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How to Get Things Done in a Gospel-Driven Way: What's Best Next in 500 Words

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At the end of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done, I give a summary of the book in 500 words so that people can easily take away the core concept and a few key practices (and share them with others).

Here it is:

Gospel-Driven Productivity in a Nutshell

We need to look to God to define for us what productivity is, not simply the ambiguous concept of “what matters most.” For God is what matters most.

When we do this, we don’t enter a realm of spiritual weirdness, as we might fear. Good secular thinking remains relevant as a gift of God’s common grace. Neither do we enter a realm of over-spiritualization where the things we do every day don’t matter.

Instead, the things we do every day take on even greater significance because they are avenues through which we serve God and others. In fact, the gospel teaches us that the good of others is to be the main motive in all that we do and the chief criteria by which we determine “what’s best next.” This is not only right, but also the best way to be productive, as the best business thinkers are showing. More importantly, when we do this in God’s power and as an offering to him, he is glorified and shown to be great in the world.

In order to be most effective in this way in our current era of massive overload yet incredible opportunity, we need to do four things to stay on track and lead and manage our lives effectively:

  1. Define
  2. Architect
  3. Reduce
  4. Execute

The result of this is not only our own increased peace of mind and ability to get things done, but also the transformation of the world by the gospel because it is precisely in our everyday vocations that we take our faith into the world and the light of the gospel shines—both in what we say and in what we do (Matthew 5:16).

If You Only take 5 Productivity Practices Away from This Book

Learning and especially implementing productivity practices can be hard. It is easy to forget what we learned or forget how to apply it. One remedy is to keep coming back to this book (of course!). But to make this as simple as possible, if you can only take away 5 things from this book, they should be these:

  1. Foundation: Look to God, in Jesus Christ, for your purpose, security, and guidance in all of life.
  2. Purpose: Give your whole self to God (Romans 12:1-2), and then live for the good of others to his glory to show that he is great in the world.
  3. Guiding Principle: Love your neighbor as yourself. Treat others the way you want them to treat you. Be proactive in this and even make plans to do good.
  4. Core Strategy: Know what’s most important and put it first.
  5. Core Tactic: Plan your week, every week! Then, as things come up throughout the day, ask “is this what’s best next?” Then, either do that right away or, if you can’t, slot it in to your calendar or action list that you are confident you will refer back to at the right time.

PovertyCure App Now Available

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PovertyCure now as an app that makes their content easily available for your iPhone.

I love PovertyCure’s vision because they actually understand how to overcome poverty. It can be done — as long as we understand the correct principles (which most initiative so far haven’t). So I highly recommend checking out their site as well as their app.

Here’s their vision:

PovertyCure is an international coalition of over 250 partner organizations and 1 million individuals spanning 143 countries and counting. We produce films and educational resources advancing partnership-based solutions to poverty that challenge the status quo and champion the creative potential of the human person.

In our efforts to combat poverty worldwide, we too often fall into paternalistic, donor-recipient models that fail to distinguish short-term relief and long-term sustainable development. Oftentimes this approach can have tragic unintended consequences. Our call to solidarity with the poor means more than providing institutional assistance and aid. It demands a deeper view of the human person predicated on an appreciation for the creative capacity of each and every human person. Effective compassion situates those afflicted by poverty not as objects of our charity, but as subjects and protagonists of their own integral development. When we understand people as made in the image of God and endowed with his divine creative spark, it changes absolutely everything about how we understand poverty and development.

It’s time to shift our focus from aid to enterprise, from paternalism to partnerships, from poverty alleviation to real human flourishing.

The Healthiest Organizations Win

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Patrick Lencioni’s latest article, giving excellent insight into what we can learn from the San Antonio spurs about organizational health. Here’s the start:

I loved basketball as a kid, wanting more than anything to play in the NBA one day. But I didn’t make it past high school, my 5’9 inch height and limited jumping ability holding me back. If I were only eight inches taller…

Now, I have to admit that since then I’ve lost much of my interest as a fan of professional basketball as the game has become less about teamwork and finesse, and more about individual, physical, one–on–one challenges. Which is why it was so fun to watch the San Antonio Spurs win the NBA championship this week. They are an old–school reminder of the days of passing, teamwork and strategy — the antithesis of what the NBA has become.

But a closer look at the Spurs, the organization and the team, reveals that there is more going on in San Antonio than meets the eye, and it is something that any organization can learn from. See, the Spurs are the healthiest organization in the NBA, and probably in all of professional sports.

A healthy organization, as I’ve defined in my book, The Advantage, is one that maintains a cohesive leadership team, establishes clarity about what it stands for, communicates that clarity repetitively, and puts in place processes and systems to reinforce that clarity over time. How do the San Antonio Spurs match up? Well, when I talk to people in the industry and ask them which organization is best across all sports, most of them will pause for just a few seconds before arriving at their answer: the Spurs. What is it that makes this organization so special?

Read the whole thing.