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

by Matt Perman

We need to give more focused attention to learning how to work. Not just the specific content of our jobs but the overarching, cross-functional skill of how to get things done in general — what David Allen calls “high performance workflow management.”8 T...

In other words, there are actually two components to doing our work. There are the job skills themselves — creating financial statements, writing web content, preaching sermons, leading meetings, and so forth — an...

We’ve done pretty well as a society at learning how to do the content of our jobs. But we haven’t been so great at learning the overarching process of how to manage our work: how to keep track of what we have to do, make decisions about what’s best to do next, keep from overcommitting ourselves, and do all of this in th...

The reason it’s so hard to get things done is that we have transitioned as a society from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, but we haven’t updated our strategies and tactics to align with the nature of knowledge work. The result is that we are unprepared to meet the challenges of ambiguity and overload.

Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all. — Peter Drucker

While efficiency is important, it works only when we make it secondary, not primary. It doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you are doing the wrong things in the first place. More important than efficiency is effectiveness — getting the right things done. In other words, productivity is not first about getting more things done faster. It’s about getting the right things done.

Simply speeding up doesn’t help if you aren’t going in the right direction in the first place.

It is good to exercise control over our environment. In fact, it’s one of the purposes God gave us when he created us (Gen. 1:28). But especially in this fallen world, it’s not possible to control everything. We will make mistakes, and sometimes things will simply be too much for us (cf. 2 Cor. 1:8 – 11). We need an approach to getting things done that acknowledges this and doesn’t require us to keep it up perfectly or to see everything go our way in order to work. Anything else is doomed to futility and will only multiply our pain and frustration.

increasing your efficiency can actually backfire and make things worse. This is because when you become more efficient, you tend to do more things — and if you aren’t doing the right things in the first place, you have just become an expert at doing more of what doesn’t need to be done at all.

In their excellent book The Bottomless Well, Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out that historically it has been the case that as energy efficiency increases, we actually use more energy, not less. The reason is that as our electronic devices become more efficient, that clears the way for us to do more things with them, and so the amount of energy used goes up.

Tim Sanders rightly notes that “success in the future [which is now!] will be based on the fuzzy intangibles: the culture you nurture, the processes for managing information you set up for your people, the partnerships you form around technology’s opportunities and challenges.”6

Effectiveness, in work and life, is thus more and more about the intangibles because effectiveness comes from people first, not things. Things are replicable; people aren’t.

This is the great irony: defining productivity mainly in terms of immediate measurable results undermines the measurable results in the long run.

The time and energy and resources you invest in the intangibles is not lost; it is not a “cost of doing business.” It is an investment that pays substantial returns in the long run. It’s just that you can’t always draw a direct and immediate line to the results. But the results are there, and the connection is there, just as the farmer who sows a crop in the spring sees results not immediately but in the fall, when it’s time to harvest. So also we need to have this long-term view when it comes to our effectiveness and productivity, both as individuals and as organizations.

One of the biggest examples of investing for the long run for the knowledge worker is attending conferences. I believe that all knowledge workers should go to every conference they can because these are prime opportunities to connect with people and share ideas — the essence of knowledge work. But many think that going to a conference is a luxury or a bonus, something to do only if you can get your other, “real” work done. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Going to conferences is a key pa...

The far greater priority than becoming more efficient is learning how to identify what’s most important — that is, what’s best — and then translate that into action. The mistake of superficial efficiency is that it sacrifices people on the altar of tasks. That’s backward. As we will see later, efficiency exists so that you can serve others better, not sacrifice them to efficiency.

One of the best places for efficiency is being efficient with things so that you can be effective with people. If you become more efficient with things (for example, by setting up your computer, desk, workflow system, and files to operate in the most efficient way possible), you will have more time to give to being effective with people without feeling like you are always behind on your tasks.

In many ways, the aim of time management can be boiled down to the quest for peace of mind — getting things done with less stress and finding greater fulfillment in what we do. Yet even on days when we get a lot done, we often still feel unfulfilled at the end of the day. We can even feel unfulfilled if we have a life that seems to have it all.

The source of our lack of fulfillment is not just that the best of our intentions often get knocked away from us. The deeper reason is that we feel unfulfilled when there is a gap between what is most important to us (the realm of personal leadership) and what we are actually doing with our time (the realm of personal management).

You are satisfied with your day when there is a match between what you value and how you spent your time. On the other hand, when what you actually work on and accomplish during the day is mostly different from what really matters to you, you feel unfulfilled. Not because you didn’t get much done — in many cases, you have — but because the things you were getting done weren’t the things that you value.