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

by Matt Perman

Supporting systems: Contacts, checklists, journals, and files

In other words, the same thing that is true of projects is true of us as individuals. Here’s what Scott Berkun says about projects in The Art of Project Management: “More often than not, I’ve found that obsessing on process is a warning sign of leadership trouble: it can be an attempt to offload the natural challenges and responsibilities that managers face into a system of procedures and bureaucracies that cloud the need for real thought and action [emphasis added]. Perhaps even more devastating to a team is that methodology fixation can be a signal of what is truly important to the organization.”7

So if you find yourself getting too bogged down in how you organize and keep up your next action lists and project lists, the problem is not your next action and project lists. Rather, these are simply symptoms of a leadership problem: you aren’t leading yourself the way you ought. You don’t have clarity on what you ought to be doing and the direction you should be taking. The result is confusion down in the lower levels. Make your productivity systems streamlined, but don’t spend time over-optimizing. Act. You are free to do this because knowing what’s best does not depend on having your system all up to date; rather it depends on just stopping, reflecting, and asking, “What is the best thing to do now?”

You just need to have the discernment to answer it right and the discipline to do it.

Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.

Rick Warren captures this very well: “The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That’s because we typically begin at the wrong starting point — ourselves. . . . Contrary to what many popular books, movies, and seminars tell you, you won’t discover your life’s meaning by looking within yourself. You probably tried that already. You didn’t create yourself, so there is no way you can tell yourself what you were created for.”2

Our mission cannot be separated from the pursuit of justice.

Given this as our mission, we should seek to walk with God continually through prayer and trust in his Word; be a part of a community of believers and a good church where we worship corporately; love people right where we are in all our vocations; seek to meet physical needs here and abroad; and pursue justice for the oppressed wherever we see it and around the world.

Jesus is saying, “You have to first acknowledge your sinfulness and come to me for life, and then this is how you are to live.”

Jesus is saying, “You have to first acknowledge your sinfulness and come to me for life, and then this is how you are to live.” Jesus is saying, “You have to first acknowledge you cannot overcome your own sin, admit your need and dependency upon me, abide in me and then you experience a transformed life that only I (Jesus) can produce.”

To every person there comes in their lifetime that special moment when you are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to you and your talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds you unprepared or unqualified for work which could have been your finest hour. — Winston Churchill

God is a big God (Jer. 32:27), he has given us a gigantic task (Matt. 28:18 – 20), and he is able to do abundantly more than we can even ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20). Thinking small, merely, is not the Christian thing to do.

As Dave Harvey shows in his excellent book Rescuing Ambition, God never intended true humility to be a fabric softener for our aspirations.

Your mission is the ultimate reason for your existence — forever. It is your chief why. Your life goal is the concrete what. It is the chief way that you seek to fulfill your mission.

A life goal is what most people mean when they talk about finding your calling in life.

Organizational Dashboard If you are at a high level in your department or organization and are responsible for the work of many people or a team or a whole department or the whole organization, you can use the role-listing concept to keep the framework of the entire organization before you. To do this, create a chart of your department or organization and review it weekly just like you review your roles weekly, giving intentional, proactive thought to whether everything is going along as it needs to, and identifying actions you can take to serve and improve your department.

While this is a critical step in becoming productive, it’s not enough, because systems trump intentions. You can have great intentions, but if your life is set up in a way that is not in alignment with them, you will be frustrated. The structure of your life will win out every time.

The key to effectiveness — putting the most important things first — is knowing what is most important and then weaving it into your life through simple structures and systems. This is the arena of personal management — that is, the practice of putting the most important things first in your life.

The architecture step is the solution to this problem. The essence of it can be summarized this way: Structure your life by living mainly from a flexible routine, not a set of lists. To do this well, you need to know three things: (1) how to set up your week, (2) what routines to slot into your week and, because it’s a special case, (3) how to get creative things done. That’s what we will be looking at in this section.

People work best from routines, not lists (or, be like George Washington).

A basic schedule helps keep you from massive overload (I speak from experience . . .).

If you have a basic routine, however, it helps make your actions more tangible and forces you to consider where and when they will fit.

A basic schedule enables you to integrate all of your roles.

A basic schedule enables (rather than hinders) creative thinking.

Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Gap Between Vision and Reality,

Having a basic routine channels your ability to focus and protects time for creative work and work that requires sustained focus and concentration.

My point in suggesting a basic framework to your week is not to eliminate or reduce spontaneous interaction but rather to enable more of it.

Sixteen-Hour Days

Be Insanely Good at What You Do

One-Month Sabbaticals

Julie Morgenstern, Time Management from the Inside Out

Get Up Early!

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you get up early or stay up super late. The key is that you need a long period of uninterrupted time to get your basic workflow and key projects done.

Daily Workflow

Basically, it boils down to one hour (or sometimes ninety minutes) of focused, uninterrupted work each day in which you can work through a set of four core tasks: 1. Plan your day. 2. Execute your workflow (including processing your email to zero). 3. Do your main daily activity. 4. Do some next actions or major project work.

Plan Your Day The first thing to do is plan your day. We will talk about this in more detail in the chapter on executing your day, but at root you need to identify the most important things for the day, list them, and sequence them.

Do Your Main Daily Activity Whatever your most important ongoing activity is, do it here. If you are seeking to devote some time each day to thinking about company strategy, do it here. If you are a blogger, blog here. Whatever your primary individual work is, do it here.

Do Some Next Actions or Work on an Important Project After you’ve been able to work on your main activity, look at your next actions list and knock some off. You might also want to put some time in on any major projects you have going on.

After Your Workflow Routine After your workflow routine, go on with your day, which means do whatever you have on your calendar or have planned for the rest of the day, whether that’s specific project work or meetings or just being generally available for people.

Weekly Workflow

Prayer and Scripture

Reading and Development

Rest

Competence is doing what you need to do. Excellence is knowing what you’re supposed to do, getting it on autopilot, and going beyond.

Chaos plays a very significant role in our lives. Lack of planning for chaotic behavior can be a very costly oversight.

Researchers have found that whenever most systems — such as airports, freeways, and other such things — exceed about 90 percent capacity, efficiency drops massively. Not just slightly, but massively. This is called the “ringing effect.” The reason is that as a system nears its capacity, the effect of relatively small disturbances is magnified exponentially.

The problem is that once capacity is past about 90 percent, small disturbances have a huge effect. And so traffic slows down, sometimes to a crawl. That’s the ringing effect.

The ringing effect doesn’t just apply to traffic or airports. It applies to your projects and your organization as well. When all these small effects are cascading — “ringing” — through your life and the organization, work is not getting done. Or perhaps to put it better, useless work is being multiplied.

Your projects themselves do this to you, even if no one else is involved. For when you are working on a lot of things simultaneously, they will often “bump into” one another, causing the same type of cascading effect.

Here’s what this means: In order to get more projects done (and do them better and faster), you need to reduce the number of projects you are actually working on at once.

And for organizations and individuals, the ringing effect comes into play not at 90 percent capacity, but already at about 75 percent of capacity. Thus, as my professor said, “If you schedule projects for 75 percent capacity, you will get more work accomplished.”