I’ve been circling around something for a long time in a lot of my content. In blog posts I have talked about limits that we have. Episodes of the podcast have detailed some of the causes of toxic productivity, as I see them. I have highlighted the need to allow for flexibility as we cannot always predict what will happen. And, my favourite line, most of plan our days as if we are Superman and will get green lights all the way. And so, I encourage you to make plans with a large helping of humility. Today, I have decided to come right out and say it. You are not God. This is Productivity 101: You are not God. Our failure to grasp this fact at a practical/operational level is, I fear, a big part of the problem we have with getting things done.
A truth universally acknowledged – in theory…
A significant number of my readers are not Christian. If my analytics are anything to go by, posts of mine that mention God or Jesus tend to get less traction. But, the point I am making is more universal truth than a specifically ‘religious’ one. For most people I have spoken with or heard from, the difficulty that they have in the area of productivity is some unspecified feeling that they are getting things wrong somehow and it feels out of their control.
It tends to be things like:
- “I have too many things going through my head right now and I can’t keep up with it all”
- “I need time and space to focus on [insert thing here] but I can never seem to find the time and space for it”
- “No matter how well I think I have planned my day, something always happens thta holds me up and I cannot get through it all”
What people then look for is a system of some kind and a set of apps or tools to try and get some kind of control of it all. For most of us, the systems help, the apps help, but they never really cure the problem. Nothing we try is fool proof and we seem to be just the fool that finds a way through.
Our starting point when we think about our approach to life and work and how we go about it all needs to be to understand and accept that we all, universally, have limits.
Two of the most effective systems I have encountered begin on this exact premise. David Allen’s GTD system and Tiago Forte’s Second Brain are spawned out of Allen’s famous idea that the brain is a great place to have ideas and a terrible place to hold them. See that? Your mind is a terrible place to hold things. Your mind has a limit and a weakness.
You have limits. A.K.A Productivity 101: You are not God
In theory we all know this. None of us would claim that we have no limitations.
In practice, when it comes to going about our daily lives, we find it so hard to accept and remember this. So, let’s take a look at 3 characteristics that can be seen in the idea of a God and see how we fall short of them.
God is eternal
One characteristic of God is that He is eternal. From everlasting, to everlasting as the saying goes. What this means in practice is that God will never run out of time.
This is not true of me. My life is not eternal. One day I will breath my last breath and be done with this life. At that point, everything outstanding on my To-Do list, no matter how urgent or important it may be gets deleted. Everything on my someday/maybe list will be nothing more than an unfulfilled hope.
We all know this, yet for some reason we often operate in life as if there will always be another tomorrow. We can always defer things to next week or even next year or some far off point into the future.
One of the great sadnesses would be living life in reactive/maintenance mode and not taking the time to give to things of significance.
The fact that our time and life has limits brings each one of us to point of needing to make a choice. Recently, I have begun phrasing this choice as “What it is that I want to put into the World before I die?”
A quick caveat here. Normally statements of this kind – life is short – get followed up with so live for the moment! And that leads to pursuing the most amount of pleasure and the fastest possible time with the least amount of effort.
This is a bad response to the brevity of life.
Far closer to where we need to be would be a statement – life is short so make every shot count. The brevity of life, with but a moment or two to think about, should lead us to focus our time and effort on things of value.
God does not grow tired or weary
From the span of life to our moment by moment existence. According to the Bible, God does not get tired and He never needs to sleep. Yes, it says he rested but that is all to do with taking time to enjoy what he had made and not about recovering from the effort of it.
By contrast, I do grow tired and I do grow weary.
The two main examples of this can be seen each day and over time. There are two points in my life where over exerting myself for a lengthy and continuous period of time has led to full blown burnout developing. The first time, it wasn’t so bad and I was able to ‘recover’ after a few weeks of slowing down. I say it that way as honestly I am not sure I did recover.
The second time, therefore, was MUCH worse. That’s a story for another time but suffice it to say I am not sure I have fully recovered even now, 3 years later. It was an experienced that has left me forever changed.
But, we all know the truth. It isn’t just that exhaustion impacts over a long period of time. It happens every day. There are many factors that go into this, how much sleep, sleep quality, cognitive demands, physical demands, what we eat, hydration.
The point is, get anyone of these wrong and you will hit a point in the day when your energy plummets and you get tired.
But, that ISN’T the point is it? No.
Get every single one of those things SPOT ON and you will STILL hit a point where your energy plummets. You will grow tired and weary.
What happens? For me I tend to find one of two things happens. Either I get really sluggish and feel I need to stop. I cannot keep going. Or, I start giving significantly less time to things and finish things quickly but make a lot more mistakes.
Your energy is limited. Ignore this at your peril.
God is ‘Omni’
We could devote a whole post here. Traditional understandings of God will consider Him to be ‘omni’. Omnipresent – everywhere all at once. Omniscient – All knowing. Omnipotent – All powerful.
I am not any of those things. Yet sometimes, when I consider the expectations I have of myself, it kind of looks like I think I should be. Not in the sense of ‘deserving the power’ but in the sense that if I cannot operate at that kind of level, I have somehow failed.
If there is some material fact that I did not know, could not know, ahead of time, I berate myself for not being aware of it. If I find myself torn between two responsibilities that geographically I cannot fulfil at the same time, I am discontent with my ‘failure’ in this.
But these are extreme examples. Life has become incredibly complicated and we live in a world where vast quantities of information are being presented to us moment by moment. We often expect to have a means to track it all and never make mistakes or miss anything. It is not possible. You are limited. Productivity 101: You are not God
Limits mean you cannot do it all
There is one conclusion to draw from all of this and two applications. You are not God, you are limited. That means one thing as much as it means anything else. You cannot do it all. Let me break this down further:
- There will be hopes and ambitions that you have in life that you will never accomplish
- There will expectations that people have of you, demands people place on you that you will never be able to meet.
- There will be expectations that you have of yourself, that you will never be able to meet.
- You will make mistakes, often.
- There will be important things, significant things, things that matter to you, that you will fail to accomplish or be present for.
- I could go on….
So, I said two applications but I am going to sneak in a third right at the close. And believe me you will need it.
The first application is simple. You have to accept it. Accept the reality that you are limited, that you cannot do it and that you definitely cannot ‘have’ it all. If you are not yet able to accept this, then there is little point in reading further.
The second application is obvious – you have to choose. Since we are limited, since we cannot do it all, we have to choose. Choice involves evaluation. We all know that we have to cull the useless faff from our lives in order to protect time for the things that are truly important. We know this but we don’t really do it. If we did, then social media would die out tomorrow. Well, some types would anyway. Where it gets really tough is when you start to realise that you won’t even be able to give time and focus to all of the things that are actually important. You will have to choose and you will therefore need to lay aside something that actually does matter in order to guard the things that matter even more. Those are the hardest choices.
But even if you get all this right – you’ll still likely get it wrong…..
So here comes the third. You’ve accepted you have limits and weaknesses and fallibility. So you’ve made choices. You’ve cut out all the unimportant and you have rejected some of the important things to protect the most important things. Good.
But you aren’t God.
So you can do all of that and still our limits means that inevitably we will look back and realise we have made mistakes. Mistakes we do not have the time or capacity to rectify.
This is what leads to regret.
And so, application three – look to grace to develop contentment. I will be brief. You aren’t God. But I believe that there is a God and in all our weakness and fallibility we can trust Him. He is able to look upon our mistakes with grace if we trust Him. His character means we never drift out of His plan.
Regret can lead to bitterness and resentment. This is toxic and destroys lives.
Grace leads to faith and then leads to contentment. This is what can bring much peace in the face of our limits.
Productivity 101: You are not God
