Hi! This is Fred Zaspel, editor at Books At a Glance, and today we are talking to Tim Challies – popular blogger and author of the new book, Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity. It’s not the kind of book you see from Christian authors every day, but it’s a topic Tim has thought on for a long time – and blogged about on occasion also. Today he talks to us about his book and his topic.
Welcome, Tim – good to have you with us.
Tim Challies:
Thanks for having me here.
Zaspel:
Tell us what you’re hoping to accomplish with this new book. What’s it all about?
Challies:
Well it’s a book about productivity, and what I’m hoping to do is to elevate the Christian’s discussion, the way Christians think about productivity. I think there’s tons of productivity books out there, but I don’t know Christians really think about productivity in a distinctly Christian way. One of the passions I’ve had throughout my Christian life has been thinking Christianly about subjects, and so I tried to bring some biblical thinking to bear on the subject to productivity. It’s asking, “How can we as Christians do productivity different and do it better than unbelievers.
Zaspel:
Talk about “productivity” is usually in the context of business, business owners, and factories, but your aim is broader than this – tell us how your book is useful for the “average” Christian.
Challies:
I guess productivity generally tends to be assumed either with the factory floor always knowledge work, right? Those of us like you and me who are in the knowledge work field tend to put a lot of effort into being productive and learning how to be more productive and just facing some of the challenges that that come when you’re sitting in front of the screen all day. A lot of the productivity tips in manuals and routines we have come out of a very different work environment where people were perhaps working on a factory floor and where they didn’t have to put a lot of thought and creativity into being productive. The car went by and you did your thing to it and that was that.
But today a lot of us are in knowledge work and then not only that but wanted to write a book that would be helpful to people who are perhaps not in the workplace at all, people who are staying at home with kids, working in that environment. Or even people who are retired, people who are past their working days, but they too ought to be productive if we think about productivity biblically. Since I wanted to bring some, as I said before, some Christian thinking on productivity and get people thinking about what it really means to be productive. Is it just doing more things? Is it just doing more things that make me more money? Or can we have a different view of productivity? Can we draw from the Bible what God means for us to do? Say, “Okay, well God means for us to do — that’s what it means to be productive, so let’s learn then we can do more of those things and do them better.”
Zaspel:
Give us a sense of what we’re talking about here – what does productivity look like for the retiree, the stay-at-home mom, the 8-5 worker after hours?
Challies:
The definition of productivity I work within the book is to use your gifts, talents, time, energy and enthusiasm for the good of others in the glory of God. And so as we go looking through the Bible, we see that all things exist for God’s glory. We been created for God’s glory. We been saved, redeemed for God’s glory. And so we’re supposed to live in this world for God’s glory. And a particular way we do that is by doing good for other people.
And so productivity isn’t really about making money, it’s not really about satisfying myself, that I’ve done enough work today, that I’ve done enough things today. The best gauge of productivity is, “Have I lived for the glory of God by doing good things for others?” When we go with that definition we can see that the stay-at-home mom has amazing opportunities to be productive; the retired person has incredible opportunities every day to do good to others, and in that way to bring glory to God. So once we understand what God means by productivity or what we mean when we look at productivity through a biblical lens, we understand the challenge that’s before us.
Zaspel:
How is diminished productivity a theological problem?
Challies:
God has given us instructions on how we are to live. If God means for us to do good to others, and in that way to bring glory to God, if we are not being productive we are not doing good to others. We are not bringing glory to God. We are probably doing things that are selfish or that our time wasting. We’ve taken our eyes off of God; we are no longer meaning to elevate Him to make Him look great.
And so in that way a lack of productivity really is first a theological issue and it needs to be addressed biblically, theologically. We need to think Christianly about it. When I’m really concerned for the glory of God, then I’m really concerned with doing good for others. I’ve addressed it theologically, and now I’m living in a very different way. So in this way only a Christian can be productive according to this way of thinking about it, only a Christian is really drawing attention to God by doing good things for other people.
Zaspel:
What kind of person do we need to be in order to be productive?
Challies:
Well, if it’s a theological issue that has to be addressed first on the level of the heart, first on the level of the character. And so what we like to do when it comes to productivity is we try to put routines in place, we try to use the right tools, we try to learn from other people, how can I imitate you, and those are all good things but I think that’s exactly why so many of our efforts when it comes to productivity tend to be so short-lived.
We haven’t addressed the heart, so it’s easy for a few days to go full strength. You know we can all be very productive from January 1 until January 4, but it’s only when trials come along, when the difficulty comes along, when that enthusiasm has diminished a little bit. And so what we need to do is address the character. Am I a person of character? Am I truly desirous to do good to others? Do I truly want to bring glory to God? If I get my character in place I start pursuing godliness then productivity should, inevitably, follow. Any productivity I desire a product from character, I think will be either shallow and or short-lived.
Zaspel:
The laziness factor is one of the significant obstacles to productivity, and you address this briefly in your book. The lazy person sees a book like yours and is likely to find even the title daunting! Talk to us about this problem … and how we might adjust our thinking to overcome it.
Challies:
I think lazy people love books on productivity because they give them that kind of swift kick in the backside they need to get moving again. And for a little time they are. But again they don’t really address character. So the kind of like the sense of being beaten up by a book. It makes them feel good: okay this time I’m going to address this – this time it will be different.
But again they haven’t addressed the patterns of laziness in their life that take away from their productivity, that take their eyes off the prize, so to speak. So hopefully the lazy person will pick up this book thinking that he’ll just find a few tips there. Really what people want to do is read the book and forget all the character stuff, forget all the theological stuff, just get to the practical stuff. Give me routines, give me law, give me rules I can follow. But hopefully, the person is reading from the first page through those early chapters; before there’s a practical word in the book there’s all these things about why we need to be productive. What God says about productivity. And so hopefully that lazy person is interrupted there and challenged there first.
Zaspel:
Okay, this will probably hurt as we hear about it, but give us some examples of what you call “Productivity Thieves.” And how is “busyness” a productivity thief?
Challies:
A productivity thief is anything that just steals from your productivity, and I think those can be different for each one of us. The specifics of them can be different for each one of us, but in some way every one of us is not as productive as we could be. And not as productive as we want to be. As you read the book you’ll see I’m not talking about we have to be completely busy all the time. God himself told us to take a day of rest. God took a day of rest. He could’ve kept creating, I suppose, or he could have broken his work into seven days. He took a day of rest.
So I’m not saying that we need to be work, work, working all the time. But we do have this mandate from God to use our time, to use our talents, energy, enthusiasm for his glory and the good of others. And we need to examine our lives to see what keeps me from doing that, what is hindering me? And in the book identify three. The first we’ve already talked about which is laziness. The second is busyness; and the third one I talk about is just the thorns and thistles in life. Just living in a sinful world and all that that brings to us.
But busyness, I think, it can also be closely related to laziness, in that we are lazy for a time. We binge watch whatever is on Netflix or we just spend way too much time on Facebook and we ignore our deadlines. We ignore those things we said we would do. Then suddenly the due date comes and now we are in this busy, panic mode trying to get all the stuff done in a very short period of time. And then we get it done but we work so hard we figure we earned a little bit of laziness again, we can kick back now and put our feet up. A lot of us live in this cycle of busy to lazy and busy to lazy. And both of them are serious problems so I don’t think in most cases they’re not entirely unrelated even though in a sense their opposite traits, they really can be closely tied together.
Zaspel:
Yes, I have a friend who likes to say, “Thank God for the last minute – if it weren’t for the last minute I’d never get anything done!”
Challies:
Right, and I think as Christians we joke about those things and that’s fine, obviously. But I do think that we reveal bits about ourselves and those things you know in those little statements. We do need to be thinking about those sorts of statements and what does it reveal about me? A lot of the practices I developed in this book and I tease out are ones I instituted in my own life over many years for that very reason. I was very lazy and then I was very busy and I had to see this first as an issue that was between me and God before it was between me and the government, between me and the taxman, between me and the boss. And I think there’s a lot of value in doing that and seeing it first as a theological issue.
Zaspel:
What is “Planned Neglect”? And how is that important in all this?
Challies:
Well we can’t do everything we would like to do in life. There’s just too many limitations on us and too many things we could do. So I think the people who get the most done and the most important things done in life are the ones who know what not to do. They know which things they’re going to plan to not do – to neglect. Each one of us has to audit our lives at some point and say what are the most important things? What things here are central to what God has called me to be and got his called me to do?
When we do that we will probably see there’s all kinds of things we are doing that maybe we shouldn’t be doing. Maybe the best way of being productive is to just let some things go. We can have someone else do them. We can delegate them to someone else. Or maybe there are some things that we can just get rid of altogether. Sometimes I like to give the example of churches. I think most churches over time begin ministries for very good reasons, but maybe it’s been 20 years since that ministry was begun and maybe it no longer serves the purpose. Maybe someone else could do it better. Maybe somebody had enthusiasm once upon a time, but now that ministry just keeps going and it’s eating up resources and it’s not really accomplishing anything.
Well the best thing the church can do, probably, is to just remove that ministry. Let it go if it’s not central to the church, if it’s nothing that God commands of us. And in our lives I think a lot of us have those things that were holding onto that we really ought to be neglecting in that planned way – just getting rid of.
Zaspel:
You talk about some essential tools that will help us toward productivity. We’ll let our readers get your book for specific recommendations and guides, but perhaps you can give us a sense of the kind of tools / helps you have in mind here.
Challies:
Each one of us needs tools for the job we do, no matter what that job is. If you’re a janitor you need a mop, right? If you’re a surgeon you need a scalpel. We all depend upon tools and that’s fine. When it comes to productivity, this business of doing good to others, I think there’s three tools that would help all of us get organized – help all of us know what we doing in life and know how to use our time, know how to allocate our energy and so on.
So I bring out three tools. There’s a scheduling tool which you may know as a calendar, there’s an information tool which holds important information, and then there’s a task management tool. The task management tool is really the one most people are least familiar with, but the one that I think can be the most helpful in the end in terms of helping people know what they need to do and help them get those things actually accomplished. It’s the tool that holds all of life’s verbs – all of those tasks and actions. I found it very helpful in my life and as I interact with people who are reading the book I can see that it’s the one people are most enjoying. It’s the most unfamiliar, but then the most freeing once they know how to use it.
Zaspel:
Have you been encouraged with the book’s reception so far?
Challies:
Yes, I’ve been very encouraged. Recently at been doing a few conferences here and there and bumping into people who are using it and really enjoying it and really giving positive feedback, so it’s been a real joy.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Tim Challies, author of the new Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity. Do yourself a favor and get a copy and read for yourself … and enjoy getting more accomplished – for the good of others and the glory of God.
Thanks for being with us today, Tim.
Challies:
You’re very welcome.
