People sometimes ask me, “Do you ever sleep? Do you work all the time? Do you ever stop?” The truth is far less impressive than they imagine: I have simply invested a lot of effort over many years in learning how to simplify life and how to maximize productivity. I have written about it often on this site, and eventually those articles grew into a book, Do More Better. What makes it all distinctly Christian is the conviction at the heart of it: productivity is not about hustle or self-optimization, but about doing good to others in a way that brings glory to God.
This page gathers the best of what I’ve written on the subject into one place. Whether you are drowning in busyness, battling procrastination, or simply longing to make better use of the short life God has given you, I hope it will serve you well.
What Is Productivity?
Everything begins with a definition, and the definition begins with our purpose in the world. In How To Get Things Done, the opening article of the series that became my book, I lay out a brief “Productivity Catechism”: God created us to bring glory to him, we glorify him in daily life by doing good works, and good works are works done for the glory of God and the good of other people. That leads to the definition I return to constantly:
Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God.
Notice what that definition rules out. Productivity is not first about tasks, projects, or money-making. As I wrote in 5 Things You Can Give to God Every Day (your gifts, your talents, your time, your energy, and your enthusiasm), the heart of the matter is elsewhere:
The heart of productivity is glorifying God by serving others. It is carefully and deliberately considering the things God calls us to do, and deploying all that we’ve got for his glory and the good of people made in his image. It is giving back to him what he has entrusted to each one of us.
Succeeding at What Matters
Why does any of this matter? Because it is entirely possible to succeed at a hundred lesser things while failing at the few things that matter most—to gain the corner office but lose your family, to clear the to-do list but neglect your soul. In How to Avoid the Worst Form of Failure I call this what it is:
The art of productivity is the art of succeeding at things that matter. At its best, productivity is ensuring that you succeed at the things that matter most. It is meant to ensure that you don’t look back over your life someday and realize you’ve only succeeded at the fleeting things, the minor things, the things that just don’t matter.
And because the things that matter most are ultimately spiritual, productivity can never be separated from godliness. As I put it in 20 Quick Tips to Improve Your Productivity, “Productivity is fueled by the spiritual disciplines. You are not truly productive if you get things done all day while neglecting your soul.”
Neither Busy Nor Lazy
We tend to assume the only two options are busy and lazy, and we wear our busyness as a badge of honor. I want no part of it. In I Have All the Time I Need I explain why I refuse to describe myself as busy, ending with a statement I make “primarily to reassure myself”: “I have all the time I need to accomplish the things the Lord has called me to.” And in Busy, Lazy, and the Space in Between I press on our vocabulary:
Laziness is a vice, the wallow of people who just don’t care. Busyness is a vice disguised as a virtue, the refuge of people who find their self-worth in activity and accomplishment. But what word describes the person who works hard, and works consistently, but who defines himself in more noble ways? Lazy is a word of shame, as it should be. Busy is a word of pride, though it should not be. In truth, it is no more noble to be busy than to be lazy, because both are an egregious misuse of time and energy.
“Busyness is a cousin to laziness and no more noble than its relative”, I wrote in Redeem Your Time. Diligence, which is quiet, consistent, unhurried faithfulness, is the virtue that is much better than either one.
Redeeming the Time
In Redeem Your Time I reflect on Ephesians 5:15–16, where “making the best use of the time” is, more literally, “redeeming the time.” God has given you the gift of time, and he has given it in trust:
Time must be redeemed by liberating it from useless pursuits and dedicating it to the highest purposes. Time is laid out before you, and it must be grasped, it must be seized from all the ignoble purposes that could otherwise steal and waste it. You relate to time well when you understand it as a precious gift to be used, not a valueless possession to be squandered.
And redeemed time is always today’s time. In There Is Only Ever Today I compare our days to the daylilies in my father’s garden, each flower open for a single day:
Life is often like a daylily in that each new day opens fresh opportunities to do good to the people around us—opportunities that often wither and fade before the darkness of evening. Each new day introduces its occasions to love and serve others and these occasions will be gone if they are not embraced before the day draws to its close. The good we can do on Tuesday is often no longer possible on Wednesday. It falls to us, then, to welcome the day’s duties, to do whatever good we can, to not put off until tomorrow the good we ought to do today.
Most of those daily opportunities come to us as plain, unglamorous duties. But as I wrote in The Only Way To Do The Work Of A Lifetime, “Duties become delights when we do them all heartily as for the Lord.”
Build a System You Can Trust
Good intentions are not enough; they need structure. My series How To Get Things Done walks step by step through building that structure: defining your areas of responsibility, understanding time, energy, and mission, finding the right tools, organizing them into a system, managing your tasks, and maintaining it all through daily and weekly reviews. The premise underneath every installment is this:
The fact is, to be productive, you need a system. You need to build it, use it, perfect it, and rely on it. Your system needs to gain your confidence so you can trust it to remember what needs to be remembered, to alert you to what is urgent, to direct you to what is important, and to direct you away from what is distracting.
Two convictions shape the way I build such systems. First, “I believe we tend to focus too much on time management and too little on energy management”—to give your best hours to your most important work. Second, use good tools: as I argue in Don’t Cheat Yourself Out of Good Tools, “Don’t be afraid or ashamed to get the tools you need to do your best possible work.” But the deepest benefit of a system is not efficiency. As I wrote years later in The Joy of Forgetting What You Need To Remember:
Ultimately, a strong system of productivity isn’t necessarily meant to help you do more, but to ease your mind, to calm your heart, to allow you to have confidence that your system is good enough, perfected enough, robust enough to grant you the joy of forgetting what you need to remember.
Procrastination and Distraction
I was once awfully good at procrastination, or awfully bad, depending on your perspective. The lesson that changed me, from 4 Tips For Dealing With Procrastination, is that “Procrastination is a problem of spirituality before it is a problem of productivity.” Years later, in Procrastination Is a Failure to Love, I saw it even more clearly:
Procrastination is a failure to love—a failure to love others. And this is exactly what makes procrastination such an ugly and offensive sin. It is inherently self-centered. It is a form of self-love.
“To do is to love, to procrastinate is to fail to love.” And so much of our procrastination arrives through distraction. In Look! A Distraction! I count its cost, shallow living, shallow doing, shallow loving, and conclude that “Distraction is the enemy of the best kind of productivity.” The solution is to take control of our devices: “If you don’t own your tools, they will own you.”
Rest Is Not Wasted Time
A guide to productivity may be the last place you expect a defense of rest, but “Not all procrastination is bad.” God himself set the pattern of work and rest, and in Redeem Your Time I number restlessness among the ways we waste our time:
You waste time when you do not rest. God himself chose to work for six days, then to rest for one. He did this not because he was worn out, but to set a pattern that we would follow. We are weak and limited creatures who need to rest. Our need for rest requires that we commit enough of our time to sleep and to activities that will refresh our minds and spirits. Rest and recreation are necessary to renew us and to prepare us to diligently carry out the tasks God has assigned to us.
Rest even extends to the mind. In Make Time To Be Bored I plead for the recovery of unstimulated moments:
Something happens to us when we are outside the flow of constant stimuli. It is then that our brains switch into a higher mode, that they begin to mull over ideas, that they begin to convert information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. We can’t stop our brains. We can’t not think. We can’t not ponder. It is in these times of boredom that we are struck by unexpected thoughts, that our brains suddenly burst with new ideas, that our minds are stimulated with fresh insights. Boredom fosters ingenuity and genius. It even fosters godliness.
Productivity Is Messy—and It’s for Everyone
Do not confuse a productive life with a tidy one. Reflecting on Proverbs 14:4 (“Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean”) in A Clean House and a Wasted Life, I make peace with the mess:
I love productivity. At least, I love productivity when it is properly defined—as effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God. By this definition, each one of us, no matter our vocation, ought to pursue productivity with all the vigor we can muster. And if you do that, it is inevitable that along the way you will accumulate some mess. You cannot focus your time, attention, gifts, energy, and enthusiasm toward noble goals while still keeping every corner of life perfectly tidy.
And do not imagine productivity belongs only to the CEO with the corner office. In 5 Quick Productivity Tips for the Busy Mom, written out of Aileen’s experience and mine, I show that “Productivity is doing good to others for the glory of God,” which makes washing floors and changing diapers as significant as preaching sermons and closing deals. That article ends with a prayer any of us could make our own each morning:
God, let me be a faithful steward of the gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm you have given me. Let me use them all today to do good to others and bring glory to you. Amen.
Start Here: Essays on Productivity
- How To Get Things Done. The series that became Do More Better: a Productivity Catechism, then the full system step by step. (Areas of Responsibility, Time, Energy & Mission, Finding the Right Tools, Organization & Systems, Task Management, Maintaining the System)
- 5 Things You Can Give to God Every Day. Gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm. These are the five things that productivity stewards.
- How to Avoid the Worst Form of Failure. Succeeding at lesser things at the cost of the greater things.
- 20 Quick Tips to Improve Your Productivity. Real-world, time-tested tips, from the not-to-do list to guilt-free breaks.
- 8 Ways to Get More Done This Week. Plan your week, block your time, claim the cracks, and entrust it all to the Lord.
- I Have All the Time I Need. Why I refuse to call myself busy, and the hidden cost of seeming busy.
- Busy, Lazy, and the Space in Between. We need a word of virtue between our two vices.
- Redeem Your Time. Time as a gift given in trust, the ways we waste it, and how to seize it back.
- There Is Only Ever Today. What my father’s daylilies taught me about the day’s opportunities to do good.
- The Only Way To Do The Work Of A Lifetime. Little duties, done with diligence, fulfill big callings.
- 4 Tips For Dealing With Procrastination. Two big-picture convictions and two practical habits that beat a lifelong battle.
- Procrastination Is a Failure to Love. The realization that makes procrastination look as ugly as it is.
- The Joy of Forgetting What You Need To Remember. The main value of a system is not accomplishment but peace.
- A Clean House and a Wasted Life. Proverbs 14:4 and the messiness of a life well-lived.
You can browse everything I’ve written on the subject in the productivity topic archive.
The Book
The articles collected on this page grew into a book that has probably become my best seller: Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity. As I said when it released, it is “short (just over 100 pages), fast-paced, and very practical”, and it teaches both why and how to do good—the great purpose behind our productivity, the common obstacles, the three essential tools, and the daily and weekly routines that hold it all together. “Because productivity is for all of us, I wrote a book for all of us.” If this page has been useful to you, the book is the natural next step.
Explore More
Stewarding your time well includes stewarding your reading, so you may enjoy my guide to reading well. And since productivity always involves choosing the best things over the merely good ones, my guide to spiritual discernment is a fitting companion.
This guide is one of a series. You can find them all on my guides page.
