What's Best Next

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Do Hard Things

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I enjoyed this post on Alex and Brett Harris at the Gospel Coalition. It starts:

“Do hard things,” Alex and Brett Harris told their fellow teenagers six years ago. Get up early. Step out of your comfort zone. Do more than what’s required. Find a cause. Be faithful. Go against the crowd.

Be better than your culture expects….

“We do hard things, not in order to be saved, but because we are saved,” Brett told me. “Our willingness to obey God even when it’s hard magnifies the worth of Christ, because in our hard obedience we’re communicating to the world that Jesus is more valuable than comfort, than ease, than staying safe.”

Indeed, we are saved by grace and created for good works (Eph. 2:8-10).

In the Harris family, “do hard things” is just a fresh way to say “do good works,” Brett said. “We’ve found it a helpful way to say ‘do good works’ because we often need to be reminded that doing good works is hard, is supposed to be hard, and puts the spotlight on God—where it belongs—because it is hard.”

I love the way they put that. “Do hard things” is another way of saying “do good works.” The rest of the article then looks at the hard things they are each doing right now, and it’s worth reading.

Jesus Made Good Tables!

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God does everything he does with excellence, and Jesus surely never engaged in shoddy work in his time of working as a carpenter before his public ministry. Therefore, we should not settle for shoddy work in our occupations, either.

Yet, because much Christian teaching on work is still thin and compartmentalized, this often happens. We need to correct this by affirming that we are not to compartmentalize our work and our faith, as though God’s call on us applies only in the area of church and our personal lives. Further, if we were able to recapture the compelling biblical vision of work in the church, it would do wonders for the effectiveness of our testimony to the gospel before the world.

I love how Dorothy Sayers makes these points in Why Work:

How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?

The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.

What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly — but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? [Great point! Shoddy and careless workmanship is an insult to God because it misrepresents his nature and pervasive concern for all areas of life.]

No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any one believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.

Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman.

And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as the work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.

God is Not Served by Technical Incompetence

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Dorothy Sayers, in Why  Work:

The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety.

Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.

God is not served by technical incompetence.

How What's Best Next Relates to The Purpose Driven Life, Jonathan Edwards, and William Wilberforce

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Yesterday I posted a cut from the introduction to What’s Best Next on how it relates to Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life and similar books. In yet another version of the introduction, I actually continued discussing that theme further, going into how What’s Best Next also relates to Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life and Tim Keller’s Reason for God. 

I then discussed how, even beneath that, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards and the great evangelical social reformer William Wilberforce lay at the foundations of the book. Both of these individuals show the essential relationship between deep doctrine and lively practice in the Christian life — a vision which we need to recapture today.

Here it is:

 

What’s Best Next also relates to other recent helpful books. For example, I find Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life to be very helpful. But how do you translate your purpose into your everyday life of emails and meetings and your kids messing up the house every 15 minutes? This book shows you more detail on how to do that.

Likewise, Tim Keller’s Reason for God is a very helpful recent book on Christian apologetics — that is, making a reasonable case for the truth of Christianity. I’d love to write a book on apologetics one day. But in the meantime, equipping ourselves to be more effective in the culture, in connecting with others in the everyday, and being a useful person, enables us to contribute to the ultimate apologetic — namely, living a life of love for others.

Beneath Piper and these other books, the ultimate vision for this book comes from two industrious Christians from about three centuries ago: Jonathan Edwards and William Wilberforce. Both exhibit the twin convictions behind this book, which are often disconnected in evangelicalism today.

Edwards is known mostly for being an utterly devoted theologian. Wilberforce, on the other hand, is known mostly as a model for Christians in the practical realm, having ended the slave trade in Britain while also all throughout his life having initiated multiple initiatives for good.

What is less known about these individuals is that Wilberforce’s practice was utterly grounded in theology, and that Edward’s theology led him to be utterly practical. In fact, Edwards’ book Charity and Its Fruits goes just as deep into the practical side of the Christian life as his other works delve into the doctrinal. And Wilberforce’s lays out the theology (which was just as Calvinistic as Edwards) behind his practice in his book A Practical View — which was also responsible for transforming the moral outlook of Britain.

Wilberforce and Edwards each demonstrate the radical connectedness of doctrine and practice in the Christian life. This conviction lies at the heart of this book: if we care about doctrine, we must also care about living that doctrine out in the affairs of everyday life. And if we care about living our faith in the world, we must care about doctrine because doctrine is the fuel and foundation of our practice as Christians.

Both Wilberforce and Edwards undergird this book in another way as well, for they show that productivity is really, at root, a matter of love. In other words, you cannot disconnect personal productivity from love because productivity is actually about loving others. The ultimate reason we seek to be productive is so that we can serve others. As Paul says, “let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14).

Likewise, since love seeks not merely to intend to do good to others, but to actually do good for others, love leads us to learn how to actually be effective in our service. Love, in other words, must care about the practical. And this is especially true in our current environment, where it is so easy for the best of intentions to be swallowed up by the tyranny of the urgent.

Personal effectiveness, then, is an expression of love, and thus a Christian understanding of productivity needs to be informed not only by all the passages on work and diligence and planning and fruitfulness, but most of all by all the passages on love. Hence, books like Edwards’ Charity and Its Fruits and his sermon “The Christian Duty of Charity to the Poor,” as well as, in more recent days, Tim Keller’s Ministries of Mercy and Gary Haguen’s Good News About Injustice have greatly shaped my thinking.

How What's Best Next Relates to Don't Waste Your Life and Radical

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This is something I cut from the introduction to What’s Best Next for space reasons, but which is very important to understanding the book. It discusses how What’s Best Next is in some sense a follow-up to and spin-off from John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life, and how it relates to other books similar to it, such as David Platt’s Radical. 

Both of those books have been very influential on me, and I think they do a good job of getting to the heart of what Jesus means when he says “follow me.” Productivity practices, in turn, exists to help us live out that call to follow Christ, because he calls us to follow him not off in the mountains by ourselves, but in the everyday context of the modern world — which is very complex and requires wisdom and skill to navigate.

 

If You Don’t Want to Waste Your Life, You Need to Know How to Get Things Done

The absence of practical instruction from a Christian perspective is especially significant given that, in the Christian realm, there are a ton of books exhorting us to live lives of radical sacrifice for the glory of God and good of others, while at the same time there is an extreme shortage of books that get concrete and specific about how to actually do that.

For example, one of my favorite books is Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper. Piper argues that the goal of life is to live with a single passion to “joyfully display God’s supreme excellence in all spheres of life.” Instead of just marking time or spending our lives on comfort and pleasure — whether traveling the world or staying at home watching clean PG-13 movies with the family every night — the call of Christ to us is to spend ourselves living radical lives of sacrificial love for the good of others and his glory. I agree with Piper, and this book shares the same vision.

Piper’s book is an incredible exhortation to live that life. But, once you have realized that living for the good of others to the glory of Jesus Christ is the purpose of life, a thousand questions are raised for the practical arena of your life. You know that you exist to proactively seek the good of others for the glory of God, but how do you go about that? Does it mean you have to go be a missionary? (Piper’s answer: no — though many should consider that.) If not, what does it look like in the midst of our daily lives right where we are at?

Further, seeking to live a life devoted to the good of others is going to make your life harder in many ways — busier, more challenging, more complex. How do you manage that? You need to know how. Simply having the aim of glorifying Christ in everything is not enough. We need to know how to translate that into the everyday.

And it translates in some very concrete ways, such as knowing how doing emails and going to meetings relates to your faith, knowing how to lead meetings well so that they actually serve people rather than tick them off, and how to stay on top of your email so that it doesn’t drown you in your quest to be a servant to others in all areas of life.

David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream and Francis Chan’s Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God give similar calls. I love these books and find them super helpful and important.[1]

In one sense, What’s Best Next is a follow-up to these books. Don’t Waste Your Life, Radical, and Crazy Love exhort us to live radical, risk-taking lives of love for the good of others. But how do you go about this in a practical sense, in the midst of the everyday, without being overwhelmed by all the new opportunities and demands this brings? And how do you live a life for the glory of God in the midst of your current life, which often consists of many mundane things? That brings us solidly into the realm of productivity. By zeroing in on the practical dimension of life, this book seeks to equip you in the how.

We can even say that in a very real sense, Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life (as well as these other books) is really a book on productivity. For it’s about orienting your life around God’s purposes so that you get the most important thing of all done with your life — namely, making much of God. That’s what Piper himself said to me once in an email when we were discussing my book. He wrote “as you might guess, I view all my books as books on productivity — that is, as books on getting the most important things done (not wasting your life), which is making much of God.”

As Don’t Waste Your Life is in a sense a book on productivity, What’s Best Next is also a book on not wasting your life. And it seeks to do this by first laying out a biblical vision for what we are even doing when we get things done (part one), and then getting into the details of how to go about getting things done effectively in daily life for the glory of God, good of others, and your joy (the rest of the book).

Knowing how to make the most of our time and lead our lives well needs to be seen as a component of Christian discipleship because it’s about how to serve others well.

[1] I would want to nuance Platt a bit in his chapter 6 on money and giving, but even there I affirm fully his call for Christians to be radically generous and sacrificial in their giving.

How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done – Slide Deck

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Here’s a slide deck to help introduce people to the theology of productivity that I give in What’s Best Next the book.

It can serve as a good refresher for those who have read the book, and also something that you can easily share with those who haven’t read the book.

Here’s the direct link to it on Slideshare.

(Note: I love slideshare! It makes it super easy to share and spread presentations.)

Tim Ferriss on the Importance of Being Unconventional

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Here are two helpful points from Tim Ferriss’ quick, short chapter in 30 Things to Do When You Turn 30:

1. Question the criticisms and even suggestions of people with low expectations, even well-intentioned ones

The reason is that having low expectations is actually unrealistic. People are capable of far more than most people think. To lower expectations is to lower efforts as well, and thus the low expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When the lower expectations (but not, as a result, the higher ones) are met, the person with the low expectations then says “see, isn’t it such a good thing we lowered expectations?” But the answer is: not at all. The only reason you met only the reduced expectations is because you didn’t strive for the high expectations.

Good leaders are like the good teachers that hopefully all of us have had the experience of having — they refuse to let you settle. They have soft hearts, but are tough-minded in their expectations. They refuse to let you settle.

2. Test the self-limiting assumptions others accept at face value

“When people tell you you can’t do something, it’s important to keep a basic question in mind: What’s the worst thing that could happen? If you’re risking a small or transient failure for a potentially life-altering permanent benefit, it’s almost always in your best interest to experiment.”

This doesn’t mean you will always succeed. But it does mean that smart experiments are part of the necessary path to success.

Don’t close off a door because someone says “that can’t be done.” Test things out and give it a try. In doing so, feel free to start small, so if you fail, “it’s a fast and affordable failure.” But don’t let the small expectations of someone keep you from trying.

How to Get Things Done in a Gospel-Driven Way: What's Best Next in 500 Words

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At the end of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done, I give a summary of the book in 500 words so that people can easily take away the core concept and a few key practices (and share them with others).

Here it is:

Gospel-Driven Productivity in a Nutshell

We need to look to God to define for us what productivity is, not simply the ambiguous concept of “what matters most.” For God is what matters most.

When we do this, we don’t enter a realm of spiritual weirdness, as we might fear. Good secular thinking remains relevant as a gift of God’s common grace. Neither do we enter a realm of over-spiritualization where the things we do every day don’t matter.

Instead, the things we do every day take on even greater significance because they are avenues through which we serve God and others. In fact, the gospel teaches us that the good of others is to be the main motive in all that we do and the chief criteria by which we determine “what’s best next.” This is not only right, but also the best way to be productive, as the best business thinkers are showing. More importantly, when we do this in God’s power and as an offering to him, he is glorified and shown to be great in the world.

In order to be most effective in this way in our current era of massive overload yet incredible opportunity, we need to do four things to stay on track and lead and manage our lives effectively:

  1. Define
  2. Architect
  3. Reduce
  4. Execute

The result of this is not only our own increased peace of mind and ability to get things done, but also the transformation of the world by the gospel because it is precisely in our everyday vocations that we take our faith into the world and the light of the gospel shines—both in what we say and in what we do (Matthew 5:16).

If You Only take 5 Productivity Practices Away from This Book

Learning and especially implementing productivity practices can be hard. It is easy to forget what we learned or forget how to apply it. One remedy is to keep coming back to this book (of course!). But to make this as simple as possible, if you can only take away 5 things from this book, they should be these:

  1. Foundation: Look to God, in Jesus Christ, for your purpose, security, and guidance in all of life.
  2. Purpose: Give your whole self to God (Romans 12:1-2), and then live for the good of others to his glory to show that he is great in the world.
  3. Guiding Principle: Love your neighbor as yourself. Treat others the way you want them to treat you. Be proactive in this and even make plans to do good.
  4. Core Strategy: Know what’s most important and put it first.
  5. Core Tactic: Plan your week, every week! Then, as things come up throughout the day, ask “is this what’s best next?” Then, either do that right away or, if you can’t, slot it in to your calendar or action list that you are confident you will refer back to at the right time.

The Key to True Productivity: Valuing What God Values

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I have an interview up at Ed Stetzer’s blog today about What’s Best Next, answering the question “How Do You Get the Right Things Done?”

Lots of time management books talk about the importance of values. But that’s not enough, because you can value the wrong things.

My answer — and the answer of the book — is that the ultimate way to get the right things done is to value what God values, and act in accordance with that. This leads us to the counterintuitive notion that love and generosity — not efficiency — are actually the ways to be most productive.

Read the whole thing.

 

Why Do I Call it Gospel-Driven Productivity Instead of Biblical Productivity?

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Shortly after What’s Best Next came out a few months ago, a commenter on another blog said I should call the productivity approach I outline in my book “Scripture-centered productivity” rather than “gospel-driven productivity.”

It’s a good question. Why isn’t it enough to just call it “biblical productivity”? Why do I have to call it “gospel-driven productivity?”

On Not Being Boring
The first answer is simple: The phrase “Scripture-centered productivity” sounds awkward and annoying! The term “biblical productivity” would be a bit better, but that phrase is still just plain boring.

This might seem superficial, but it’s not. God commands us to communicate in ways that are interesting (Colossians 4:6). The phrase “biblical productivity” is just plain boring in most contexts, and so I reject it on biblical grounds.

The Gospel is the Heart of the Scriptures
Someone might say to this “but why do you have to put the ‘gospel’ label on it? Isn’t it actually more accurate to just say ‘biblical’?” My answer is that it is not more accurate. The reason is that the gospel is at the heart of the Scriptures. Therefore, any view of productivity that is truly “Scripture-centered” must necessarily be gospel-centered.  I want to draw that connection, because it is essential.  

The Essence of Gospel-Driven Productivity
The chief implication the gospel has for our productivity is that the guiding principle in all the things we get done should be the good of others. Just as Jesus in the gospel put our needs ahead of his own, even to the point of dying on the cross, we are to see all that we do as an avenue for serving others — putting their needs ahead of ours, just as Jesus did for us. And we are to do this from acceptance with God on the basis of the gospel, not for acceptance with God.

That’s the heart of what it means to be “gospel-driven” and live a truly productive life. “Scripture-centered productivity” doesn’t capture that. “Gospel-Driven Productivity” does.

What it Really Means to be “Gospel-Driven”
Using the phrase “gospel-driven” also helps capture other thing — namely, that if you say “wait, the term ‘gospel-driven’ doesn’t communicate that to me at all,” then you are not understanding the gospel.

In other words, everyone who considers themselves gospel-centered needs to understand that you cannot claim that the gospel is the center of your life if you aren’t living your life first of all for the good of others rather than yourself.

This means if you are a “gospel-centered” leader, you lead for the welfare of your people first, not your own advantage, comfort, and advancement (Matthew 20:25-28). (This means getting rid of command and control, authoritarian leadership that sees people only as tools to get the job done, rather than as valuable people in the image of God to be treated with respect.)

If you are a gospel-centered business owner, you manage your business to make a real contribution to society, not simply make a profit.

And if you are gospel-driven in the way you get things done (as all Christians should be), then you make the good of others your motive in all you do, rather than just doing things to get to the bottom of your list or increase your own personal peace and affluence.

I see many who claim to be gospel-centered because they really like proclaiming the gospel, but who don’t allow the gospel to guide and shape their actions at work. They are sometimes just as selfish in the way they do things as the world is (often more so! a true irony). This is a terrible testimony and it does a lot of harm. It undermines the gospel and therefore is not gospel-centered in the slightest. We need to change this, and become truly gospel-driven in our deeds as well as words.

Is the Term “Gospel-Centered” Cliche?
It is certainly true that some have attached the term “gospel-centered” to their ideas without actually knowing what it means. When the term “gospel-centered” is used in a trite and superficial way, it is unfortunate.

But when you understand what gospel-centered really means, it is anything but trite or superficial. It is not the “flavor of the month” in Christianity, but rather at the very core of Christianity.

In Sum
Thus, from all this we can see why a phrase like “Scripture-centered productivity” actually doesn’t communicate my point. Certainly I am trying to say that we are to be guided by the Scriptures in how we think about productivity. But I’m trying to say more. My point is that since the gospel is at the heart of the Scriptures, when we think of the Scriptures we are to first think of the gospel. It is the gospel, not just the concept of Scripture in an abstract sense, that is to guide our productivity.

And to be guided by the gospel is to be guided by love, of which the gospel is the greatest demonstration in all the universe.