by Matt Perman
Fast Company’s cover article this month.
“A senator, a chef, four CEOs, and DJ superstar Diplo reveal how, exactly, they get the most out of their days.”
If you scroll down a bit, there is a list of a bunch of other short articles on productivity as well.
by Matt Perman
You can get it for your iPhone.
Here’s their description:
Download it now and study your personal strengths wherever you go.
by Matt Perman
One of the difficulties in affirming that God calls us to be productive is that this can sometimes be mistaken to mean that there is always an easy solution to our productivity challenges. We can think that there is no place for messiness, difficulty, and even falling behind in the life of truly productive, God-honoring people.
For example, if your car has a problem, you take it to the mechanic and he ought to be able to fix it. That’s what they are trained to do, and most automobile problems are well understood. If your mechanic can’t fix diagnose and fix a broken fuel pump or heater core, there is indeed something wrong with that shop.
Lots of things in life are like this, so it can be easy to think that productivity is supposed to be like that as well. We can easily reduce our thinking to something like this: “You feel like you are always rushing and are pulled in a thousand directions? Well, just do these three things, and it will be all fixed by tomorrow. Oh, and by the way, how did you not know that? [Implication: Something is wrong with you, and look at how great I am for being able to easily “fix” your problem!]”
But managing our tasks, workflow, and lives is not like that. It is not like getting the oil changed or fixing the radiator in your car. The reason is that we are often dealing with the unknown and with ambiguity.
Hence, there are two errors we can fall into. The first is, as I mentioned, to think that there is always an easy solution and that if you are having a tough time keeping up with things, then the problem is always you. That’s simply not true.
The other error, though, would be to conclude from this that there is not any way at all to actually get on top of your work. That would be a very depressing, discouraging reality.
Fortunately, it’s not true. It is possible to be on top of things.
Yet, at the same time, there will be seasons where you aren’t — and perhaps can’t be.
How do we reconcile these two realities?
By recognizing that productivity is a learning process. Further, by recognizing that it is sometimes a tough learning process. You can grow and get better — but that doesn’t mean it will always be a smooth ride.
It is like learning calculus. You can learn calculus. But it can also be a big challenge.
The challenges along the way don’t mean something is wrong with you. Rather, they are part of the learning process. Further, as we achieve certain levels of effectiveness in managing our work, we graduate to new challenges — which require a new level of learning. So sometimes it can even feel like two steps forward and one step back.
I remember when I was learning Spanish in high school. We reached a point where, when some certain advanced material was introduced, we actually fell backwards in our abilities. It was strange. But our teacher said this was perfectly normal. It’s what happens. It’s part of the learning process as you graduate to new levels of difficulty.
And, it’s temporary. If you keep at it, you make it through these periods and emerge with entirely new, amazing abilities.
If the calculus analogy seems a bit off-putting (since calculus is so hard!), maybe think in terms of learning a foreign language, or even learning algebra. Most productivity stuff is not calculus level. The point is simply that in learning anything, there will be ups and downs.
I think this allows us to account for the biblical teaching that things will not always be going perfectly for us (including our productivity abilities) while also affirming the equally true other biblical reality that we can indeed make a difference in our lives for the better.
It helps us avoid a prosperity gospel-like view of productivity, thinking that everything is always supposed to be perfect if you are just doing the right things, without falling into a defeatism that says we are somehow supposed to be always stuck.
We aren’t supposed to be stuck, and there is hope. It just takes a learning process and persistence, not a magic wand.
by Matt Perman
Tim Challies’ series on productivity has him talking about email today. This part towards the beginning is hilarious, and does a good job of showing just how bad some of our email practices are by drawing a comparison with the physical mail:
DOING EMAIL BADLY
To better understand why so many of us do email so badly, let’s draw a comparison to a real-world object: your mailbox. Imagine if you treated your actual, physical mailbox like you treat your email. Here’s how it would go:
You walk outside to check your mail and reach into your mailbox. Sure enough, you’ve got some new mail. You take out one of your letters, open it up and begin to read it. You get about halfway through, realize it is not that interesting, stuff it back inside the envelope, and put it back in the mailbox. “I’ll deal with this one later.” You open the next letter and find that it is a little bit more interesting, but you do the same thing—stuff it back into the envelope and put it back inside the mailbox. Other mail you pull out and don’t even bother reading—it just goes straight back inside the mailbox. And sure enough, your mailbox is soon crammed full of a combination of hundreds of unopened and unread letters plus hundreds of opened and read or partially-read letters.
But it gets worse. You don’t just use your mailbox to receive and hold letters, but also to track your calendar items. You reach in deep and pull out a handful of papers with important dates and events written on them, including a few that have come and gone without you even noticing or remembering. And, of course, you also use your mailbox as a task list, so you’ve got all kinds of post-it notes in there with your to-do items scrawled all over them.
But we aren’t done yet. Even though you feel guilty and kind of sick every time you open your mailbox, you still find yourself checking your mail constantly. Fifty or sixty times a day you stop whatever else you are doing, you venture down the driveway, and reach your hand inside to see if there is anything new.
It is absurd, right? Your life would be total chaos. And yet that is exactly how most people treat their email. It is chaotic with no rules or procedures to control it. What do you need? You need a system.
He then goes on to give a simple but highly effective system for managing your email. He nails all of the core principles, such as the fact that an inbox is only for receiving email — not storing it –, the basic email workflow, and more.
by Matt Perman
Tim Challies has been doing a great series on how he gets things done.
So far, he has covered:
I especially appreciate how he has given solid attention to the higher levels of roles and responsibilities, instead of going straight to to-do lists. This is essential for making sure you are doing the right things (rather than just being busy) and doing them for the right reasons. And, it’s just plain interesting!
I’m enjoying these posts very much and Tim’s thinking is very much in sync with mine. Tim has been studying this issue and refining his systems for several years now. It is great to see what he has developed and it’s worth keeping up with the series as it continues.
by Matt Perman
God does everything he does with excellence, and Jesus surely never engaged in shoddy work in his time of working as a carpenter before his public ministry. Therefore, we should not settle for shoddy work in our occupations, either.
Yet, because much Christian teaching on work is still thin and compartmentalized, this often happens. We need to correct this by affirming that we are not to compartmentalize our work and our faith, as though God’s call on us applies only in the area of church and our personal lives. Further, if we were able to recapture the compelling biblical vision of work in the church, it would do wonders for the effectiveness of our testimony to the gospel before the world.
I love how Dorothy Sayers makes these points in Why Work:
How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?
The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.
What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly — but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? [Great point! Shoddy and careless workmanship is an insult to God because it misrepresents his nature and pervasive concern for all areas of life.]
No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any one believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.
Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman.
And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as the work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.
by Matt Perman
Dorothy Sayers, in Why Work:
The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety.
Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.
God is not served by technical incompetence.
by Matt Perman
Yesterday I posted a cut from the introduction to What’s Best Next on how it relates to Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life and similar books. In yet another version of the introduction, I actually continued discussing that theme further, going into how What’s Best Next also relates to Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life and Tim Keller’s Reason for God.
I then discussed how, even beneath that, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards and the great evangelical social reformer William Wilberforce lay at the foundations of the book. Both of these individuals show the essential relationship between deep doctrine and lively practice in the Christian life — a vision which we need to recapture today.
Here it is:
What’s Best Next also relates to other recent helpful books. For example, I find Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life to be very helpful. But how do you translate your purpose into your everyday life of emails and meetings and your kids messing up the house every 15 minutes? This book shows you more detail on how to do that.
Likewise, Tim Keller’s Reason for God is a very helpful recent book on Christian apologetics — that is, making a reasonable case for the truth of Christianity. I’d love to write a book on apologetics one day. But in the meantime, equipping ourselves to be more effective in the culture, in connecting with others in the everyday, and being a useful person, enables us to contribute to the ultimate apologetic — namely, living a life of love for others.
Beneath Piper and these other books, the ultimate vision for this book comes from two industrious Christians from about three centuries ago: Jonathan Edwards and William Wilberforce. Both exhibit the twin convictions behind this book, which are often disconnected in evangelicalism today.
Edwards is known mostly for being an utterly devoted theologian. Wilberforce, on the other hand, is known mostly as a model for Christians in the practical realm, having ended the slave trade in Britain while also all throughout his life having initiated multiple initiatives for good.
What is less known about these individuals is that Wilberforce’s practice was utterly grounded in theology, and that Edward’s theology led him to be utterly practical. In fact, Edwards’ book Charity and Its Fruits goes just as deep into the practical side of the Christian life as his other works delve into the doctrinal. And Wilberforce’s lays out the theology (which was just as Calvinistic as Edwards) behind his practice in his book A Practical View — which was also responsible for transforming the moral outlook of Britain.
Wilberforce and Edwards each demonstrate the radical connectedness of doctrine and practice in the Christian life. This conviction lies at the heart of this book: if we care about doctrine, we must also care about living that doctrine out in the affairs of everyday life. And if we care about living our faith in the world, we must care about doctrine because doctrine is the fuel and foundation of our practice as Christians.
Both Wilberforce and Edwards undergird this book in another way as well, for they show that productivity is really, at root, a matter of love. In other words, you cannot disconnect personal productivity from love because productivity is actually about loving others. The ultimate reason we seek to be productive is so that we can serve others. As Paul says, “let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14).
Likewise, since love seeks not merely to intend to do good to others, but to actually do good for others, love leads us to learn how to actually be effective in our service. Love, in other words, must care about the practical. And this is especially true in our current environment, where it is so easy for the best of intentions to be swallowed up by the tyranny of the urgent.
Personal effectiveness, then, is an expression of love, and thus a Christian understanding of productivity needs to be informed not only by all the passages on work and diligence and planning and fruitfulness, but most of all by all the passages on love. Hence, books like Edwards’ Charity and Its Fruits and his sermon “The Christian Duty of Charity to the Poor,” as well as, in more recent days, Tim Keller’s Ministries of Mercy and Gary Haguen’s Good News About Injustice have greatly shaped my thinking.
by Matt Perman
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.)
by Matt Perman
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.