gospel movement to start.
The way we are serving and renewing the culture right now is not very productive, because it de-emphasizes the place of the city and gospel movements. It’s time to learn the more productive approach of reaching cities through gospel movements.
That’s how a concern for productivity and the gospel leads to a concern for cities and gospel movements.
Register at the website, and use the code “chicago” to save an extra $25 before June 4!
This is a sponsored post for The Gospel and Our Cities: Chicago 2018
Why Character is at the Root of True Productivity
This is an excerpt from chapter 6 of How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity, “Character: The Great Unsticking Force.”
Central to good time management is doing what is important, not merely what is urgent.
Yet, how do you know what is important? Importance is something even deeper than your own goals. Important things are things that align with correct principles and God’s truth.
And that takes us to the heart of why character is essential to productivity, for principles bring us into the realm of character. There are two sources for knowing correct principles. First, the Scriptures: “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD!” (Ps. 119:1). And second, we have the capacity to discern correct principles through our conscience, which is directly informed by our understanding of the Scriptures. We have an inner compass that enables us to detect what right principles are.
The way to put first things first is to build this inner compass—that is, our character—so that we are able to discern what right principles are and desire to follow them. Character enables us to see and understand correct principles so that we can base our lives and decisions on them. That is why character is central to true productivity.
We then can articulate our mission and values flowing from those correct principles, and our personal vision can become an accurate way of identifying what is important. This is at the heart of time management and why productivity is rooted first in character, not techniques, for it is character that enables us to discern what is important and use the techniques well.
Are You Stuck? A Quick Survey to Identify If You Are
How can you tell if you are stuck? The following is adapted from the “Unstuck Clinic” at the end of chapter 2 of How to Get Unstuck. It can help you know if you are stuck and, if so, in what areas. (Once you’ve identified that, how do you get unstuck? Well, that’s what the book is for!)
The Unstuck Clinic
Note: Writing down your answers to the questions has been scientifically shown to be more effective than just reading the questions or thinking bout the answers in your head.
What Does it Mean to be Stuck?
We get stuck in our productivity when we don’t know where we should be going, don’t know how to get there, or keep encountering obstacles.
Are You Stuck?
What are the biggest ways you are stuck right now? Take a few minutes to reflect, and write them down.
Taking it Deeper: Diagnostic Questions
To help you think this through further, here are a few diagnostic questions grouped into the three areas where we get stuck in our productivity.
Vision
- Are you accomplishing what God wants you to accomplish?
- Do you know what God wants you to accomplish?
- When you accomplish your goals, do you feel they were the right goals?
Execution
- Do you feel prepared for each day?
- Are you completing things on time?
- Are you unhurried?
- Are you making progress toward your goals?
- Do you like the approach you have for managing your work?
- Are you able to get from where you are to where you want to be?
- Are you able to accomplish the things that matter most to you?
Obstacles
- How often do you get in the zone in a typical workweek?
- In your work, are you able to do what you do best every day?
Need help getting unstuck? If so, I wrote How to Get Unstuck to help!
Now Available: The Best Next Steps Application Journal
Now available in our online store—a digital application journal to help you advance further in your productivity.
Why did we create this? The hardest part of improving our productivity is consistently applying the right principles and making them ongoing habits. We designed this application journal to address this issue. Research has shown that writing out your answers to exercise questions leads to far greater understanding and application than just reading the material.
So that’s what this journal does. With this short and interactive resource, we walk you through a process of discerning how you can become more effective to help you clarify what your priorities should be and how you can get the right things done. Use it to build a plan that works for you and start applying these principles in your life today.
This PDF resource is available in our online store for $2.
How Do You Define Value in Your Work?
From Great at Work, which is now the best book on personal effectiveness I have ever read:
As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.
This may seem obvious in retrospect, but how many of us intentionally work this way? It is so easy to get caught up in accomplishing tasks, defining our productivity that way, rather than defining it in terms of the benefit our work actually brings.
If we take this outside-in view, I see two benefits. First, we will have more success in our jobs. That seems obvious, right? Second, we will be able to become more efficient, because now we have a criteria that allows us to identify unnecessary tasks or unnecessary steps in our tasks.
Beyond this, the outside-in view is very much in line with the gospel ethic, which is others-centered.
There is one nuance, of course: do not let this stifle innovation or too easily justify the status quo. You know the benefits of your work by how people act, not mainly what they say in response to your initial idea. Focus groups, for example, are usually a bad idea. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” What actually produced the greatest value was when Ford democratized the automobile — something people weren’t asking for initially.
How History’s Most Creative People Organized Their Days
Start with Your Time, Not with Your Tasks
A quick tip from How to Get Unstuck.
This is one of the simplest and most powerful time management principles there is. Yet, it is also takes a lot of discipline, because it’s the opposite of what we naturally want to do!
The Beginning of How to Get Unstuck
How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity released yesterday. Here is the beginning of the intro.
If you’ve ever been stuck, you are in good company. Mark Twain got stuck when writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Einstein got stuck when developing the general theory of relativity, and Martin Luther got stuck trying to grasp the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Even the apostle Paul got stuck on his missionary journeys (Acts 27:20; 1 Thessalonians 2:17–18).
We all hate being stuck. But it happens to everyone in various ways—sometimes in big ways and very often in smaller ways. You can even be stuck in multiple ways at once.
You likely are stuck in some way right now. You might feel like you don’t know where you are headed in life, which is certainly one major type of being stuck. Or you might know where you want to go but keep running into obstacles—another way of being stuck.
You might be trying to do something large and important that you just can’t push forward. Or the ride to accomplishing your goals is just plain bumpier than it ought to be because of various “sticking points” in your productivity approach, workplace environment, or time-management tools. You know there are ways to do things more effectively, but you just aren’t sure what they are.
The encouraging and surprising truth is that it’s okay to be stuck. Being stuck can be a mark that you are doing important things, because important things are often hard. And when things are hard, we are likely to get stuck.
Further, God meets us where we are stuck. In fact, it’s when we are stuck that he often meets us most deeply. David often prayed things like,
Rescue me from the mud;
don’t let me sink any deeper!
Save me from those who hate me,
and pull me from these deep waters. (Ps. 69:14 NLT)
Now that’s being stuck.
We’ve all been there, and all is not lost when we are. It’s okay to be stuck. But we don’t want to stay stuck.
None of us enjoys being stuck. And it sometimes puts crucial, important things at risk. There are things we want to do, things we need to do, and things that make a difference in the world that won’t get done if we stay stuck.
The good news is that it is possible to get unstuck and overcome the obstacles to doing great work and getting the right things done. David prayed for deliverance and got unstuck. Paul never became passive, in spite of his many obstacles. Mark Twain finished The Adventures of Tom Sawyer after taking a year off to replenish. And Einstein got the help he needed with the math to bring the theory of relativity all the way through to completion. (Yes, Einstein needed help with math! — of a very advanced sort, of course.)
Read the rest of the intro and chapter one, or grab your copy today!
How to Get Unstuck is Now Available!
It’s May 1, and that means How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity is now available! Go get your copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, WTS Books, or your local Christian bookstore.
Like What’s Best Next, this book has been in the works for a long time. I’m excited that it is now available and hope it can enable you individually to be more effective for God’s purposes, with more peace of mind, and to build up the church so we can be collectively more effective as well.
What Will This Book Do For You?
As Christians, there is an important tool that we’ve been overlooking for how to do our work and live our lives in a God-centered way. This is the tool of personal effectiveness, or personal productivity.
There are lots of great secular books on productivity, such as Getting Things Done, and lots of Christians have been finding them helpful. But none of these look at the issue from a biblical perspective. And we need to do that for a few reasons:
- The gospel affects all of life, and productivity is an issue that affects all of us every day, so we need to see how they relate to one another.
- Good productivity practices can be used to amplify our ability to serve God in our work, lives, and the world. We can more effectively use them for that purpose when we look at them within a biblical framework.
- God deserves the credit for all good productivity practices, including the ones from common grace that secular thinkers have been articulating, because he is the source of everything that is true and good. So let’s explicitly give him the credit for these things!
There is now a bit more now on the gospel and productivity than there was a few years ago. But we still need more.
In What’s Best Next, I sought to give an overall system for productivity. In How to Get Unstuck, I focus on helping you overcome obstacles to your productivity. The approach dovetails well with What’s Best Next by going deeper into this specific issue; in doing so, it also includes several principles that I wanted to include in WBN but didn’t have room for. (You can start with either book, as they both stand on their own.)
In How to Get Unstuck, you learn:
- how the urgency addiction is one of the main culprits interfering with our productivity, and how to conquer it
- that being unstuck is ultimately a positive concept, about flourishing and well-being (shalom), and where we see it in the Scriptures
- why character, not first techniques, is central to being productivity and how long-term, fundamental change truly happens
- how our faith and work relate, and why we have often gotten “stuck” in relation to the culture by not understanding this
- what it means to be a true professional in your work, and how to get there through deliberate practice and preparation
- why the key to getting more done is to start in the opposite place you might think: with your time, not your tasks
- how to utilize deep work, the new super power of the knowledge era, to overcome distractions and more than double your productivity
- and much more
So if you want to get more of the right things done, with greater peace and fulfillment, do this through obstacles, and do it for the advancement of God’s purposes in the world, check out How to Get Unstuck.
Endorsements
Here are two endorsements:
Perman’s new book on productivity goes beyond the how of effectiveness to the why: Why do anything well? The answer is found in our theology: Excellence, attention, and care are all ways that we leaders love our God and our neighbors. Drawing on the wisdom of business gurus, neuroscientists, and pastors, Perman has provided a resource for all of us who desire to steward our time, talents, and resources better so that we can live out the gospel more faithfully and fully in the time we’ve been given.
— Katelyn Beaty, former managing editor, Christianity Today, author of A Woman’s Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World
Getting stuck is frustrating, disruptive, and unavoidable. Getting stuck is also not the way it is supposed to be, suggests Matt Perman in his new book, How to Get Unstuck. Gleaning the wisdom from the best of the personal-effectiveness gurus, Perman combines common sense and biblical principles to help you get out of the rut that may have become your new normal. This book will help you joyfully bring more flourishing to the communities God has called you to serve.
— Hugh Whelchel, executive director, Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, author of How Then Should We Work? Rediscovering the Biblical Doctrine of Work
User Reviews
Here are a few comments from readers so far:
“I had high expectations for this book because of my love for Matt Perman’s previous book, “What’s Best Next”, and I am so very happy that it didn’t disappoint. I am an avid reader with a significant number of professional / business books on my shelf at home and work, and this is one of the few that I intend to re-read on an annual basis.”
“I found What’s Best Next (Perman’s first book) to be super helpful for me, so I was pretty excited to tear into How to Get Unstuck to continue to grow in the area of personal productivity. Good news…I wasn’t let down at all. Perman’s second book builds off the strengths of What’s Best Next, while addressing a struggle all of us encounter in our productivity: getting stuck.”
“Biblical, brilliant, and beautiful.”
Table of Contents and Sample Chapter
And here are the table of contents and a sample of the book (the introduction plus first chapter).
I’ll be posting more on Unstuck today and this week. But in the meantime, pick up your copy now!