It seems like everyone these days has got something to say about productivity. Personal productivity at least. We live in a changing world of work where an increasing number of us are knowledge workers of some kind. We work with information of some form or another. That could involve numbers and money, design or software development, management and planning or all forms of administration. We aren’t making or fixing things with our hands, driving cars for a living etc etc. And even if we do, the amount of ‘knowledge’ work we need to do to manage our own personal lives is on the increase. What this means is that, to a degree, our own personal productivity is our own responsibility.
The idea of productivity first began with the production line. It wasn’t about individual workers and how they could be more efficient and get more done. This was all about the productivity of the plant as a whole. It was men like Henry Ford and others coming to the conclusion that a production line, with each worker performing a specific task on repeat, was more efficient (more productive) than having those same workers individually building whole cars from start to finish.
This isn’t necessarily intuitive as the production line requires massive initial investment in plant and machinery, whereas the ‘old method’ just required a worker, some tools, components and space. It was scalable by adding more workers, more tools, more components and more space. But, once you’d reached your maximum potential output with this method in the space and with the workers that you had, the question became, how can we increase output, without increasing space and workforce. Enter the manufacturing process and the production line.
In the long run, it proved more efficient and more productive for a couple of reasons. The often touted one, and the one I learned in school, was that by developing a specialism, workers became more efficient at that one task and thus the overall output of the factory was increased. I suspect the other reason is because it transfers the productive capital away from the skill and knowledge of the individual craftsman and into the plant, machinery and process, owned by the company. And crucially, whilst the worker becomes highly skilled at his one element of the production process, it is a skill that has limited value without the rest of the production process. Thus you can reduce costs as each individual worker is now less valuable and easier to replace whilst also increasing overall output. But that’s a whole different story.
Now, we sit behind desks and the skill ball is back in our court. We study, we learn, we are trained all with the end result of developing skills and ‘career capital’ that we are selling to our employers or utilising for our own business or work. The key point though is that most of us never get told how to manage our work, plan our time or make the most of all the different elements that make up our work. For that, the responsibility is on us.
And if you are self employed or running your own business, then the whole thing rests on you.
Where am I coming from?
I want to be frank at this point. I am a Christian and this gives me a world view. This world view impacts my thinking on productivity matters. So let me walk you through my logic. If you are not a Christian, I’d encourage you to still read this bit as the core principles will still apply and I will flag the moment where our interests become more aligned.
As a Christian, I see my purpose in life as ultimately being to honour and glorify God with everything I do. This is because, as a sinner saved by grace, I have been given an eternity with Christ. I have been forgiven and made new. And therefore, I want every decision I make and everything I do to reflect this new self and honour my saviour. Crucially, whilst I fundamentally believe in the sovereign grace of God over everything I am, do and say and over everything that happens for me and to me, I also believe in my own responsibility and accountability for the choices I make. In short, I don’t want to coast through every day just hoping that somehow each day, week, month and year ends up serving my ultimate purpose. I want to take responsibility for it in a proactive way. This means living an intentional life and a disciplined life. This means wanting to have an answer to the question ‘Why am I doing this and how does it serve my ultimate purpose of honouring or God?’ for every decision I make and everything I say and do.
If you’re not a Christian, whatever your purpose is, this aim of living intentionally is a good one. None of us on our death beds will regret not having another day to binge Game of Thrones or wish we could have just five more minutes to scroll through Instagram.
Now don’t get me wrong, I believe it is very much possible to rest, relax and enjoy yourself in a way that honours God and serves his people by doing things that would not traditionally be seen as productive. But that is a subject for a later post. Actually – I have a three part mini series of podcasts planned – (1) Why do we work? (2) Why do we rest? (3) Why do we play?
Two realities that sit over all of this
As I approach life and work and everything else there are two things that I would want to govern my outlook. The sovereignty of God and the grace of God. The sovereignty of God meaning that He is the ruler and is in control of everything that does and doesn’t happen – and that I am not. This gives us both humility and confidence. Humility because it reminds us of our limitations and confidence because we know that everything is in good hands. The fact that God is God and I am not also defines what my purpose is and provides a framework for discerning what is truly important and what is not.
The grace of God. I have spoken about this more in the post Toxic Productivity – A Better Way. The danger with personal productivity is that it can often be motivated by unhealthy needs and unhealthy fears. For ease, I will paste an edited quote from the post here:
I have spoken before about some of the needs that motivate toxic productivity. The need to be valuable and needed. We desire to be liked and to be valued and this can become a need leading us to ever strive to prove our worth. This can evolve in a desire or a need to be the best and be seen to be the best. This is one step away from perfectionism. A state of thinking where any mistake is totally intolerable.
Grace answers these needs because grace provides the only solution. The need is eliminated. The grace of God in Christ proves without a shadow of doubt that it is not only the ‘best’ that are valued, rather even the very worst can and has been accepted by Him, without condition. To consider ourselves perfect is idiocy in its highest form. Our mistakes and weaknesses are obvious for us all to see. But, by grace we have been made perfect.Every need we may strive to meet is eliminated by grace. And if our needs are eliminated, our fears are done away with.
A desire to always be on top of everything can be driven by a fear of the unknown and the unknowable. We fear failure and we fear man – or more specifically rejection by man. This is where we move to. Our fear of the unknown, our fear of missing something, our focus on the negative things in order to eliminate them, is all summarised by a fear of failure. This fear of failure is all tied up with a fear of being rejected and cast aside. Perhaps we even fear that our lack of output, be it moral good works, ministry success, managing our homes with excellence, being a good parent and spouse or diligence in our labours at work, we fear that our weaknesses and shortcomings here might eventually disqualify us from God’s eternal Kingdom. Not competent, not valuable, not needed, not good enough.
By grace we are totally accepted. Not on the grounds of our own productivity or effectiveness. Not on the grounds of our competence or our own value. We are accepted on the grounds of another. We are accepted as a free gift that we did not, nor could not, ever earn.
Grace teaches us that we do not need to be God. And it teaches that we can trust the one who is God.
Toxic Productivity – A Better Way
So much of the negative side of ‘productivity’ or ‘hustle culture’ is all about being in control and being unwilling to let that control slip or about proving ourselves, our worth and value so that we will be needed and not cast aside. Between them, the sovereignty of God and the grace of God eradicate these problems.
They also remind me that it is not all about serving me. Serving my goals, my ambitions and my purpose. All for my own glory. I am living in service of another. In a previous life I worked in a job that was marked by interruptions. These increasingly became frustrations for me. Another person has broken the photocopier!!?? Another person is stuck in the lift!!?? Another person can’t remember where that thing is or doesn’t know how to use that other thing!!??? Come on everyone – just leave me alone!!! My work is far more important than your stuff!!! That’s kind of thinking is just code for “I am more important than you!“ The fact that I serve another and not myself, means that these interruptions, far from being a disruption to my service of God, are actually a part of it. Obviously wisdom is needed here as you don’t want to end up reacting to stuff all the time, but it gives you perspective on it that is grounded in humility and not pride.
At this point I have explained my purpose – that drives me to be intentional and disciplined in my pursuit of serving it and I have explained the two realities that govern my world view as I do so. Which brings us to Effective Faith – A Christian Approach to personal productivity.
What is productivity anyway?
I’ll be honest, I don’t really like the term productivity. To me that conjures up images of working more and more and more and not resting or relaxing or enjoying life. That is not my take on things whatsoever. Work is good, but work is not the sum total of our lives and so I prefer to think of effectiveness. This to me is a term that encapsulates a more holistic approach. (I should clarify here that plenty of other people would speak of the same concept and idea here but would use something like ‘busyness’ for just doing more and more and ‘productive’ for being considered and doing actually useful stuff).
So, I consider being effective to be devoting our time, attention and focus to things of significance or importance (the things that matter) in a planned and considered way and then being disciplined in executing that to achieve the desired outcomes. This encapsulates a lot of things. Just doing more and more and more work, would fail to meet this definition. Spending all your time concerned about mundane, everyday, maintenance tasks would fail to meet this definition (incidentally, I released a podcast on this which you can listen to here).
None of this is to say that these things are unimportant, but it is more to say that what I would consider to be an effective approach to life and work would consider many different areas and aspects of life that are important. It would consider your work. It would consider your family. It would consider your health. Your friendships. It would include time to enjoy God’s world. And so on. It involves considering the whole of my life under God’s rule and under God’s grace and therefore taking an intentional approach to my use of time as best I can (I fail at this a lot), so I focus my time on what truly matters most. I’ve heard it said that planning ahead is un-Christian as it denies the sovereignty of God. It doesn’t. It’s actually about intentionally sitting under His sovereignty and grace.
Why think about these things?
Why bother? Well, it’s not so we can work, work, work more. As I said, it’s about being planned and intentional so our time is given to the things that matter to us. The things that fulfil the purpose. But more than that, my observation mostly from myself but also from others, is that without this considered approach, we tend to have our time, energy and focus taken up by things that, if we were honest about it, just wouldn’t make the cut. Let me give some examples:
- In the office, we might end up spending the bulk of our time responding to emails in an ad-hoc, as they come in, reactive way. Before we know it the day is gone and we have little to actually show for it.
- At home, we may lament the books we never have time to read but still manage to spend a significant amount of time on social media or watching YouTube shorts.
- With our families, the big things and the more regular important things take thinking and planning and intentionality. Family holiday, days out, a trip to the park, story time, date night etc etc. With young kids, you could very easily spend every day just tidying up after them.
- In ministry you could spend all of your time reacting to every pastoral need or crisis and never give time to sermon prep or thinking ahead to better meet the pastoral needs of the church over the long term.
The bottom line is, the stuff that just happens each day, that we could very easily fill our time reacting to, is rarely how you would choose to spend your entire day. Whatever our role in life, whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, I firmly believe that our lives could be improved with a bit of intentionality and discipline – which means deliberately saying ‘yes’ to some things and just as deliberately saying ‘no’ to others.
This is why the blog is called Effective Faith. Not everything I write will be overtly Christian, but fundamentally I believe that the solution to the personal productivity problem – to frantic, self focussed, busyness to get as much done as possible is instead to be effective in faith. By effective, I mean focussed on what is truly important. By effective I mean using the time and resources we have with wisdom and godliness. By effective I mean considering ourselves with sober self judgement, acknowledging our weakness and limitation. By effective I mean in service of others and not just my own goals and ambitions. But we do this in faith. Trusting that there is one seated on the throne, in control of all things. Trusting that grace that has met all our needs. Trusting that grace that has destroyed all our fears and our enemies. Trusting Him with every plan I make, with every plan that fails. Trusting Him with every opportunity I am given to serve others, even those that seem like ‘interruptions’ and with every opportunity I miss. Trusting Him with everything I do each day. Trusting Him with everything I don’t do each day.
What is the solution to the personal productivity problem? To be effective in faith.
I want to throw in a last thought below:
Some pitfalls to avoid
- We are not all the same. Our circumstances and roles in life will mean that our ability to adopt this approach will vary and it will change as our lives change. But, before you say this kind of thinking doesn’t apply to me, ask one simple question – why not? In a free country, everything we give time to is a choice based on a set of priorities. Given what you believe to be your purpose and aim in life – what does how you actually use your time say about what your priorities are and are they inconsistent with that purpose?
- Thinking I’m just talking about working more. I’m not, this kind of thinking can be applied to our rest and fun as well. The whole of our life.
- Thinking there is never a place for ‘vegging out’. There is, sometimes we need to. If so – be intentional about it and you don’t need to feel so guilty and ashamed afterwards.
- Not being aware of the ‘crises’ that will come. Inevitably there will be time and situations where just reacting is all you can do. That’s ok. We can’t plan for everything.
- Being rigid in the need to be considered and intentional all the time for the rest of your life. You can take a break. In fact you need to.
