Productivity

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is “Beyond the To-Do List” by Erik Fisher. Erik also co-wrote a book called “Ready Aim Fire!” with Jim Woods, who recently appeared on Beyond the To-Do List and discussed “hustling in the margins”. The gist of the idea is that you should make best possible use of whatever resources (read: time) you have to work with. The episode inspired Jeremy Duvall to write a great blog post on the topic.

Here’s a highlight:

I’m a firm believer that everyone should have a side project in their back pocket that keeps them excited and gives them something to work on and develop outside of their normal 9-5. It fuels the fire and creates a desire to do/learn/achieve more… a side project doesn’t have to be about making money nor does it have to be something you intend on doing full-time. It could be about injecting some good into the world through starting a charity or just perfecting a skill that you’ve always wanted to learn.

The guidelines are loose, but the goal is clear: find something that gets you excited.

Read the rest of this excellent blog post here.

There’s a big difference between being effective and efficient. Peter Drucker once said “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”

David Allen said it this way: “There are only 2 things you need to do – what you’re doing right now and everything else.” His point was that whatever you’re doing right now is what you’ve determined (maybe involuntarily) is of utmost importance. Of all the things you could be doing at any given moment, you are saying with your time that “this is the most important thing to me right now”.

The problem is that sometimes we’re wrong.

Look at Martha and Mary in Luke 10:38–42. Martha was effiecient, and I’m sure she had that kitchen humming! She was doing the best she could, she was operating at peak performance, she was probably at max capacity – but she was focused on the wrong things. On the other hand, Mary recognized presence of Jesus and took the opportunity to sit at His feet and be taught – she made a decision that all the other “stuff” could wait because this was more important.

It’s easy for us to look back and say “Geez Martha, how thick are you?!? Jesus is at your house!!!”, but the truth is we do the exact same thing whether we realize it or not.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You wake up in the morning exhausted because you didn’t sleep well. You roll out of bed and lethargically climb into the shower, where you tend to linger because you know as soon as you get out you’ve got to go to a job where you probably already are behind in the emails you have to send and the calls you have to make. No matter how hard or long you work you can never seem to get ahead, and when you leave for the night your mind is still thinking about how much you have still have to do. Your “tasks” hang over you like a thick cloud and when you get home you to your family to discover that your wife’s car battery died (someone left the light on again), little Jimmy hurt himself jumping out of the tree in the backyard and the lawn needs to be mowed. You don’t have the energy to deal with it, and everything is a bigger deal than it should be. You feel stuck. You feel overwhelmed. You feel like screaming, just like Martha did, “Can’t somebody help me?!?”

The problem is not with inefficiency – it’s with ineffectiveness. You’re focusing on the wrong things.

On your deathbed, you’re not going to say “I wish I would’ve spent more time at the office.”

Maybe you can’t change your work responsibilities, and you certainly can’t stop your kids from doing things to injure themselves (as a father of 4 boys, I speak from experience). But you can choose what you focus on. You can choose to put “first things first”.

You can choose to organize your thoughts and leave your work at work. Dr. Edwin Louis Cole once said “the man without an organized system of thought will always be slave to the man who has one”. You don’t have to be a slave to disorganization. You don’t have to just “roll with punches”.

Here are 7 things you can do TODAY to improve your tomorrow:

1. Go to bed early – if you go to bed early, you can get up early. Getting up early is the best way I know of to attack your day before it attacks you. Getting up early “suckerpunches” the day and says “I’m going to make sure today is awesome!”
2. Be intentional – recognize that every moment is a gift. Time is the one resource you can never get back. Be intentional with how you spend your time and what you give your life to.
3. Be fully engaged – wherever you are, be all there. If you’re at home playing with your kids, play with your kids, don’t check your email. Leave your phone in another room if you have to.
4. Leave work at work – when you leave the office for the day, leave all the work-related tasks you have to do there also. Worrying about your non-empty inbox at home won’t help you empty it any faster and robs you of what’s really important.
5. Have a vision – know where you’re going! Have goals and write them down! Habakkuk 2:2 says to write down the vision so that you can run with it – you’ll never run without a vision, and you’ll never achieve a goal until you write it down.
6. Review – periodically stop and take inventory of all your projects and tasks. Is what you’re giving your time and energy to worth the investment? Is it in line with your goals and life vision? If not, consider cutting it loose.
7. Say no – being productive is just as much about what you don’t do as it is about what you do do. You have limited resources, and you need to make sure that what you are doing is worth it! Don’t just do things right, do the right things!

Simply speeding up doesn’t help if you’re not going in the right direction in the first place. Make sure that what you’re doing really counts.

You don't need a new tool. You need to commit to getting more out of the ones you have.

— Garrick van Buren (@garrickvanburen) April 23, 2014

Couldn’t agree more – do something with what you have first.

In his book Some Thoughts About Writing, Patrick Rohne says something I thought was extremely powerful. It has the potential to revolutionize the way you get work done, whether you are a programmer, designer, developer, writer, artist, musician, or any other creative type:

The right tool is the one you have with you.

Many people wait for the perfect circumstances before they start creating. What usually ends up happening is those circumstances you visualize in your mind never materialize exactly the way you thought they would and you end up not actually doing anything. Just because you dont have the “right tool” doesn’t mean you can’t create.

Eric Clapton can make the the crappiest guitar sound great. You could give me the nicest , most expensive guitar rig in the world, and it’s still not going to sound nearly as good as Slowhand on a Squire Strat.

No tool can compensate for a lack of ability, and ability comes from experience. A teacher can say “do as I say not as I do”, but the best teachers are the ones who can say “do as I say and as I do”.

You don’t need a new computer, a new app, new camera, or a new instrument before you can start creating. In fact, if you wait until you get the “perfect setup”, you probably won’t make anything! There will always be something newer, better, and shinier that will distract you from getting actual work done.

Maybe the “tool” you’ve been waiting for is time. Well, I have good news and bad news.

• Bad news: you will never find enough time.
• Good news: you can always make enough time.

If you want time to do something you’ve always wanted to do (write a book, start a blog, learn an instrument, etc.), YOU must make the time. YOU must make it a priority. There are no shortcuts to “awesome” – YOU must do the work. Saying you don’t have time for something is often an attempt to justify your busy-ness (“look at all the tasks I have to do”), but really (most times) it just highlights a lack of direction and focus. We say we’re “busy” like it’s a badge of honor, but it just shows how poorly we manage our time. The reason you have so many tasks to complete could be because you can’t say “no” to anything.

At the heart of not being to say “no” is the inability to identify your true purpose. You need a vision. You need to write down your goals. These will determine your priorities and will chart the course for your future. You need to find and do what gives you life – you need to find what makes your spirit say “YES!”. When you know your “YES!”, it’s easy to say “no” to things that distract from your goals. So what I hear when someone says “I don’t have time” is really “that’s not a priority to me”. Which is completely fine (you don’t want to get coffee with me? I’ll get over it), except that we often say “no” to the things that are most important because we’ve said “yes” to too much “filler” in order to uphold our artifical standard of being “busy”. If creating something awesome is a priority for you, you WILL make the time. You will start with what you have, and you will start immediately.

Patrick talks about doing the majority of his writing on his phone since he always has it with him when inspiration hits. It’s definitely not the most “efficient” way to write in terms of words per minute, but he’s also published several books so does that really matter? Maybe he could write more if he adapted his workflow, but as Jon Acuff says, “some beats none every time.” Patrick is creating great content, and he’s been doing it for a LONG time. His methods work for him because those are the tools that he has to work with, and he’s making the most of them while chasing his “awesome”.

Zechariah 4:10 says “Don’t despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin” (NLT). Wherever you are, whatever tools you have, just start.

I’m not a morning person. Don’t even talk to me before I’ve had my coffee.

I also have 4 kids (and a wife), so for me, the only time I get to myself is early in the morning. So guess what? I’m teaching myself to become a morning person.

And you know what? It’s really not that bad getting up early. I actually enjoy it.

A LOT.

I’ve been reading a book lately called The Early to Rise Experience by Andy Traub. It’s kind of a guided walk through establishing new productivity habits by being selfish with your time early so you can give it away later in the day. It’s a simple premise, but it really does make a difference. Here’s what I think is in the “secret sauce”:

1. You’re at the top of your game first thing in the morning – energy is the currency of life. By the time you get home after work and have dinner and get the kids in bed, you’re literally spent. Whatever you have left isn’t going to accomplish much – sorry, but you’re useless.
2. It allows you to put “first things first” – one of the key cogs to David Allen’s GTD system is the “weekly review”. Anytime GTD “doesn’t work” for someone, it is because they are not reviewing regularly. When you get up early, you have time to put thing in their proper place and plan out your day. Essentially, you attack your day before your day attacks you.
3. When you “eat your frog” in the morning, you’ve already done something significant – Brian Tracy wrote a great book called Eat That Frog which is based on the famous Mark Twain quote “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” The gist of it is that if you do that hard thing you’ve been putting off because you don’t have enough energy first thing in the morning then the rest of your day gets easier.

Andy Traub says that 1 minute a day can change your life. The minute you hear your alarm clock to off, you have a choice – get up and attack your day with intentionality, or stay in bed and let it happen to you instead. Hitting the snooze is the epitome of the unstable man in James 1:8, who’s tossed to and fro by the waves of life. This man most likely knows he should be getting up earlier and being more prepared for his day, but just can’t bring himself to actually do it. He waits until the last possible moment to do just about anything – not just get out of bed. This is the guy in Matthew 25:14–30 who did nothing with his talent – don’t be that guy!

If you find yourself in this position, good news – you don’t have to live that way! Here are 5 things you can do to make a change:

• Think a day ahead – suddenly never happens suddenly – it’s the cumulative result of choices you’ve made over a period of time. If you think ahead (i.e. go to bed early), you can break the habit chain and set yourself up for success tomorrow. If you string together enough of these “small wins”, you’ll find yourself winning the war.
• Get Organized – being disorganized costs you more than you know. David Allen says that many people operate in “emergency scan modality” because they’re not organized enough to know what they’re supposed to be doing at any given time. Ed Cole said it this way: “the man without an organized system of thought will always be at the mercy of the man who has one.” Don’t let your life just happen to you and then get stressed out because you don’t have control – take control, today!
• Visualize success – picture the perfect morning, whatever that looks like to you. Is it having coffee with your significant other before the kids get up? Going for a run? Walking the dog? Hitting the gym? Whatever it is, WRITE IT DOWN! On the paper, off the mind. Habakkuk 2:2 says to write the vision down so that people may run with it – you’ll never move yourself until you write it down.
• Start TODAY! – don’t wait until tomorrow to stop procrastinating. I’ve written about it before, but the graveyard is full of people who ran out of tomorrows. You don’t need a lifetime to become great at something, you just need to be consistent. Just start! Karen Lamb once said “A year from now you will wish you had started today.”
• Give yourself some grace – you won’t hit your goal 100% of the time. Some morning you will fail. That’s OK! As Jon Acuff says, “some beats none every time”. Every time you do succeed you are creating and reenforcing a new success habit. Just keep going!

Make it happen, cap’n!

Your mind is a weapon, and education is the tool to sharpen it! Use it righteously.

— Bishop Dale Bronner (@BishopBronner) April 8, 2014

Well said, Bishop Bronner.

Sometimes all all you need is a fresh perspective.

Sometimes you just need to see things from another angle, or see what things look like from the other side.

Your perspective can either drive you to slay giants or keep you on the sideline instead of entering your promised land.

Perspective will either propel you with passion or paralyze you with fear.

David didn’t look at the size of the giant, he looked at the size of his God. The spies in Numbers 13 though couldn’t look past the opposition they faced. They had a “grasshopper mentality” which kept them small.

Don’t tell God how big your mountain is – tell your mountain how big your God is!

Success is on the other side of inconvenience. – Dale Bronner

If it was easy, everyone would do it.