Don't Phone It In

I really appreciate and agree with this thought from Seth Godin:

This was sort of shocking, at least to me:

I was talking to a religious leader, someone who runs a congregation. She made it clear to me that on many days, it's just a job. A job like any other, you show up, you go through the motions, you get paid.

I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.

But isn't your work spiritual?

I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art form, a calling, and an important (no, an essential) thing worth doing.

In fact, I don't think there's a relationship between what you do and how important you think the work is. I think there's a relationship between who you are and how important you think the work is.

Life's too short to phone it in.

Runway or Top-Down Matters for Production

Matt Perman, again offers some valuable lessons in how we should operate in business and yes in how we do ministry, practically speaking.

By the way, his blog, What's Best Next, is one well worth reading and subscribing to.

There are two main ways to put in place an approach for staying on top of things. First, you can start with the “runway” level — all the actions and stuff that lies right before you. Second, you can start at the top levels of mission, values, and goals.

The difficulty with the top down approach is that all of the things at the runway can easily keep bugging you and make it hard for you to see at that level.

But starting at the bottom is worse. If you tell yourself that getting all of your runway actions in order will allow you to work on up to the level of roles, goals, values, and mission, you’ll never make it.

It’s like a few months ago when I was jogging through a field of grasshoppers. When I went faster, there were just more grasshoppers to jump out.

That’s what happens if you focus on the runway level of actions and the stuff you need to process and try to work on up from there. The runway-level stuff will just multiply, and you’ll never rise much above it.

The best solution is to take a both/and approach. You have to deal with the stuff right before you, of course, and that will in turn provide good illumination on the nature of your roles and goals. But if you start there, don’t stay there too long. Go up to the higher levels and work down so that you will have your priorities defined, which will enable you to cut out a bunch of that stuff that’s been cluttering the runway anyway.

Productivity to The Glory of God

It seems like every week is a "busy week", with meetings, The Well, seminary, more meetings there just always seems to be more to do than time to do it in. C. J. Mahaney has put together a great little PDF on what Biblical Productivity looks like. I recommend you start your day off after time in the Word and Prayer in this handy little guide.

From C.J.'s Blog

Spanning more than four months on the blog, C.J.’s 17-part series on biblical productivity has finally concluded. Via email and in personal conversations many of you have requested that the series be provided as a single document to make it easier to print and read. And today we are making this entire series available as a single 36-page document. You can view and download the PDF by clicking here (0.6 MB):

For anyone interested in reading the series online, I’ve included a final series index of the original posts (see below).

Thanks for reading!

Biblical Productivity

1. Are You Busy?

2. Confessions of a Busy Procrastinator

3. The Procrastinator Within

4. Just Do It

5. In All Thy Ways

6. The Sluggard

7. Time. Redeemed.

8. Roles, Goals, Scheduling

9. Roles (Part 1)

10. Roles (Part 2)

11. Goals (Part 1)

12. Goals (Part 2)

13. Goals (Part 3)

14. Goals (Part 4)

15. Scheduling the Unexpected

16. The To-Do Lists Are Never Done

17. Self-Sufficient

For more form C.J. Mahaney check out his blog "A View From the Cheap Seats."

C.S. Lewis on Real Life Interruptions

C.J. Mahaney has been talking about Biblical Productivity over at his blog. In his latest installment he discusses Scheduling the Unexpected. He also shares this convicting quote by C.S. Lewis on how we view these interruptions that are sometimes quite unpleasant.

"The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time." The Quotable Lewis (Wheaton, IL.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1989), 335.

Props: Sovereign Grace Blog

Procrastination and Youth

The dudes over at The Rebelution shared this video and offer some great wisdom about being young and fighting procrastination.



Here is a quote from the Harris Brothers at Rebelution:

When are you going to get your stuff done? Procrastination can sabotage more than a day’s work. Too many of us also procrastinate in much bigger areas of life — things like growing in responsibility, maturity and in our relationship with Christ.

For young people this can be expressed in the phrase: Life starts later. Life begins after high school, after college, later, someday, but not now. We view the teen years as a vacation from responsibility, a time to goof off and have fun. We’re like athletes, lounging poolside, not realizing the game has already started.

And you see, what bothers us when young people die is that we think they somehow didn’t have a chance to live. But that’s only because we’ve bought into the lie that life doesn’t start until after you’re married with kids.