Every Day Matters

A Biblical Approach to Productivity

Brandon D. Crowe

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781683593270
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Zeitmanagement

True productivity is more than just getting things done. True productivity is less about getting things done; it is more concerned with stewarding priorities, time, and resources wisely and faithfully in a way that honors God. In Every Day Matters Brandon Crowe provides an accessible and biblical understanding of productivity filled with practical guidance and examples.Crowe draws insights from wisdom literature and the life and teaching of the Apostle Paul to reclaim a biblical perspective on productivity. He shows the implications for matters such as setting priorities and goals, achieving rhythms of work and rest, caring for family, maintaining spiritual disciplines, sustaining energy, and engaging wisely with social media and entertainment.

PART I

Perspectives

In Part 1, I discuss the reasons why I have written this book (ch. 1), and then I provide a theological orientation to productivity. In chapter 2, I discuss wisdom literature of the Bible, focusing on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. In chapter 3, I turn to the New Testament and consider what the apostle Paul teaches us about living life in light of the most important things.

CHAPTER 1

Why You Need this Book

Sometimes there’s so much to do you don’t know where to start. My wife had that feeling several years ago, as she sat holding our one-year-old son on the kitchen floor. He had just thrown up and was crying. In this case, he had not only thrown up on himself, but all over my wife and the floor around them. There didn’t seem to be any good options for where to start. How do you get out of that mess without making things worse? Do you clean the child up first? Yourself? The floor? Will the residue follow you down the hall? You have to do something; you have to start somewhere.

This is not the most pleasant picture to begin a book on productivity, but it illustrates a stark reality: sometimes you know you have to do something—maybe something you’re dreading—and there doesn’t seem to be any good way to do it. The longer you wait to get started, the harder it becomes. If you never get started, you’ll never get finished.

I am here to help you think about how to get started and make progress toward important things in life—whatever that means for you. I am here to help you think about how to make your life more fruitful and focused. You need to get started, and you need a plan for how to finish.

The Need for a Plan

Life is complicated, and it’s easy to lose clarity in the face of daily, pressing needs. To cut through the complexity and begin to make progress, you need a plan of attack. This can be hard, because life comes at us fast. We’re faced each day with a constant stream of choices—whether in big decisions or small decisions. And it’s often the small, seemingly inconsequential decisions that you make each day—today—that have the biggest impact on your long-term success. How long should you work? What issues will you focus on? What will you spend your time doing this afternoon? What’s most important? Given your limited time and energy, is it even possible to get everything done that is expected of you at school, work, and home?

I’ve written this book to help you think biblically about how to get things done (productivity), and to give practical advice for maximizing your time and energy toward the most important things in everyday life. These are things I’ve had to learn over the years through research, trial, and error. In my days as a student, college graduate, business professional, graduate student, and professor, I’ve often been overwhelmed with all the things I should know and be doing, and have struggled to know how to approach each day.

Many years of teaching at a seminary have helped me recognize the acute need for students to gain their footing and deal with a demanding and often unrelenting workload. I’ve received countless questions from students over the years wrestling with how to squeeze everything in that needs to be done. The most common prayer requests from students relate to time management. Quite often school isn’t all that students are responsible for; they have other obligations to consider. Many are married, and many have children (often small children). The need for prioritizing is especially pressing for those who are also working to make ends meet. And of course, busyness does not subside when the particular stresses of being a student are over.

Though I often see the squeeze particularly in the lives of students, such difficulties are by no means unique to students. For all those who work with ideas or who are responsible for their own schedules, there is a particular challenge to prioritize and invest your time in the most important and high-yield activities. Whatever your current role, the number of skills to be honed, people to meet, knowledge to master, and administrative responsibilities to be addressed can appear endless. The reality is we all have limited time each week.

Since you cannot do all that you would perhaps like to do, you need clarity to recognize the best ways to invest your time, as well as specific strategies for realizing the possibilities before you. You need to be able to think clearly about what the most important things are, and have a plan for getting those most important things done. Ideally, your approach would also yield more down time while also ensuring sufficient attention is devoted to the most important things in life. I aim in this book to help you accomplish both these things.

I also want to take some of the mystery out of how to get more done, and offer a peek behind the curtain of the sorts of practices implemented by many successful people. It can sometimes be surprising—even discouraging—to find that those who seem to be the busiest are also the most productive. What’s their secret? How do they do it all? Why does the saying ring true, “If you want something done, ask a busy person”? Yet the super-productive have the same amount of time each week as everyone else, and the sorts of practices they implement can be practices you learn from and implement in your own life.

Therefore be encouraged; you don’t need a full-time staff to be more productive. A few strategic disciplines and investments of time on the front end, over the course of time, can yield exponential results.

The Need to Connect Productivity, Life, and Scripture

For those who look to Scripture for ultimate guidance, having biblical perspective on productivity is imperative.1 Many books on how to accomplish more are in circulation today, but few of them come from a Christian perspective that is faithfully informed by the Bible. As a result, it can be difficult to know how to square the ambitiousness envisioned in popular productivity books with biblical humility. I also aim for this book to be a helpful starting point for those who don’t know where to start. For those who have read widely in the field of productivity, what follows is my own synthesis of insights and twists.

Researching productivity is not my full-time job. I’ve had to pick it up along the way. I wish I had started earlier. I know what it’s like to feel swamped. I know what it’s like to be a student (at various stages), and I also know what it’s like to graduate and have no idea what you’re doing in the world. I’ve experienced the struggle of trying to balance an open-ended workload while caring for a family. I’ve been, to some degree, responsible for my own schedule for many years, which brings unique opportunities and pitfalls. I’ve not always managed myself and my time well, but I have learned quite a bit about how to juggle complementary (and sometimes competing) responsibilities. I never had a course on how to do this; I had to figure it out.

Here is a glimpse into my typical weekly workload: as a professor I am responsible for writing and delivering lectures, creating and managing various writing projects, attending meetings, engaging with students, leading a department, answering emails, keeping up with the latest research on a wide range of issues, ministry outside the seminary, and editorial work. My wife and I have four children that we are responsible to teach, train, and rear, and with whom we spend much of our time. I’m called to love and serve my wife, and we need time for one another. On top of this, I have to find time for spiritual disciplines, for exercise, for recuperation, and for sleep.

Your situation may be similar to mine in some respects; it is no doubt different in some respects. But if you’re reading this book, then you’re probably looking for tips on how to be more productive. Maybe you have a good system already; maybe you’re just beginning to think about these things. Whatever your situation, I want to help you by sharing what I have learned.

This book represents my own thinking about how to be productive and faithful in daily life. It derives from dozens of books, articles, seminars, podcasts, blogs, and so forth that I have gleaned from over the years as I have tried to find my footing. I’m not able to retrace my steps entirely to determine where I first learned many of the principles in this book (particularly those in Part 2), but I’ve done my best to identify sources and influences wherever possible. I’m eager to give credit to those that have helped me, which I’ve done in the notes throughout—though some of the principles seem, at this point, to be common knowledge in the world of productivity.

At the same time, the perspectives in this book are distinctly my own. I don’t follow any one person’s productivity method, but have tweaked various approaches and theories based on trial, error, and biblical principles. Just as I have been helped by what others have said about productivity, I know you will be helped by the synthesis and biblical application in this book. Your method may end up being different than mine, but the most important thing is to think biblically about living fruitful lives and finding practical ways we can take steps toward realizing that ideal.

The Overarching Need: Loving God and Neighbor

We must think about productivity biblically. Being productive from a biblical perspective does not mean seeking first our own interests. Biblical productivity must be guided by the two great commands: loving God and loving our neighbor (Matt 22:37–39 ESV).2 Love for God is more than an emotion (though it ought to include our emotions). Loving God also means keeping his commands; love and obedience go hand in hand in Scripture. Jesus says that if we love him, we will do what he commands (John 14:15).

Loving God and doing what he commands means we must be faithful stewards of what God has entrusted to us. This is illustrated in the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30). In this parable, Jesus speaks about servants entrusted with various amounts of talents (money). In each case, the servants are expected to be concerned for the master’s work while he is away.3 The first two servants are faithful, though they have not been entrusted with the same amount in each case (five and two talents, respectively). Yet both doubled the amount of talents entrusted to them. In contrast, the third servant hid his master’s money in the ground and did nothing with the talents entrusted to him. The first two servants were praised, whereas the third—who (wrongly) viewed his master as a harsh and unfair man—was chastised for being wicked and lazy. He did not even act in accord with the character that he thought was characteristic of his master. The third servant was wrong on both accounts.

It is notoriously difficult to make one-to-one correspondences to life from the details of parables (they are often more subtle than that), but one application from this parable seems clear enough: we are called to be faithful with what has been entrusted to us as we await the return of Christ. This is a practical way for us to love God. We must not follow the lazy example of the unfaithful servant. We are called to be faithful with a little, and we just might find ourselves being entrusted with more. Elsewhere Jesus states that to those whom much has been given, much will be required (Luke 12:48). Productivity must be related to the first great command to love God with all that we are, which includes being faithful with what he has entrusted to us.

In addition to love for God, love for neighbor is also at stake in our productivity. Keeping God’s commands entails loving our neighbor. Being productive means we are thinking not only of ourselves, but of others. First Peter 4:10 connects stewardship to love for others: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” This should affect how we spend our time. One way we love others is by doing our best work to serve them. If you’re a manager, this may mean doing your best to serve both your company (and those you oversee) and your customers. If you’re a student, it may mean humbly learning as much as you can to serve others in the future. If you’re a pastor, it may mean guarding the time you’ve devoted to sermon preparation each week.

We also love others by making time in our schedules for them. If I say I love my wife and children, but am never around or willing to spend time with them, then my actions do not show love. To make time for others, we need to be diligent and wise in the way we spend our time when we’re working. One struggle in times of frenetic busyness is being distracted and distant even when we are physically present with other people. Perhaps there are a hundred things we feel like we need to be doing. We may even feel guilty for not working at that moment. This is another area in which this book can help—having a biblical productivity method in place can help you maximize the time you spend with others. Thinking proactively and intentionally about scheduling and productivity can allow you to be free when you are scheduled to be free, and to work when you are scheduled to work. This can be one of the simplest ways to think about what productivity is.

In short, being productive from a biblical perspective means doing all we can for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. I am especially interested in helping those who want to maximize their impact for the kingdom of God. Though no amount of effort on our behalf can merit salvation, those who follow Christ are called to diligent obedience as new creations.

What to Expect in this Book

What I have written is designed to be short and practical for those who seek to gain greater clarity in what they ought to do with their time (and how they ought to do it). I will also discuss what Scripture has to say about living a faithful and productive life. There is no silver bullet I can offer that will solve every issue. However, as one who has thought about issues relating to productivity for years, and who needs a well-oiled workflow to accomplish my present responsibilities, my goal is to provide basic principles that can translate into sustainable practices that will help bring focus and sanity to the busyness of your life. I make no claim to have it all figured out. In fact, I regularly fail and therefore need to tweak my own productivity methods. But I can provide some ligh...