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An Interview with Tim Challies on Productivity, Part One

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As part of the research for my book, I’ve been interviewing various Christian, non-profit, and marketplace leaders. Last week Tim Challies graciously agreed to do a written interview to serve the readers of the blog as well.

Many of you know Tim from his blog at Challies.com. He is also author of The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment and the forthcoming The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (due out in April).

I’ve known Tim for a few years now and am very impressed with his productivity. So I’m glad to finally have had the chance to probe him a bit on how he gets everything done. I think you’ll find his answers here very helpful and insightful. I’m posting this interview in two parts — the first five questions today, and the next five questions tomorrow.

1. Tim, you seem to be one of the most productive people I know. For example, you write a substantial blog post every day. You started a new publishing company. You completed your second book last year. You are an elder at your church. You read a ton. And it seems that you preserve a good amount of family time. Do you ever get thrown off balance and, if so, what do you do to get back?

It is interesting that you see things that way. When I look at my life I am prone to see vast amounts of wasted time. I often struggle with finding joy amidst so many wasted opportunities.

If I am productive, I think it probably owes to my attempts to simplify my life. While it is true that I wear quite a few different hats during the week, I have tried to keep each area as simple as possible and as clearly defined as possible. I attempt to focus on large chunks of time, so that I will dedicate an entire day to one of those tasks and then dedicate the next day to a different task. Thus on Tuesdays I work in the church office and focus on church matters while on Wednesday I work in my home office and focus on my ongoing work with Ligonier Ministries. I have a wandering mind, so focusing on one task at a time seems to keep me on track.


2. How do you organize a typical day? When do you blog, read, pray, spend time with the family, and get your work done?

At present I have three different varieties of work days. Mondays I tend to take the morning off and spend it with my wife (all the kids are in school, giving us time to go on a date that doesn’t require paying for babysitting). Then I spend the afternoon working and preparing a few blog posts. Tuesdays and Fridays I typically spend in the church office; I tend to leave early in the morning to avoid traffic, so I head home by mid-afternoon. Wednesdays and Thursdays I dedicate to my work with Ligonier Ministries, working roughly 8 until 5.

Devotions come before the work day and family time comes after. I can’t say that I always get the balance right, but I certainly do try. It’s the rare day when my wife and I do not spend 8 PM until bed time just hanging out and spending time together, even if that just means we’re sprawled out on the coach together reading.

3. What type of planning do you do? For example, do you plan daily? Weekly? Do you find this to be a helpful practice?

My life is currently structured enough that I do not requite a ton of advance planning. The one thing my wife and I have found indispensable is to sync our calendars once a week. We do this on Sunday evenings. I open up iCal while she grabs a one-week paper calendar. We plot out the week to come, mostly focusing on our weekly tasks. We make sure that we don’t have any obvious overlaps. It’s a small thing, but it makes a big difference by helping to reduce unexpected surprises (such as finding out that we both need the car at the same time). As my pastoral responsibilities increase, I find more occasions where there are good and necessary interruptions to the routine. I am learning to adapt well.

4. Do you keep a to-do list and/or a projects list? If so, how do you use them and how often do you look at them?

At my best I use Things, a fantastic bit of software (Mac-only). I maintain lists of projects for home, blog, church and office and check in with it every day. Practically, though, I often forget and tend to find myself updating it in batches rather than regularly. I keep telling myself I’ll do better once they (finally) add cloud syncing. I carry a notebook with me wherever I go and this helps give me a place to go to reference lists of things to do. A recent addition is an Action Journal which I use in meetings; it helps me make sure that I leave a meeting with a list of action items. That has proven very, very useful.

5. Do you set goals? If so, how do you determine which goals should be a priority?

I do not tend to set goals. I don’t really know why this is, except that I may not have an organizational structure to make sure that I attain those goals.

Explore and Try Things First, Then Prune

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Seth Godin makes a great point in his post the other today:

Step one: Open all doors. Learn a little about a lot. Consider as many options as possible, then add more.

Step two: Relentlessly dismiss, prune and eliminate. Choose. Ship.

The problem most people run into is that they mix the steps and confuse them. During step one, they aren’t open enough, aren’t willing enough to consider the impossible. And then, in step two, fear of shipping kicks in and they stay open too long, hold on to too many options and hesitate.

Simple doesn’t always mean easy.

Put the Big Rocks in First

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The only way to get the important things done is to put them into your life and schedule first, rather than trying to get the smaller “sand and gravel” out of the way to make room. The notion that you have to clear out the smaller stuff first, in order to make room for the larger stuff, almost always ends up back firing (one reason being that there is always more small stuff ready to come in).

Stephen Covey explains this better than anyone I’ve read in his book First Things First. I blogged on this a few months ago, and you can read his description of the analogy in that post.

Today on Michael Hyatt’s blog I came across this video where you can see Covey illustrates this principle visually:

(HT: Michael Hyatt)

Great Leaders are Strengths-Based

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The Gallup Management Journal has a good interview with Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, authors of Strengths-Based Leadership, about some of their key findings from the book. Here’s one that stands out and should be encouraging: effective leaders don’t try to be someone else or even become well-rounded; instead, they know their strengths and focus on leading from those — which means that there are all sorts of different ways to lead. (Note: That doesn’t mean you can just do anything and be effective; the key point is that your particular style emerges from your strengths, not from a random or uninformed decision.)

It looks like you have to register to read the whole thing, but here are a few key highlights.

1. Concentrate on developing your talents into strengths, not fixing weaknesses or imitating others:

Here are some questions that leaders often ask themselves: How can I fix my weaknesses to be a more complete leader? How can I emulate the traits of the great leaders who preceded me? What should I focus on — vision or strategy? Here is the answer to all those questions: Don’t bother.

Concentrating on those issues will only distract you from the most important aspect of leadership: your natural talents, which can be developed into strengths. According to Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, coauthors of Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, strengths are what make leaders great.

We all have natural talents, of course, but the greatest leaders are highly aware of theirs. They know what they’re good at and spend countless hours making themselves better at what they do best. They don’t try to make themselves well-rounded or like some other leader. Nor do they devote their energies solely to the relentless pursuit of strategy, vision, or any other ideal. And what they don’t do well, they hire someone else to do.

2. If you’ve taken the “Strengths Finder” test to examine your talent themes, these themes don’t of themselves say anything about whether you can be an effective leader. You lead effectively by harnessing your unique talents, whatever they may be:

GMJ: Of the thirty-four talent themes that the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment identifies, which are the most common among great leaders?

Barry Conchie: I’ve got a problem with the question.

GMJ: Why?

Conchie: There is no single characteristic or set of characteristics that would enable us to determine an effective leader. The most effective leaders are the ones who figure out how best to use what they’ve got. So it matters less what the strengths are in terms of the themes; what’s key is that the leaders understand the strengths they have, how those strengths help them to be effective, and that they use strategies and methods to deploy their strengths to the greatest effect

Rath: I think that from all the research that Gallup’s done on leadership over the last three or four decades, the broadest discovery is that there is no universal set of talents that all leaders have in common. As we looked through these data and ran through hundreds of transcripts and individual interviews, we were struck by just how different all these leaders are.

If you were to sit down with each of the four leaders we featured in the book [Brad Anderson, vice chairman and CEO of Best Buy; Wendy Kopp, CEO and founder of Teach For America; Simon Cooper, president and CEO, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC; and Mervyn Davies, chairman, Standard Chartered Bank], you’d notice that they do things very differently based on their strong awareness of their unique talents.

I expand about this a bit more in my post “Leading From Your Strengths May Look Unusual,” where I quote from their chapter on Brad Anderson’s unique leadership style at Best Buy.

I would want to qualify one thing from their point here, though. While you can lead effectively with any of the talent themes identified by the Strengths Finder test, there are two qualities (not measured by the test) which, following Marcus Buckingham (see his excellent discussion in The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success), I would argue are essential to leadership. The qualities are optimism and ego.

“Ego” doesn’t have to have the negative connotations we often associate with it; it simply means you believe that you are the one to lead and are fiercely committed to the task. Optimism is necessary because the essence of leadership is to rally people to a better future, and nobody will want to follow someone who doesn’t believe that they can make the future better. (Thinking that you can’t make a difference would be contrary to the nature of leadership altogether — where are you leading if not to someplace better?)

Understanding the nature of leadership as rallying people to a better future also enables you to focus on your strengths more effectively. For, as I talk about in my post “What Does a Leader Do?,” you don’t have to focus on developing long lists of recommended attributes for leaders when you know the core of the matter. Instead, focus on the core, and develop your own unique strengths.

3. Seeking to be well-rounded leads to mediocrity:

GMJ: You wrote: “If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. While our society encourages us to be well-rounded, this approach inadvertently breeds mediocrity.” Why is that?

Conchie: The great leaders we’ve studied are not well-rounded individuals. They have not become world-class leaders by being average or above-average in different aspects of leadership. They’ve become world-class in a relatively limited number of areas of leadership. They’ve recognized not only their strengths but their deficiencies, and they’ve successfully identified others who compensate for those deficiencies.

The concept of well-roundedness is illusory. It might sound desirable from a developmental perspective, but really all that happens when people try to fix their weaknesses is that they spend inordinate amounts of time trying to become marginally better in an area that will never be particularly strong for them. So they’ll get far less of a return by trying to shore up relatively mediocre capabilities because they’ll probably always be below average in those areas. Leadership is not a construct of well-rounded attributes; it’s nearly always the consequence of some pretty incisive talents that are relatively specific and slightly narrow in focus being leveraged to the maximum.

The Core Productivity Decision in an Age of Infinite Input

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Namely: input versus output. Godin makes a great point on this today:

[Input versus output] is one of the most important decisions you’ll make today.

How much time and effort should be spent on intake, on inbound messages, on absorbing data…

and how much time and effort should be invested in output, in creating something new.

There used to be a significant limit on available intake. Once you read all the books in the college library on your topic, it was time to start writing.

Now that the availability of opinions, expertise and email is infinite, I think the last part of that sentence is the most important:

Time to start writing.

Or whatever it is you’re not doing, merely planning on doing.

3 Strategies for Recovering from Information Overload

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An article from the McKinsey Quarterly. Here’s the first paragraph:

For all the benefits of the information technology and communications revolution, it has a well-known dark side: information overload and its close cousin, attention fragmentation. These scourges hit CEOs and their colleagues in the C-suite particularly hard because senior executives so badly need uninterrupted time to synthesize information from many different sources, reflect on its implications for the organization, apply judgment, make trade-offs, and arrive at good decisions.

Beware of Performance Load

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Being competent is a good thing, but you need to be aware of one danger: “If not controlled, work will flow to the competent man until he submerges” (Charles Boyle). So if you aren’t deliberate about it, your competence can actually be your undoing.

This is the issue of performance load. Here’s how Josh Kaufman explains it in The Personal MBA:

Being busy is better than being bored, but it’s possible to be too busy for your own good.

Performance load is a concept that explains what happens when you have too many things to do. Above a certain point, the more tasks a person has to do, the more their performance on all of those tasks decreases.

Imagine juggling bowling pins. If you’re skilled, you may be able to juggle three or four without making a mistake. The more pins that must be juggled at once, the more likely you are to make a mistake and drop them all.

If you want to be productive, you must set limits. Juggling hundreds of active tasks across scores of projects is not sustainable: you’re risking failure, subpar work, and burnout. Remember Parkinson’s Law: if you don’t set a limit on your available time, your work will expand to fill it all.

Part of setting limits means “preserving unscheduled time to respond to new inputs.” This is necessary to handle the unexpected. And this means we must recognize that downtime is not wasteful. Kaufman goes on:

The default mind-set of many modern businesses is that “downtime” is inefficient and wasteful — workers should be busy all the time. Unfortunately, this philosophy ignores the necessity of handling unexpected events, which always occur. Everyone only has so many hours in a day, and if your agenda is constantly booked solid, it’ll always be difficult to keep up with new and unexpected demands on your time and energy.

Schedule yourself (in terms of appointments and projects) at no more than 80% capacity. Leave time to handle the unexpected. And to enable yourself to do this, realize that, counterintuitively, people (and systems — this is true of highways, airports, and all sorts of things) become less efficient when operating at full capacity, not more, and that downtime can actually increase productivity. If you keep these things in mind, you can help prevent your competence from being your undoing.