This is an excerpt from chapter 6 of How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity, “Character: The Great Unsticking Force.”

Central to good time management is doing what is important, not merely what is urgent. 

Yet, how do you know what is important? Importance is something even deeper than your own goals. Important things are things that align with correct principles and God’s truth.

And that takes us to the heart of why character is essential to productivity, for principles bring us into the realm of character. There are two sources for knowing correct principles. First, the Scriptures: “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD!” (Ps. 119:1). And second, we have the capacity to discern correct principles through our conscience, which is directly informed by our understanding of the Scriptures. We have an inner compass that enables us to detect what right principles are.

The way to put first things first is to build this inner compass—that is, our character—so that we are able to discern what right principles are and desire to follow them. Character enables us to see and understand correct principles so that we can base our lives and decisions on them. That is why character is central to true productivity.

We then can articulate our mission and values flowing from those correct principles, and our personal vision can become an accurate way of identifying what is important. This is at the heart of time management and why productivity is rooted first in character, not techniques, for it is character that enables us to discern what is important and use the techniques well.

An excellent article at the 99% on how “non-cognitive traits like optimism, zest, gratitude, and grit make children (and adults) more likely to succeed.”

This article discusses scientific research backing this. What’s interesting is that this is an excellent statement of the character ethic, which states that success is most fundamentally a function of your character rather than your technique (I talk about this a bit in my book). Here we have scientific confirmation.

Not that scientific confirmation is essential, or that success is first about what you achieve in life, but it is interesting nonetheless.

This is a great post by Ben Stafford, director of short-term ministries at Training Leaders International.

It is so good I’m copying the whole thing here (but don’t forget to check out his blog):

In a recent post I wrote: There are definitely upsides to [being a planner by nature] but the temptation to think of myself as captain of my own destiny, my protector, and my safe-keeper is not one of them.”

On rereading it today, I thought of Psalm 121 and Derek Kidner’s comments on it.  Clearly the emphasis of this Psalm is on God’s keeping of his people. So of course, it would be idolatras for me to think of myself as my own safe-keeper.

He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The LORD will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
(Psalm 121:3-8 ESV)

On verses 7 & 8 Kidner says:

     The promise moves on from the pilgrim’s immediate preoccupations to cover the whole of existence.  In the light of other scriptures, to be kept from all evil does not imply a cushioned life, but a well-armed one.  Cf. Psalm 23:4, which expects the dark valley but can face it.  The two halves of verse 7 can be compared with Luke 21:18f., where God’s minutest care (‘not a hair of your head will perish’) and His servants’ deepest fulfillment (‘you will win true life’) are promised in the same breath as the prospect of hounding and martyrdom (Lk. 21:16f.). Your life, in the present passage (7), is as many-sided a word as in Luke; it means the whole living person. Our Lord enriched the concept of keeping or losing this by His teaching on self-giving and self-love (e.g. Jn. 12:24f).

The Psalm ends with a pledge which could hardly be stronger or more sweeping.  Your going out and your coming in is not only a way of saying ‘everything’: in closer detail it draws attention to one’s ventures and enterprises (cf. Ps 126:6), and to the home which remains one’s base; again, to pilgrimage and return; perhaps even (by another association of this pair of verbs) to the dawn and sunset of one’s days. But the last line takes good care of this journey; and it would be hard to decide which half of it is the more encouraging: the fact that it starts ‘from now‘, or that it runs on, not to the end of time but without end; like God Himself who is (cf. Ps 73:26) ‘my portion for ever’.

This Lewis quote is spot-on, and well worth thinking over:

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

Doing good, and pursuing Christ-like character, is not something to do simply when it is easy. What really counts is when you continue being merciful or generous or justice-seeking or truth-affirming even when it is risky, dangerous, and possibly to your own disadvantage. To be merciful or loving or generous only when it is easy is not to be merciful or loving or generous at all.

Trustworthiness is a function of two things — character and competence. Stephen Cover makes this point well in Principle Centered Leadership:

Most people equate trustworthiness with character alone. Character is vital, but it is also insufficient. For example, would you trust a surgeon to perform a critical operation who is honest in his billing practices, but who has not kept up on advances in his field and is professionally obsolete?

On the other side, some people equate trustworthiness with competence alone. That, too, is insufficient. Would you hire a doctor who was up on the advances in his field but not honest in his billing practices?

And we need to go beyond simply the minimum character requirements. We should seek to be people of character who pursue the good of others. And, we should seek to be incredibly competent in this, because there are few things worse than well-intentioned incompetence.

Pursue both character and competence.