What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

by Matt Perman

Myth #1: Productivity is about getting more done faster. When most people think of productivity, they think of efficiency — getting more things done faster. While efficiency is important, it is secondary. More important than efficiency is effectiveness — getting the right things done. Efficiency doesn’t matter if you are doing the wrong things in the first place. Truth: Productivity is about effectiveness first, not efficiency.

the foundation of effectiveness is not first techniques or tools, but character.

~ What's Best Next

The power behind our productivity comes from realizing that, through faith in the gospel, we are accepted by God in Christ apart from what we do. This puts wind in our sails and unleashes the power of the Spirit in our lives (Gal. 3:5).

Truth: The only way to be productive is to realize that you don’t have to be productive.

We are most productive not when we seek to tightly control ourselves but when we seek to unleash ourselves. Productivity comes from engagement, not control and mere compliance. This is why operating in our strengths is so important.

The reason we should seek to be productive is to serve others to the glory of God, and not for the sake of personal peace and affluence. Ironically, however, peace of mind results when the good of others, and not our own peace of mind, is our first aim.

Myth #8: We will have peace of mind if we can get everything under control. The problem with this idea is that it doesn’t work. It is simply not possible to have everything under control, and so the quest to base our peace of mind on our ability to control everything is futile. Our peace of mind must be based on other grounds — namely, the gospel.

Myth #10: Productivity is best defined by tangible outcomes. We often think of productivity as getting concrete things done — emails sent, widgets made, and assignments completed. These things are important, but they do not exhaust the scope of our productivity. More and more, productivity is about intangibles — relationships developed, connections made, and things learned. We need to incorporate intangibles into our definition of productivity or we will short-change ourselves by thinking that sitting at our desks for a certain number of hours equals a productive day.

Truth: The greatest evidence of productivity comes from intangibles, not tangibles.

Myth #11: The time we spend working is a good measure of our productivity. Being at our desks doesn’t equal being productive, and organizations should no longer measure an employee’s productivity that way. At the same time, other things take far longer than you would think: sometimes the best way to be productive is to be inefficient. As a corollary to this, deadlines work well for execution tasks (the realm of personal management), but they do not work well for creative tasks and ambiguity (the realm of personal le...

Myth #12: Having to work really hard or even suffer in our work means our priorities are screwed up or we are doing something wrong. I’m not sanctioning the practice of making work an idol to which we sacrifice everything in our lives. Productivity is concerned with all areas of our lives — work, home, community, everything — because all areas of our lives are callings from God.

I want to show you that serving God in the things you do every day and going beyond to be engaged in God’s global purposes is the life of greatest joy and peace — not seeking personal peace, affluence, wealth, or success.

The frustration of bad productivity approaches is not a small matter that we can just work around, for we can’t run our lives without some sort of approach to getting things done. The issue is not whether we have an approach to personal productivity; the issue is whether our approach is a good one or a bad one.

our ability to lead, manage, spend undistracted time with friends and family, and do everything else we do depends largely upon a skill that goes underneath all of those things and makes them all possible — the cross-functional skill of knowing how to manage ourselves.

If we don’t give attention to the discipline of personal effectiveness but instead let the flow of events determine what we do, we will likely fritter ourselves away doing all sorts of urgent things that come our way while never getting to the truly important things.

managing yourself well involves more than just getting more done faster. It also involves knowing what the right things to do are — the realm of personal leadership. If we aren’t heading in the right direction in our personal lives, we may accomplish our goals only to find out that we were going down the wrong road the whole time.

A good approach to getting things done reduces the friction in doing good and also amplifies our ability to do good. The result is that we can be of more benefit to others with less snags, stress, and confusing systems.

As time management expert Julie Morgenstern notes, “Workers who can consistently decide with clarity and ease which tasks are most important when under pressure are the most prized in every organization. Highly focused in pressure-cooker situations, they rise to meet the challenges of an opportunity-saturated workplace that demands tough calls at every step. Not surprisingly, these employees are also the most calm.”8

The essence of GDP is this: We are to use all that we have, in all areas of life, for the good of others, to the glory of God — and that this is the most exciting life.

To be a gospel-driven Christian means to be on the lookout to do good for others to the glory of God, in all areas of life, and to do this with creativity and competence. Further, being gospel-driven also means knowing how to get things done so that we can serve others in a way that really helps, in all areas of life, without making ourselves miserable in the process through overload, overwhelm, and hard-to-keep-up systems.

Generosity is at the heart of true productivity in all areas of life.

a life of doing good for others is actually the most exciting life, for God calls us to find ways of doing good with a sense of creativity, competence, and adventure.

We also will look at how the only way to be productive is to realize we don’t actually have to be productive (our goal is to please God, not appease God), and how the gospel continues to give us peace of mind even when everything is blowing up around us.

Define. This means not only knowing where you are going, but also knowing your criteria for deciding that altogether. This is not just a matter of clarifying your values. It is a matter of identifying the right values to have, and basing our lives — our entire lives, especially right here at the center — on those values that God and his Word lift up as central. This brings us into the realm of mission, vision, roles, and goals. The essence of defining can be summarized this way: Define what’s most important in your life based on what God says, not first on what you (or others) think. This is the only way to build a life that lasts and thus is truly productive (Matt. 7:21 – 27; Prov. 3:5 – 6; 14:12).

Architect. Once you’ve identified the most important principles, goals, and ongoing priorities in your life, you can’t just leave it at that. You have to weave these things into the structure of your life through a basic schedule, or time map, because intentions are not enough. A bad (or nonexistent) structure for your life will undo the best of intentions. Setting up a flexible framework for your life also frees you to be less dependent on lists, which was an especially welcome benefit to me once I figured this out. The essence of the architecture step can be summarized this way: Structure your life by living your life mainly from a flexible routine, not a set of lists.

Reduce. After creating this structure, often you’ll find that making everything fit is the biggest obstacle. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve architected wrong; it just means you need to reduce. You need to know what’s most important (define), weave it into your life (architect), and then get rid of the rest (reduce). But you don’t get rid of the rest by simply letting balls drop. Rather, you do it by creating systems and using tactics that ultimately expand your capacity. This brings us into the realm of the core practices of day-to-day time management, including delegating, eliminating, automating, and deferring (the DEAD process we will learn), as well as how to turn time killers back on themselves by harnessing them rather than being defeated by them. The essence of reducing can be summarized this way: ...

Execute. This is the stage of making things happen in the moment. It is easy to think of execution as synonymous with productivity, but in reality it is actually only the last step. When you have done the previous steps (define, architect, and ...

Conveniently, these form the acronym DARE — which reminds us of the all-important guiding principle that underlies all of this, which is that we should have a sense of adventure in doing good. That is, we should be radical and risky and creative and abundant in using our effectiveness to make life better for others. (And, that this is the most exciting life.)

we need to understand productivity not simply in the sense of personal productivity but also in a broader sense — seeing it as about making our organizations, cities, and society as a whole more productive as well.

We will see that as we are productive in a gospel-centered way, God transforms our workplaces, communities, cities, and the entire world for the advancement of the gospel and the good of the world.

The mark of a truly helpful approach to productivity — and life — is that it keeps you oriented and keeps you going even when everything around you seems to be falling apart. This is a productivity approach for imperfect people in an imperfect world, but with a perfect God who is leading them to what one day will be a renewed world of perfect joy, peace, and righteousness.

the essence of knowledge work is that you not only have to do the work but also have to define what the work is.

For example, if you are painting your house (a form of manual labor), you can see right away where to brush next. But when you get a hundred emails a day (a form of knowledge work), most of which do a pretty poor job of getting to the point, the next actions don’t usually come to you predefined. You have to figure out what to do with each email, then figure out how to fit that in with all the rest of your work that you have had (or have yet) to define.

Most of us haven’t paid sufficient attention to the skill of defining our work clearly. This is why it so often feels like our workdays never stop. When you don’t have your work cle...

when your work consists in creating and using knowledge, there is an important consequence: by definition, it must be primarily self-directed. Peter Drucker points this out well: “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, effectiveness.”1

Peter Drucker pointed out that he never found a “natural,” someone who is instinctively effective. Every effective person he encountered — and as perhaps the greatest consultant and business thinker of the twentieth century, that’s a lot — had to work at becoming effective.

Brilliant insight, hard work, and good intentions are not enough. Effectiveness is a distinct skill that must be learned.

Drucker says it well: “To be reasonably effective it is not enough for the individual to be intelligent, to work hard or to be knowledgeable. Effectiveness is something separate, something different.”3

Belsky adds later, “The ideas that move industries forward are not the result of tremendous creative insight but rather of masterful stewardship.”

Ambiguity is not necessarily a villain in itself. It is a good thing that knowledge work has at its essence creating clarity out of ambiguity and making good decisions (i.e., determining what’s best next). But when we don’t know how to do knowledge work, ambiguity becomes a villain because it ends up frustrating us, making life harder, and sometimes defeating us. It’s like jumping in the pool without knowing how to swim. Jobs today are not as clear as they were in the industrial era, yet we haven’t been taught the skills of navigating this context, learning how to define our work, and managing ourselves for effectiveness.

the most effective knowledge era strategies don’t drop from heaven fully defined. We have to figure them out — and that happens by trial and error. As a society, we are still figuring out the best practices for navigating knowledge work — which means we encounter a lot that don’t work and many problems along the way.

So with the shift from the industrial era to the knowledge era, we now need to decide more than ever what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

The issue of ambiguity doesn’t simply affect us at the level of defining our work; it also affects us at the level of defining the direction of our lives.

As Tim Sanders has put it, it used to be that “relationships were for the most part geo-bound, and only a handful of people comprised your entire business network.”6 Today, our networks run into the hundreds and thousands, and we can connect with people all over the world through email, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

The proliferation of technology has not only increased our daily load of information; it has astronomically increased the rate of change in society and in the world of work altogether. As Tim Sanders notes, “before the information revolution, business changed gradually and business models became antiquated even more slowly. The value progression evolved over decades and double decades. You could go to college, get an M.B.A. and work for forty years, and your pure on-the-job knowledge stayed relevant.”7 Today, however, our skills become outdated more quickly (except for the macro, cross-functional skill of getting things done!). We not only need to keep up with all the information coming our way on a day-to-day basis, but we also need to keep our skills and knowledge up to date with the massive changes that are rapidly occurring at the level of work and society.

Just as something good (the rise of knowledge work) brought us head-to-head with the first villain, so also the rise of mass connectivity, though an excellent thing, brings us head-to-head with a second villain: overload. Massive overload.

In 2008, the web contained one trillion pages. That has risen at an exponential rate, such that in 2013 the quantity of information on the internet began doubling every seventy-two hours. Every seventy-two hours — every three days — the amount of information online doubles.

In 2010, 95 trillion emails were sent (about 260 billion per day). That averages to about 153 emails per user per day (there were about 1.86 billion internet users at the beginning of 2010). Currently 92 million tweets are posted per...

How do we make good decisions in the midst of this overload? And how do we keep this overload from sinking us? We can’t just float along, like a ship without a rudder, expecting things to go well. We need to take initiative and learn how to navigate this and get things done in spite of the obstacles.

WE NEED TO LEARN HOW TO WORK Here’s the bottom line: We are using industrial era tactics for knowledge era work. And that doesn’t work.