Some people might ask, “another book on productivity?” Rest assured, I’m not interested in repeating cliches. I’ll be making connections that I don’t see other people making, but which I think are absolutely necessary to how we think about productivity.

I want to do two things in this book. First, I want to give the theological basis for productivity. The question I’m asking is “how should we think about productivity as Christians?” There are some very surprising things here. More specifically, I’m going to mine the relationship between productivity and the gospel, so that we can have a gospel-oriented approach to our productivity. Believe me, this matters (and I’ll be showing why).

After giving the theological foundations for how to think about productivity, I’m then going to give a practical, simple approach to managing your life and work effectively. In particular, I’m going to try to present an overall approach that solves some of the snags that you run into with both GTD and Franklin-Covey (the two most well-known approaches to productivity).

Both of those approaches are fantastically helpful. But both have a few snags that can easily lead you to spend more time than you ought to managing your system rather than actually getting things done or just taking time to think and be with people. Maybe these snags flow from how we use them (or how I have used them!) or the way technology has increased our pace in just the last few years, but regardless, I think that we have need now for an updated approach (that is kept as simple as possible).

I’ll be covering some of the highlights of this in my workshop this fall at the Desiring God National Conference. You can glean part of my perspective from my title there: Zealous for Good Works: Rethinking Productivity in Light of Justification by Faith Alone.

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One of our associates shared this experience:

I attended a seminar once where the instructor was lecturing on time. At one point, he said, “Okay, it’s time for a quiz.” He reached under the table and pulled out a wide-mouth gallon jar. He set it on the table next to a platter with some fist-sized rocks on it. “How many of these rocks do you think we can get in the jar?” he asked.

After we made our guess, he said, “Okay. Let’s find out.” He set one rock in the jar . . . then another . . . then another. I don’t remember how many he got in, but he got the jar full. Then he asked, “Is that jar full?”

Everybody looked at the rocks and said, “Yes.”

Then he said, “Ahhh.” He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar and the gravel went in all the little spaces left by the big rocks. Then he greinned and said once more, “Is the jar full?”

By this time we were on to him. “Probably not,” we said.

“Good!” he replied. And he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went in all the little spaces left by the rocks and the gravel. Once more he looked at us and said,”Is the jar full?”

“No!” we all roared.

He said, “Good!” and he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in. He got something like a quart of water in that jar. Then he said, “Well, what’s the point?”

Somebody said, “Well, there are gaps, and if you really work at it, you can always fit more into your life.”

“No,” he said, “that’s not the point. The point is this: if you hadn’t put these big rocks in first, would you ever have gotten any of them in?”

The point is: You have to put the big rocks — your most important tasks — in first, or you won’t be able to do them at all. The point is not to do more in less time, but rather to focus on doing what is most important. Covey continues:

Wit the “more is better” paradigm, we’re always trying to fit more activities into the time we have. But what does it matter how much we do if what we’re doing isn’t what matters most?

Our Quadrant II goals [important, but not urgent] are like the “big rocks.” If we put other activities — the water, sand, and gravel — in first, and then try to fit the big rocks in, not only will they not fit, we’ll end up making a pretty big mess in the process.

But if we know what the big rocks are and put them in first, it’s amazing how many of them we can put in — and how much of the sand, gravel, and water fits in between the spaces. Regardless of what else actually does fit in, the key point is tha thte big rocks — our Quadrant II goals — are in first.

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It is wrong to think that great management is important for front-line employees, but that managers themselves can have bad managers and get along just fine.

Maybe this is an overstatement, but I think it would be better to have no manager at all than a bad manager. Actually, that’s probably true.

Regardless, great managers perform better when their manager is also a great manager, providing just a bit of outside perspective to help them make sure that they are doing what they do best every day, that the expectations of their role are clear, and that they are on track to being as effective as they can be.

Here’s how Rodd Wagner and James Harter put it in the book 12: The Elements of Great Managing:

We are often asked what makes great managers perform so well.

Some of it is pure talent — a natural ability to discern an employee’s mindset, a persistent optimism, or a strategic acumen difficult to duplicate. Some of it is a deeply held personal mission to change the world for the better.

Much of it also requires that a front-line supervisor have the same experience with the 12 Elements as those he directs. One of the most fundamental needs of a great manager is . . . a great manager.

As obvious as that statement may be, there is an undercurrent running through many organizations that assumes recognition and praise, a mentor, clear expectations, and the rest of the 12 are required only for the front lines. The best managers, so this line of thinking goes, are more self-aware and self-contained, impervious to such forces, and able to maintain a steady course without much regard for the circumstances.

The evidence is just the opposite. The engagement of managers ebbs and flows just as much as it does for anyone else. Moreover, the engagement level of a manager correlates strongly with the attitudes of her team. No one is an island.

. . . The anecdotes and, more important, analyses of manager performance point out that one of the best things a senior executive can do to motivate the entire population in a company is to first look out for the enterprise’s supervisors. Before a person can deliver what he should as a manager, he must first receive what he needs as an employee.

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Burnout doesn’t happen when you are working long hours on invigorating activities. Long hours may tire you out, but they rarely burn you out. But fill your weeks with the wrong kinds of activities, activities that weaken you, and even regular activities will start to burn.

This means that burnout doesn’t even necessarily mean that you are in the wrong job. You can be in the right job, doing the wrong things.

So, what’s the solution? Work within your strengths, and cut out the activities that call upon your weaknesses — that is, the activities that weaken you:

Pick a week; capture, clarify, and confirm which activities strengthen and which weaken; then start the week-by-week process of pushing your time toward the former and away from the latter.

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People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.

You can learn more about how this works and how to get started using it in the full post.

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They make the point — rightly, I believe — that “most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture.” For this reason, companies that pay with a generosity of spirit are likely to perform better financially than those that don’t. The reason is that when employees feel that they are being treated well with their pay (rather than the minimum the company could get by with paying them), they tend to match the gesture with more effort. It also tends to result in higher engagement (because of the thought behind their pay — not because of being driven by money), which also results in greater performance for the organization.

Here is what they have to say in their own words:

Most employees who feel generously compensated repay the gesture

One truth reemerges in various permutations throughout this book. It is that human behavior usually doesn’t conform to the logical or mathematical assumptions behind many personnel strategies. This certainly holds true of the tug-of-war over an employee’s salary.

The traditional view assumes that a company should pay as little as possible to secure someone’s services, whether that amount is just a little more than a competitor would pay or the lowest amount for which the worker will settle in his salary negotiations.

The often-overlooked flip-side of that strategy holds that the employee will do the minimum required to make his salary and his bonus. The company wants maximum work for minimum pay, while the employee wants just the reverse. Between these competing forces, the wage is settled, giving both sides a tolerable, antagonistic compromise.

But a funny thing happens in experiments where one person offers a wage and another person decides what level of effort to give in return. If the “employer” offers an above-market wage, the “employee” usually matches it with more effort, even when the worker can get away with doing less. “This suggests that on average people are willing to put forward extra effort above what is implied by purely pecuniary considerations,” wrote researchers Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter. With conscientious, engaged employees, generosity of pay begets generosity of effort.

While money itself does not buy engagement, it appears an employee’s perception that the company is aggressively looking out for his financial interest leads to productive reciprocation. More than just the money, the thought counts.

The research points to a choice that executives must make. Do they want a workforce that thinks, “I have to fight for every extra dollar they begrudgingly pay me,” or one that feels, “If I look out for my company, they will look out for me”?

Simple questions reveal where a company stands. If a talented employee does something extraordinary or repeatedly distinguishes herself, will it be her manager or the employee herself who initiates discussion of a raise? Does the company spend more to attract outside stars than to cultivate internal ones? Does the company realize its talent is underpaid only after a competitor woos them away?

In matters of pay, as with the 12 Elements, what employees enthusiastically do for the company depends heavily on what the company eagerly does for them.

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I thought it might be fun not only to talk about the book itself (float ideas, post some early drafts parts of chapters, and so forth), but also talk a bit about my process as well. After all, it seems very fitting, when writing a book on productivity, to peel back the curtains a bit on the productivity process involved in creating that very book.

So, even though it is a bit out of order to talk about the process before what the book is actually a bit, here’s the first snapshot for you.

I’m working on the book at this very moment. I haven’t started the actual writing yet, but am still crafting the proposal. In fact, I’ve slotted the whole weekend to work on this (the kids are at the grandparents — which is a nice break for Heidi and I).

So, what does it look like to be productive when working on a book proposal? I don’t exactly know. But what I’m doing today is probably going to seem counterintuitive to you.

Instead of getting up at 6:00 am and plowing through things for 12 – 18 hours — which I tend to do quite often with large projects — I’m actually spending more time not working on the proposal today than actually working directly on it. One reason for this is that both Heidi and I have had so many pressures of late (for example, our third child just turned 9 months) that my brain actually felt a bit fried this week (this is rare).

So I worked on the proposal a bit this morning, and then we both worked on staining the play set in our backyard for a bit (since the kids are gone, it’s a great time to do that). Then I came back down to work more on the proposal for a bit by reviewing my notes on how to make a proposal (yes, I read a bunch of books and took notes on how to do this — maybe that’s overkill!) and how to write (I also took notes over a bunch of books on writing; I feel like I had fantastic high school English teachers, but wanted to still touch up my knowledge a bit before embarking on this project). These notes come to about 60 pages.

After reviewing those and being reminded of some really cool stuff, I went running. When I got back from running I took a shower and then wrote a blog post that came to mind while on my run. Then I went to Subway. On the way back from Subway, I had some breakthrough ideas on a key area of the book (and an upcoming message that I’m giving). When I got back, Heidi and I had lunch, and I came back down to work on the proposal. I then quickly decided to go for a walk instead. On this walk more ideas came, which I captured in Evernote on my iPhone. Then I came down to continue work.

Now I am finally drilling down and beginning work on conceiving the table of contents. The way I’m doing this is by going through and organizing all the notes and ideas for the book that I’ve been capturing over the last few years. For at least the last year, these notes have gone in to Evernote. Wherever I have been when an idea would come — driving to work, on a trip, at work, anywhere — I would put the ideas in to Evernote on my iPhone and gave them a “book” tag. Now I’m going through each one and organizing them in to groupings that seem natural.

Out of this, the table of contents and overall blueprint for the book is emerging. I have had a rough idea of the table of contents in mind for a while, but this is really refining that and fleshing it out. It has been interesting to me today to see that the table of contents wants to come about as a result of organizing my thoughts on the book, rather than by just sitting down straight to create it.

So, there’s a snapshot for today. I wrote this because I thought you might find it interesting to see that I don’t necessarily think that productive means sitting down and knocking something out in such a way as to “minimize” any gaps in production or “wasted” time. I do often sit down and knock stuff out quickly (like this post), and I think that’s a good thing. But it isn’t always the best way to do things. There is also a place for giving ourselves breathing room.

I think there are five reasons that I’ve taken this approach today. The first reason is that I’ve never created a book proposal before. So I’m not only having to create a proposal, but figure out the way I want to create the proposal and get familiar with the process. Second, as I mentioned earlier, I needed to get my brain back in to a less pressured and more ordinary mode. Third, I think that reflection and thinking are often the fruit of unpressured time. Fourth, what I’m really doing with this proposal is blueprinting the entire book (that’s why proposals are so helpful, and important). As I went running, went to Subway, went on a walk, and worked on the play set, these were just environments where my mind could work more effectively on pulling my thoughts together than if I was sitting at my desk. Fifth and perhaps most significantly, it’s because I have so many ideas about this book and there are so many new things that I haven’t read anywhere else that it’s important to take time at the beginning here to bring that all to the front of my mind so I can now, finally, do things with it and turn it in to the actual book.

One of the books I read recently makes this point well. I think it was “Your Brain at Work” or something. It likens your short-term memory (your focus) to a stage. The stage is smaller than you think, and only a certain number of characters can fit on it at once. So in order to really focus, you have to get the wrong characters off the stage and the right ones on it. Then you need to get the right people in to the audience, so you can quickly call them up on to the stage when needed. With a project the size of a book, there’s a lot to do to set the stage.

So, there’s a snapshot. I’ll do this more as it strikes me. It might be frequent, or maybe not. Probably most snapshots won’t be this long. And, once I’ve finalized the publisher and such, if they tell me to stop, then I will!

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Your weaknesses are the things that make you feel weak, and your strengths are the things that make you feel strong.

This means there is incredible hope for growth. For when we say “your greatest opportunity for growth is in your area of your strengths, not your weaknesses,” we do not mean: “if you are bad at something, you don’t have much hope of ever getting better at it.”

There might be something that you are initially bad at but which you could become excellent at. For if it is something that makes you feel strong, then it’s not a weakness and you won’t be stuck. You just need to work on it — and work hard — and you will experience tremendous growth.

Having a right definition of strengths and weaknesses keeps us from a fatalistic mindset. It says: “It doesn’t matter what you are bad at. If there is something you want to accomplish, identify what makes you feel strong and seek to accomplish it along that path. If you currently aren’t good at something but doing it makes you feel strong, great news: you will be able to experience tremendous growth in that area if you work hard at it. And if there are legitimate areas of weakness (things that weaken you) that weigh you down, you can navigate around them by identifying your strengths and leveraging them to pass by your weaknesses.”

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In contrast, I’m working on my first book now.

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This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. 2 Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. 3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. 4 For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. 5 Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.

In The Cross and Christian Ministry: Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians, DA Carson points out that there is a nice surprise in this text which is contrary to everything we might expect:

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this paragraph of 1 Corinthians is how it ends. With the final day of judgment in view, Paul might have been expected to say, “At that time each will receive his rebuke from God.” But instead, he says, “At that time each will receive his praise from God” (4:5c).

How wonderful! The King of the universe, the Sovereign who has endured our endless rebellion and sought us out at the cost of his Son’s death, climaxes our redemption by praising us! He is a wise Father who knows how to encourage even the feeblest efforts of his children. What this way of concluding the paragraph shows is that in this case, God judges less sternly than the self-appointed judges in the church.

In this world, we can get so accustomed to hearing criticism. It’s built in to the fabric of things. In school, parent-teacher conferences are often centered around what the student is doing well, and then “areas for improvement.” Employee reviews often focus on what someone is doing well, and then “opportunities for growth” [= weaknesses]. And the truth is, of course, that we all have multiple shortcomings that can be rightly pointed out.

And so we would most of all expect the Last Judgment to end in the same way. But it won’t. Instead, for those who follow Christ, the Last Judgment will end with commendation — with praise — from God himself to us. He will not say “Here are the few things you did right, but look, you really screwed up here, here, and here.” Instead, “each will receive his praise from God.” I’m sure that the things we should have done differently will indeed be clear, in a non-condemnatory sort of way. But God’s focus will be on what is right, and that’s the note on which the Judgment will end (for believers). And we see this not only here in 1 Corinthians 4:4, but also in the Parable of the Talents: “Well done, good and faithful servant. . . . Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:21).

For believers, the dominant note of the Final Judgment is not rebuke, but praise.

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There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

He then goes on to give some helpful thoughts toward a solution at the end — both in terms of enabling managers and makers to be in sync and in terms of helping those who need to (and want to!) function in the realms of both manager and maker.

(HT: Josh Sowin)

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Don’t internalize failure. Remember that failure is an event, not a person. When you do fail, allow yourself to feel the disappointment. That’s reality, and an important part of it. But don’t internalize disapproval. Just because you failed at something doesn’t mean your a failure. Shake it off. And try something again.

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I have a large group of people to whom I write asking for prayer when I have a need. Sometimes my need is overcoming tiredness. When I write about this, many write back saying they are praying that God would strengthen me and guide me in my scheduling. However, there are differences in the way friends from the East and some from the West respond.

I get the strong feeling that many in the West think struggling with tiredness from overwork is evidence of disobedience to God. My contention is that it is wrong if one gets sick from overwork through drivenness and insecurity. But we may have to endure tiredness when we, like Paul, are servants of people [emphasis added].

The New Testament is clear that those who work for Christ will suffer because of their work [emphasis added]. Tiredness, stress, and strain may be the cross God calls us to. Paul often spoke about the physical hardships his ministry brought him, including emotional strain (Gal 4:19; 2 Cor 11:28), anger (2 Cor 11:29), sleepless nights and hunger (2 Cor 6:5), affliction and perplexity (2 Cor 4:8), and toiling — working to the point of weariness (Col 1:29). In statements radically countercultural in today’s “body conscious” society, he said, “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16); and, “For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you” (2 Cor 4:11-12). I fear that many Christians approach these texts only with an academic interest, not seriously asking how the verses should apply in their lives.

The West, having struggled with the tyrannical rule of time, has a lot to teach the East about the need for rest. The East has something to teach the West about embracing physical problems that come from commitment to people. If you think it is wrong to suffer physically because of ministry, then you suffer more from the problem than those who believe that suffering is an inevitable step on the path to fruitfulness and fulfillment. Since the cross is a basic aspect of discipleship, the church must train Christian leaders to expect hardship. When this perspective enters our minds, pain will not touch our joy and contentment in Christ. In 18 different New Testament passages, suffering and joy appear together. In fact, suffering is often the cause for joy (Rom 5:3-5; Col 1:24; James 1:2-3).

In short, suffering is not just persecution. As Paul’s own example shows, it is also the pain, tiredness (2 Cor 6:5 — even “sleepless nights,” in which I would also include all-nighters), seasons of extensive work (2 Thessalonians 3:8; 1 Thessalonians 2:9), confusion (2 Cor 4:8), emotional pressure (2 Cor 11:28; Gal 4:19), and “non-mind-like-water” mental “weights” that come our way as we are simply being faithful. These things are not automatically signs that we are working too hard. They are often part of the path, and they are supposed to be.

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