What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

by Matthew Aaron Perman, John Piper (Foreword by)

Overview

Do Work That Matters

Productivity isn’t just about getting more things done. It’s about getting the right things done—the things that count, make a difference, and move the world forward. In our current era of massive overload, this is harder than ever before. So how do you get more of the right things done without confusing mere activity for actual productivity?

When we take God’s purposes into account, a revolutionary insight emerges. Surprisingly, we see that the way to be productive is to put others first—to make the welfare of other people our motive and criteria in determining what to do (what’s best next). As both the Scriptures and the best business thinkers show, generosity is the key to unlocking our productivity. It is also the key to finding meaning and fulfillment in our work.

What’s Best Next offers a practical approach for improving your productivity in all areas of life. It will help you better understand:

• Why good works are not just rare and special things like going to Africa, but anything you do in faith even tying your shoes.

• How to create a mission statement for your life that actually works.

• How to delegate to people in a way that actually empowers them.

• How to overcome time killers like procrastination, interruptions, and multitasking by turning them around and making them work for you.

• How to process workflow efficiently and get your email inbox to zero every day.

• How your work and life can transform the world socially, economically, and spiritually, and connect to God’s global purposes.

By anchoring your understanding of productivity in God’s purposes and plan, What’s Best Next will give you a practical approach for increasing your effectiveness in everything you do.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780310494232
Publisher:	Zondervan
Publication date:	03/04/2014
Sold by:	Zondervan Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	251,725
File size:	924 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Matt Perman is director of Marketing at Made to Flourish and the author of What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done (Zondervan, 2014). He has an M.Div. in biblical and theological studies from Southern Seminary and a Project Management Professional certification from the Project Management Institute. Prior to Made to Flourish, Matt served as director of strategy at Desiring God. Matt is a frequent speaker on the topics of leadership and productivity from a God-centered perspective and also consults with businesses and non-profits, focusing on startups devoted to solving large global problems. He blogs at www.whatsbestnext.com.

 

Read an Excerpt

What's Best Next

how the gospel transforms the way you get things done

---

By Matthew Perman

ZONDERVAN

Copyright © 2014 Matthew Perman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-49422-5

---

CHAPTER 1

Why Is It So Hard to Get Things Done?

How the world of work has changed; and introducing the villains

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, effectiveness.

—Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO GET THINGS DONE?

A reader of my blog and a highly successful woman in the business world recently said to me: "I am so overwhelmed right now with my work. The worst part is that I still haven't found a system for managing everything that works well for me and that I'm happy with."

Another friend of mine, this time someone who works at a ministry, recently posted on Facebook: "Is this for real? I'm leaving the office at a normal time!? Too bad it doesn't count when you bring work home."

Most of us can relate. We have too much to do and not enough time to do it. We feel overstressed, overworked, and overloaded. And thanks to new technology and media, we have more coming at us than we ever did before. But the problem is deeper than this. The root of the challenge lies in a major shift our society has undergone in the nature of work itself.

THE RISE OF KNOWLEDGE WORK

What Is Knowledge Work?

Until a few decades ago, we were predominantly an industrial economy. In that era, work was clearly defined for most people. If you were a farmer, for example, you had fields to plow, cows to milk, and equipment to fix. The work was hard and might involve long days, but (most) tasks were generally straightforward and self-evident. (Not to mention that you probably had someone show you the ropes before you took over full responsibility.)

With the shift to a knowledge economy, the nature of work has changed. Unlike in the industrial era, in which tasks were generally self-evident, the essence of knowledge work is that you not only have to do the work but also have to define what the work is.

For example, if you are painting your house (a form of manual labor), you can see right away where to brush next. But when you get a hundred emails a day (a form of knowledge work), most of which do a pretty poor job of getting to the point, the next actions don't usually come to you predefined. You have to figure out what to do with each email, then figure out how to fit that in with all the rest of your work that you have had (or have yet) to define.

Most of us haven't paid sufficient attention to the skill of defining our work clearly. This is why it so often feels like our workdays never stop. When you don't have your work clearly defined, there can never be any finish point.

What Is Unique about Knowledge Work?

Knowledge work is about creating and utilizing knowledge, but it is more than that. For when your work consists in creating and using knowledge, there is an important consequence: by definition, it must be primarily self-directed.

Peter Drucker points this out well: "The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, effectiveness."

The freedom this gives us is a fantastic thing. But there is also a challenge.

What Is Challenging about Knowledge Work?

Some people think that knowing how to get things done is obvious—that it just comes naturally to people and that therefore we don't need to spend much time on it.

But that's not the case. In more than fifty years of consulting, Peter Drucker pointed out that he never found a "natural," someone who is instinctively effective. Every effective person he encountered—and as perhaps the greatest consultant and business thinker of the twentieth century, that's a lot—had to work at becoming effective.

Brilliant insight, hard work, and good intentions are not enough. Effectiveness is a distinct skill that must be learned. Some people are more inclined to it than others, and everyone is naturally built to be capable of effectiveness, but effectiveness is something we learn—like reading. Drucker says it well: "To be reasonably effective it is not enough for the individual to be intelligent, to work hard or to be knowledgeable. Effectiveness is something separate, something different."

Scott Belsky, founder of Behance (whose mission is "to organize the creative world") and author of Making Ideas Happen, makes the same point. Belsky's focus has been the creative world (also a form of knowledge work), where there is often a notion that if you have a great idea, it will naturally turn into reality. In contrast, Belsky writes, "Ideas don't happen because they are great—or by accident. The misconception that great ideas inevitably lead to success has prevailed for too long.... Creative people are known for winging it: improvising and acting on intuition is, in some way, the haloed essence of what we do and who we are. However, when we closely analyze how the most successful and productive creatives, entrepreneurs, and business people truly make ideas happen, it turns out that 'having the idea' is just a small part of the process, perhaps only 1 percent of the journey."

Belsky adds later, "The ideas that move industries forward are not the result of tremendous creative insight but rather of masterful stewardship."

So it takes more than just enthusiasm, great ideas, native talent, and hard work to get things done. It takes a method.

THE VILLAIN OF AMBIGUITY

Ambiguity in Defining Our Work

Knowledge work therefore brings us face to face with the first villain in this story: ambiguity. Ambiguity is not necessarily a villain in itself. It is a good thing that knowledge work has at its essence creating clarity out of ambiguity and making good decisions (i.e., determining what's best next). But when we don't know how to do knowledge work, ambiguity becomes a villain because it ends up frustrating us, making life harder, and sometimes defeating us. It's like jumping in the pool without knowing how to swim. Jobs today are not as clear as they were in the industrial era, yet we haven't been taught the skills of navigating this context, learning how to define our work, and managing ourselves for effectiveness.

Further, the most effective knowledge era strategies don't drop from heaven fully defined. We have to figure them out—and that happens by trial and error. As a society, we are still figuring out the best practices for navigating knowledge work—which means we encounter a lot that don't work and many problems along the way.

There are other factors as well:

• We change jobs more frequently.

• We have more nonroutine tasks than ever before.

• Many in highly specialized vocations, such as doctors, engineers, web developers, business analysts, pastors, and so forth, are taught in great detail how to do the activities of their job itself (thankfully!), but they aren't taught much about the process for managing their work, managing others, and leading others.

So with the shift from the industrial era to the knowledge era, we now need to decide more than ever what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

Ambiguity in Defining the Direction of Our Lives

The issue of ambiguity doesn't simply affect us at the level of defining our work; it also affects us at the level of defining the direction of our lives. Our current era is unlike any in history. We have more choices and opportunities before us regarding what to do with our lives than we can even comprehend. Many of us (myself included) have found it hard to know what to do with our lives. And when we've sought out guidance on how to navigate that territory, there hasn't been much to find.

Many are still on that journey, trying to figure it out as they go. That can work, but it's a tough road. Others are blowing it altogether. Too many Christians in their twenties are living in their parents' basements playing video games. That aside, too many people at all stages of life are unclear on what they should be doing. We need to know how to make good choices at this level without expecting to have a map that tells us every detail. This is also part of what it means to manage ourselves, and part of what we will cover later in the book.

THE RISE OF MASS CONNECTIVITY

The rise of knowledge work has happened over the last sixty or so years. We have experienced an even greater revolution over the past fifteen years or so: the rise of mass connectivity. Distance is no longer the barrier it once was. As Tim Sanders has put it, it used to be that "relationships were for the most part geo-bound, and only a handful of people comprised your entire business network." Today, our networks run into the hundreds and thousands, and we can connect with people all over the world through email, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

And we can do this no matter what we are doing. We can be in the back yard camping, on a run (my least favorite time to receive calls), or in a meeting. We can even text internationally. When I was in China recently, it almost felt like I was hardly gone because I could stay in instant communication with my wife through texting (though, unfortunately, I racked up a pretty high bill).

The proliferation of technology has not only increased our daily load of information; it has astronomically increased the rate of change in society and in the world of work altogether. As Tim Sanders notes, "before the information revolution, business changed gradually and business models became antiquated even more slowly. The value progression evolved over decades and double decades. You could go to college, get an M.B.A. and work for forty years, and your pure on-the-job knowledge stayed relevant."

Today, however, our skills become outdated more quickly (except for the macro, cross-functional skill of getting things done!). We not only need to keep up with all the information coming our way on a day-today basis, but we also need to keep our skills and knowledge up to date with the massive changes that are rapidly occurring at the level of work and society.

This is a fantastic thing and has implications for how we do everything. It has also resulted in a whole lot more to manage—which leads to the second villain.

THE VILLAIN OF OVERLOAD

Just as something good (the rise of knowledge work) brought us head-to-head with the first villain, so also the rise of mass connectivity, though an excellent thing, brings us head-to-head with a second villain: overload.

Massive overload.

In 2008, the web contained one trillion pages. That has risen at an exponential rate, such that in 2013 the quantity of information on the internet began doubling every seventy-two hours. Every seventy-two hours — every three days — the amount of information online doubles.

In 2010, 95 trillion emails were sent (about 260 billion per day). That averages to about 153 emails per user per day (there were about 1.86 billion internet users at the beginning of 2010). Currently 92 million tweets are posted per day and 2.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every day.

This amount of information is overwhelming— not simply at an aggregate level but at an individual level (I think most of those 95 trillion emails came to my inbox). We are all feeling this. It is almost impossible to keep up.

How do we make good decisions in the midst of this overload? And how do we keep this overload from sinking us? We can't just float along, like a ship without a rudder, expecting things to go well. We need to take initiative and learn how to navigate this and get things done in spite of the obstacles.

WE NEED TO LEARN HOW TO WORK

Here's the bottom line: We are using industrial era tactics for knowledge era work. And that doesn't work.

We need to give more focused attention to learning how to work. Not just the specific content of our jobs but the overarching, cross-functional skill of how to get things done in general—what David Allen calls "high performance workflow management." This can make getting things done more relaxed, simple, and possible.

In other words, there are actually two components to doing our work. There are the job skills themselves—creating financial statements, writing web content, preaching sermons, leading meetings, and so forth—and then there is the process of how to do work in general.

We've done pretty well as a society at learning how to do the content of our jobs. But we haven't been so great at learning the overarching process of how to manage our work: how to keep track of what we have to do, make decisions about what's best to do next, keep from over-committing ourselves, and do all of this in the midst of seventy-five emails, twelve phone calls, and eighteen interruptions a day.

In past eras, this wouldn't have been such a big deal. But today it is because of the rise of knowledge work and the consequent ambiguity, coupled with the overload that comes from mass connectivity.

EFFECTIVENESS CAN BE LEARNED

I mentioned earlier that effectiveness must be learned. Here's the good news: Drucker found that everyone who worked at becoming effective succeeded. And that's what Belsky found as well. Effectiveness has to be learned and, fortunately, can be learned.

If we are going to learn effectiveness, we need to do it right. Many people make a wrong turn here, however. In the next chapter, we'll learn what the answer is not.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from What's Best Next by Matthew Perman. Copyright © 2014 Matthew Perman. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Foreword John Piper 11

Preface: Busting the Twelve Myths about What It Means to Get Things Done 13

Introduction: Why We Need a Uniquely Christian View on Productivity 17

Part 1 First Things First: Making God Supreme in Our Productivity

1 Why Is It So Hard to Get Things Done? 35

Introducing the villains

2 Why Efficiency is not the Answer 43

Putting effectiveness over efficiency

3 Why We Need to be God-Centered in Our Productivity 51

How seeking to be productive without God is the most-unproductive thing in the world

4 Does God Care about Getting Things Done? 61

Why knowing how to get things done is essential to Christian discipleship

Part 2 Gospel-Driven Productivity: A New Way to Look at Getting Things Done

5 Why the Things You do Every Day Matter 73

Productivity is really about getting good works done

6 Put Others First: Love as the Guiding Principle for All of Life 85

The gospel calls us to put others before ourselves; this is not only right, but also the way to be most productive

7 How the Gospel Makes Us Productive 103

The only way to be productive is to realize you don't have to be productive

8 Peace of Mind without Having Everything Under Control 117

Don't turn productivity into a new law: productivity and Philippians 4

9 The Role of Prayer and Scripture in Our Productivity 123

God-centered character as the foundation of all productivity

10 The Core Principle for Making Yourself Effective 131

Know what's most important and put it first

Part 3 Define: Know What's Most Important

11 What's Your Mission? How not to Waste Your Life 147

Setting a God-centered direction for your life

12 Finding Your Life Calling 169

Discovering why you are here, and how vision differs from mission

13 Clarifying Your Roles 179

Our roles are not simply areas of responsibility, but callings from God

Part 4 Architect: Create a Flexible Structure

14 Setting Up Your Week 195

The (almost) missing component in GTD

15 Creating the Right Routines 209

The six routines you need to have

Part 5 Reduce: Free Up Your Time for What's Most Important

16 The Problem with Full System Utilization 223

Avoiding the ringing effect and why you need to reduce

17 The Art of Making Time 227

Delegating, eliminating, automating, and deferring in the right way

18 Harnessing the Time Killers 241

Harnessing multitasking, interruptions, and procrastination

Part 6 Execute: Do What's Most Important

19 Weekly Planning 257

If you can do only one thing, this is it

20 Managing Email and Workflow 265

The five steps for processing your work

21 Managing Projects and Actions 275

How to connect your actions to your life so they actually get done

22 Daily Execution 289

Nine principles for making things happen every day

Part 7 Living This Out

23 Productivity in Organizations and Society 301

Why we must care about productivity in all of life

24 The Greatest Cause in the World 311

Productivity, world missions, and how our faith relates to our work

25 Productivity in a Fallen World 325

We need to get a larger view of suffering, minimizing our own suffering when we can, but embracing it with joy when it is necessary for the good of others

Conclusion 343

Toolkit

Recap: What's Best Next in 500 Words 347

Getting Creative Things Done 349

Knowing What's Best Next: The Easy Reference Guide 353

Recommended Reading 355

The Online Toolkit 359

Learn More and Pass This On 361

Acknowledgments 363

Notes 365