Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity

by Tim Challies

Productivity is not what will bring purpose to your life, but what will enable you to excel in living out your existing purpose.

Q1. Ultimately, why did God create you? A. God created me to bring glory to him.

All things exist to bring glory to God, and that includes each one of us. That includes you. God created you so he could receive glory from you and receive glory through you. That is an astonishing truth to consider and a deeply humbling one. When you grasp it and apply it, it transforms everything about your life. The simple fact is, you are not the point of your life. You are not the star of your show. If you live for yourself, your own comfort, your own glory, your own fame, you will miss out on your very purpose. God created you to bring glory to him.

There is no task in life that cannot be done for God’s glory.

If you can bring glory to God in all areas, you should bring glory to God in all areas. There is no area of your life where you have no ability to do good to others and where you have no ability to bring glory to God. Paul said, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). To Titus he said, “The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist

on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people” (Titus 3:8). To Timothy he wrote specifically of women and said,

Q6. What is productivity? A. Productivity is effectively stewarding my gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God.

three productivity thieves: laziness, busyness, and the mean combination of thorns and thistles.

But busyness cannot be confused with diligence. It cannot be confused with faithfulness or fruitfulness.2 “Busyness does not mean you are a faithful or fruitful Christian. It only means you are busy, just like everyone else.”3 Busyness may make you feel good about yourself and give the illusion of getting things done, but it probably just means that you are directing too little attention in too many directions, that you are prioritizing all the wrong things, and that your productivity is suffering.

Busyness and laziness are both issues that arise from within. They are deficiencies in character that then work themselves out in our lives. And, as if they weren’t already difficult enough, we also face challenges that come from outside ourselves.

You need to structure and organize your life so that you can do the maximum good for others and thus bring the maximum glory to God.

The kind of productivity I have described here is not only about what you do, but also about who you are. You need to be a certain kind of person before you can live this life. What kind of person do you need to be? You need to be a Christian—a person who has believed in Jesus Christ and received forgiveness for your sins, a person who has given up living for yourself and begun living for the glory of God. If you have truly trusted in Christ, you will long to be like Christ, to put to death all the sin that is in you, and to come alive to all righteousness and holiness. You will long to do whatever it takes to make God look great.

God calls you to productivity, but he calls you to the right kind of productivity. He calls you to be productive for his sake, not your own.

No amount of organization and time management will compensate for a lack of Christian character, not when it comes to this great calling of glory through good—bringing glory to God by doing good to others.

So much of life involves attempting to strike the right balance between competing demands. We have families, churches, hobbies, and jobs, and all of them are competing for the same 168 hours we are given each week. Though time is so limited, the possibilities for using that time are unlimited. Productivity depends upon brokering peace between each of the different tasks we could prioritize in any given period of time.

Your primary pursuit in productivity is not doing more things, but doing more good. Generally speaking, you can do more good for others if you have fewer roles and projects than if you have more. It is far better to dedicate lots of attention to those areas in which you are particularly talented or gifted than it is to dedicate minimal attention to the many areas you are not. “Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.”5 What are those things that really matter in your life?

The key to a productive and contented life is “planned neglect”—knowing what not to do and being content with saying no to truly good, sometimes fantastic, opportunities. This happens only when you realize how truly limited you are, that you must steward your little life, and that of all the best things to do on the planet, God wants you to do only a miniscule number.6

You haven’t begun to live a focused and productive life until you have said no to great opportunities that just do not fit your mission. There are many good things in this world that will go undone or that will have to be done by someone else. So keeping your mission in mind, return to each one of your areas of responsibility, examine that list of roles and projects, and ask questions like these: •Are these the right and best things for me to be doing? •Do these things fit my mission? •Are there things I can do in this area that no one else can do? •Am I especially gifted or talented in this area? •Do I bring unique value to this? •Is there someone else who could do this better than I can?

Most productivity gurus will encourage you to be as selfish as you need to be, to get rid of anything that doesn’t interest or excite you. But as a Christian you know you can do things that do not perfectly fit your mission but still do them out of love for God and with a desire to glorify him.

God may call you to do things simply because they need to be done, and he will expect you to do them with joy and excellence.

Essentially, your vocation is to be found in the place you occupy in the present. A person stuck in a dead-end job may have higher ambitions, but for the moment, that job, however humble, is his vocation. Flipping hamburgers, cleaning hotel rooms, emptying bedpans all have dignity as vocations, spheres of expressing love of neighbor through selfless service, in which God is masked.

To a large degree, your productivity depends on identifying and using the best tools for the job and then growing in your skill in deploying them.

Effective productivity depends upon three tools and the relationship between them. •Task management tool. A task management tool enables you to capture and organize your projects and tasks. •Scheduling tool. A scheduling tool enables you to organize your time and notifies you of pending events and appointments. •Information tool. An information tool enables you to collect, archive, and access information.

Motivation gives the desire and energy to begin making changes in your life, but it cannot sustain them. However, this does not mean you cannot be productive even when motivation is low. As many have pointed out, motivation gets you started, but habit keeps you going. You need to use those times of high motivation to build habits and to embed those habits in a system. That way, when motivation wanes, the system will keep you going.

A productivity system is a set of methods, habits, and routines that enable you to be most effective in knowing what to do and in actually doing it. An effective system involves identifying, deploying, and relying on appropriate tools. When functioning together, these tools enable you to operate smoothly and efficiently, dedicating appropriate time and attention to the most important tasks.

Your tools work together to help plan your day, and your tools work together to help you get things done throughout your day. This reality means that your day needs to have two phases: planning and execution. In the planning phase you will make your plans for the day, and in the execution phase you will actually get your work done. While planning does not need to take much time, it is very important, and when done right, will dramatically increase what you are able to accomplish throughout the rest of the day.

To manage your day effectively you need to know what the possible tasks are for that day, what the necessary tasks are for that day, and what time is available to accomplish them. Once you have that information available, you can begin to fit tasks into your day like pieces in a puzzle—you set tasks into time. This is what you do during the daily planning phase. The purpose of this phase is to consider all of your projects, duties, and appointments, and to prayerfully choose the tasks that will receive your attention that day.

R.C. Sproul explains its implications: “To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, to the glory of God.”10 The person who lives with an awareness of God’s presence, who lives under God’s authority, and who longs to bring God glory is the person who will be highly motivated to do more good—to do the most good for other people.

Getting things done is not only a matter of managing time, but also a matter of managing energy. In many vocations and in many places in life it is energy, not time, that is the more valuable commodity. Like time, energy is limited and needs to be used strategically. You can give massive amounts of time to certain areas of life, but if you only give those times in which your energy is at its lowest point, your productivity will still be low.

As you get things done, you will undoubtedly need to remind yourself again and again of your purpose. You do not exist in this world to get things done. You exist to glorify God by doing good to others. Remind yourself often of this important truth.

Even when you organize your life and plan your day, you will still have times when you fail and times you are overwhelmed. Your responsibility is to plan, organize, and execute to the best of your ability, but to realize that circumstances and providence may interrupt and delay even your best laid plans. Not only that, but you set and manage your priorities with the information available to you at the time, but this information is always limited.

C.J. Mahaney agrees: “My experience confirms that if I fail to attack my week with theologically informed planning, my week attacks me with an onslaught of the urgent. And I end up devoting more time to the urgent than the important.”

Prayer is an indispensable part of biblical productivity, because it causes us to acknowledge that God is sovereign over all of our plans, and it pleads with God to help

us make wise and God-honoring decisions. The reason I begin my daily coram Deo with prayer is to ask God to help me identify and prioritize the most important tasks for the day ahead. And I believe he answers that prayer.

There are always a few things that are undeniably high priorities and a few things that are undeniably low priorities. But the majority will fit somewhere in the middle, leaving you to make difficult decisions. These decisions are often more art than science, often requiring finesse and a best guess. Embrace the tension, because you will probably never quite solve it.

Serving is beautiful, but we can do better than that. Serving represents those things we must do, but we can also surprise. Surprise answers this question: What can I do this week? What can I do to excel in this role God has given me? What are the things I could do this week to surprise and delight my children? What are things I could say or gifts I could give that would be an unexpected blessing to the people of my church? How can I serve as a faithful image of the God who delights to give good gifts to his children (Matthew 7:11)? That is what we are called to in each of our areas of responsibility: to serve and surprise. So as we turn to our weekly checklist, we will work toward this question: How can I serve and surprise in the week ahead?