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

by Matt Perman

As we will see in this book, 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. Mark Schultz gets at this idea in his song as well. The speaker reflects on how time has passed and wonders how he got where he is. Then he says, “I dreamed my dreams; I made my plans; but all I built here is an empty man.” He had his plans, but they didn’t take him where he thought. In order to avoid the tragedy of the empty self, we need to know our purpose and direction in life. The last thing anyone wants is to end up having it all, only to realize they have nothing (cf. Luke 9:23 – 25).

This pressed me to refine my approach to give a greater place to prioritizing — an approach that focused not primarily on doing more things in less time but rather on doing the right things in a flexible way.

delegating, eliminating, automating, and deferring (the DEAD process we will learn),

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.

we ought to manage to the whole person, treating people as people, not as machines who are merely here to get a job done. And ironically, when you treat people this way, even though it is harder at first, you get higher productivity in the long run.

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 part of the work of any leader and manager. It is one of the many intangibles that define the essence of knowledge work in our day.

As John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”

As Paul says in Galatians 6:10, “as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone.” We aren’t called to do good that God has not put within our reach; to try to do so would be quite exasperating.

But, second, notice that we are to do all the good we can. Very often we seem to settle for a reduced view of the good that God has for us to do. But when we look around at the world, we see that there are far more opportunities to do good than we can imagine. If we aren’t abounding in good works, the problem is likely not a lack of opportunity but a lack of desire. I love what the great evangelical social reformer William Wilberforce said: “No man has a right to be idle. . . . [W]here is it in such a world as this that health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?”1 That’s the biblical ethic. We are not to be scant and scarce in our good works, or even nominal and mediocre, but abundant and liberal in doing good. We are not simply to do good for some people here and there; we are to do good for all people as often as we can and as much as we can.