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An Interview on Coronavirus and Productivity

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A few weeks ago Daniel Kaufman, one of the members of our team, had the idea of sharing a behind the scenes look at what each of us is doing during this unique season. He created a set of interview questions for each us, and here are my answers. If possible, we’ll have interviews with Daniel and James coming up.

How has the current pandemic affected your work habits?
I much prefer to be in the office, and then working from home maybe one day a week if possible to focus on large projects. But there are two main ways I’m aiming to make the most of this.

First, I’m trying to get more rest and sleep. Because of not having a commute, I feel less pressure to do extra work in the evenings. I try to take that time to relax more and get rested (though I don’t always do that). I think this will have long-term benefits after things are back to normal. 

Second, I’m able to make more progress on some large, long-term projects I’ve been working on. These projects involve lots of writing and development of systems, which is hard to do when you have more interruptions.

What one piece of advice would you give to people who are suddenly having to work from home?
Lots of people right away say to make a schedule and respond quickly to emails from your boss so they know you are working. While those things may be important, they fail to take advantage of the new paradigm that working from home creates.

Working from home saves time in two big ways: no commute, and less in-person interruptions. Now, not all in-person interruptions are bad. I think they are an important part of what makes work human and effective, actually. However, the reality is that now you have less of them.

So you need to take advantage of this extra time created by increasing your professional development. Invest the extra hour a day, or something like that, to intentionally get better at the skills required by your job. That could look like taking some online classes at Skillshare or Coursera or Udemy, or self-directed learning. 

I would especially recommend that everyone learn about management. Many who are managers never received training; and those who aren’t in management now may be one day but, even if that is not the case, everyone needs to know what good management practices are so they can be supportive of them. The best book on management is Marcus Buckingham’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. 

Have you been able to get to anything that was on backlog prior to this?
Yes, I am spending a lot of time getting backlogged projects completed, which is one of my favorite things.

How does your view of the gospel affect your productivity during this time?
My view of the gospel is leading me to think hard about what the best strategies are to minimize the spread of the virus and help America get back to work. Someone might say that’s just for government leaders to care about. However, the NT was one of the first ancient documents to acknowledge that all people are equal, and it is the gospel which brought that truth into new focus.

Because all people are equal, that leads to the concept of self-government—which we have in America. This means that every citizen has a duty to think hard about our government policies and cultural strategies for dealing with large problems. This is a right and duty we all have, and society is better when everyone is exercising their critical thinking.

How does the call to love people look different when working remotely from home?
Working from home brings a unique opportunity to give more time to important but not urgent tasks. I think loving people well in this time means making sure we take initiative to make progress on those tasks, and not let our extra time simply be taken up by more email and Zoom meetings.

Be deliberate about where the extra time you now have available goes. It is easy for that to be taken by new kinds of urgency, or the wrong-headed value of instant responsiveness (unless you are literally in a customer service position). The projects with long-term value that no one is pressuring you to do–those are often the way to make the biggest impact in people’s lives and in your work. So protect the time to identify and do more of those projects.

What’s Best Next Video Lectures Now Available (and 50% Off)

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This seems to be a week for lots of product announcements!

I recently created an online course for What’s Best Next in conjunction with Zondervan. I went out there and recorded lectures on each chapter in the book. Then, they turned that into an  online course–complete with readings, reflections, and other assignments.

The course is excellent and available on the Zondervan online course platform. In the course you will learn:

  • A new way of looking at productivity, that is centered on the gospel
  • Why productivity matters — immensely — for Christians
  • How to fit time for hard thinking into a busy schedule
  • How to plan your week
  • How to identify your life mission and vision
  • How to get your email inbox to zero every day
  • And much, much more

The lectures are also available on their own — and, for this week only, they are 50%. You can watch them on Vimeo or get them on DVD.

Why get the video lectures? Teaching on the material is actually my favorite part. One of the big reasons I write on a subject is so that I can talk about it.

So by watching the video lectures, I hope you will experience the content in a new and deeper way. You will also gain some insights that I didn’t have space to go into in the book itself, along with new discoveries I’ve made since writing the book.

Defining Productivity

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This is one of the best definitions I’ve come across. It’s from Charles Duhigg’s Smarter Faster Better:

Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle.

I like this definition because it brings together two things that are both necessary in defining productivity well.

First, the focus is on getting the right things done—not just getting things done more quickly. The aim is to “figure out the best uses” of what we have and to seize “the most meaningful rewards.” It does not matter how much you are getting done, or how fast, if you are not getting truly useful and helpful things done.

Second, it doesn’t overcorrect and forget that efficiency does matter. We do need to try to accomplish things with “the least wasted effort” and get things done “with less stress and struggle.”

This is the magic combination: get more of the right things done, in less time and with less friction and frustration.

In your quest to be productive, remember both sides. When all you care about is quick and cheap, you run the risk of helping to fill the world with useless things. But if you don’t care about speed and efficiency, it’s going to take forever to get your great work out to the world. Caring about both of these sides is a big challenge–but it is well worth it.

Don’t Save Your Own Time at the Expense of Others Time

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Sometimes we take shortcuts to save ourselves time, but which cost others a lot of time because of the sub-par work product our time-saving shortcuts created. This is not an overall savings of time, but a wasting of time. Hence, though it seems efficient, it is not. We must think deeper.

Garr Reynolds illustrates this very well in his excellent book Presentation Zen. Though his specific example pertains to presentations, the principle applies to anything you do:

I can save time on the front end, but I may waste more time for others on the back end. For example, if I give a completely worthless one-hour death-by-PowerPoint presentation to an audience of 200, that equals 200 hours of wasted time.

But if I instead put in the time, say, 25-30 hours or more of planning and designing the message, and the media, then I can give the world 200 hours of worthwhile, memorable experience.

Software companies advertise time-saving features, which may help us believe we have saved time to complete a task such as preparing a presentation and “simplified” our workday. But if time is not saved for the audience — if the audience wants its time because we didn’t prepare well, design the visuals well, or perform well — then what does it matter that we saved one hour in preparing our slides?

Doing things in less time sometimes does indeed feel simpler, but if it results in wasted time and wasted opportunities later, it is hardly simple.

 

Do Less, Then Obsess

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People often say that “doing less” and “saying no” is the key to productivity. But this advice actually doesn’t work — unless you include with it the necessary corollary.

When you do that, you have perhaps the guiding concept for being effective.

How Do You Define Value in Your Work?

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From Great at Work, which is now the best book on personal effectiveness I have ever read:

As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.

This may seem obvious in retrospect, but how many of us intentionally work this way? It is so easy to get caught up in accomplishing tasks, defining our productivity that way, rather than defining it in terms of the benefit our work actually brings.

If we take this outside-in view, I see two benefits. First, we will have more success in our jobs. That seems obvious, right? Second, we will be able to become more efficient, because now we have a criteria that allows us to identify unnecessary tasks or unnecessary steps in our tasks.

Beyond this, the outside-in view is very much in line with the gospel ethic, which is others-centered.

There is one nuance, of course: do not let this stifle innovation or too easily justify the status quo. You know the benefits of your work by how people act, not mainly what they say in response to your initial idea. Focus groups, for example, are usually a bad idea. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” What actually produced the greatest value was when Ford democratized the automobile — something people weren’t asking for initially.

We Don’t Have a Right to Be Idle

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No man has a right to be idle . . . where 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?  – William Wilberforce

It makes no sense for us to live in a society of abundance while half the world lives in great need, and not be diligent and creative and eager to figure out ways to use our abundance to help meet those needs.

When we look around and see our comfort, privilege, and affluence, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of asking “how can I get more of this?” As Kingdom-minded Christians, our first thought should be: “how can I use this technology/money/time to serve—especially those in greatest need?”

That’s the gospel-driven productivity William Wilberforce gave his life to.

Does God Care About Efficiency?

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Much (but not all!) productivity literature places way too much focus on efficiency. The default thinking of many seems to be that one of our main goals in any task should be to get it done as quickly as possible with as little waste as possible.

This works well with machines. But it is problematic when it comes to people, because prioritizing efficiency when humans are involved often results in diminishing beauty, quality, and discovery. (For one example, see Patrick Lencioni’s great article “The Enemy of Innovation and Creativity” which is, you guessed it, efficiency.) Efficiency has its place, but it is secondary to effectiveness and quality.

This productivity principle relates to apologetics, or the defense of the faith. Sometimes skeptics look at the universe and the way God created things and critique it on the basis that it’s not maximally efficient.

These thinkers are guilty of over-prioritizing efficiency. For God is far more like an artist than an engineer.

I love how William Lane Craig puts this at his site Reasonable Faith, in response to the question “Does the Vastness of the Universe Support Naturalism?“:

Sometimes people complain that a vast cosmos is a waste of space and so would impugn God’s efficiency as a Creator and Designer. But here I’m persuaded by Thomas Morris’ point that efficiency is a value only for someone who has limited time and/or resources, a condition which is just inapplicable to God.

That’s why I think that those pressing the efficiency objection are just wrong in thinking of God in terms of an engineer marshaling his resources rather than as an artist, who enjoys splashing His cosmic canvas with dazzling colors and creations.

I am in awe as I look at the galactic and cosmic structures photographed by the Hubble telescope. The vastness and beauty of the universe speak to me of God’s majestic greatness and His marvelous condescension in loving and caring about us.

As with God, so also with us. Care about efficiency. But care about beauty and service most of all.