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Productivity is not what will bring purpose to your life, but what will enable you to excel in living out your existing purpose.
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.
You do not glorify God only when you talk about him, or share his gospel with other people, or stand with hands raised in public worship. Those are all good actions, but they are not the only means through which you can bring glory to God. Far from it. You glorify God when you do good works. The apostle Peter wrote, “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12). Your good works make God look great before a watching world.
The Bible assures you that good works are any deeds that are done for the benefit of other people and the glory of God.
If you are a mother and you simply cuddle and comfort your crying child, you are doing a good work that glorifies God, because you do it for the benefit of your child.
Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God.
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.
Jesus calls you to let your light shine before others, and this light is more like a dimmer switch than a simple on and off button. You can reflect more or less of that light to shine before men.
It has been widely shown, and it has been my experience, that there are certain habits and practices in life that are predictors to success in other areas of life. Displaying discipline and self-control in one area shores it up in others; conversely, neglecting discipline and self-control in any major area makes it all the more difficult to emphasize it in others.
Exercise
What is it that the Lord has entrusted to you? What has he made you responsible for? If the master gave talents to his servants and demanded an accounting, what has God given to you, and where will he demand that accounting?
Action:
Family
Work
Personal
Church
Education
You have limited amounts of gifting, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm, but unlimited ways of allocating them. For this reason productivity involves making decisions about how to allocate these finite resources.
what I have found very helpful is preparing a limited mission statement for each of my areas of responsibility. I have five areas of responsibility, and for that reason have five mission statements.
Your primary pursuit in productivity is not doing more things, but doing more good.
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.
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.
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.
a home for everything, and like goes with like.
If you take an honest look at your life, you will inevitably see times where you were highly motivated and times where you had almost no motivation at all. These times of high motivation usually come at New Years, when a new school year begins, or when your life undergoes a significant transition. In these times you love being organized, and you are able to live a structured life. For a while all goes well and productivity is easy and fun. But over time you get lazy, busy, or stressed out, and what was once fun becomes grueling. And before you know it you have gone right back to where you
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If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination.
You will probably find that you can get as much done in a short and focused meeting as in a long and unfocused one.
Sometimes a change of scenery is as good as time off.
Set aside specific times in the day when you will check email, and keep it closed at all other times.
