Faith-Based Productivity

I recently listened to an episode of Beyond the To-Do List where host Erik Fisher and guest Merlin Mann (creator of Inbox Zero) talk about inboxes and managing them appropriately. One of the things Merlin talked about was a subconscious fear we have of our inboxes because of the unknown – we’re afraid of what might be lurking in there. The reason we’re afraid of what might be in there is that we’re afraid that there might be something urgent that we need to deal with, and we don’t think we can right now.

When it comes to handling your inboxes though, ignorance is not bliss. The thing that may be in there is either urgent or important regardless of whether you are aware of it and deal with it or not. The fact that it’s there isn’t a big deal, but the fact that you aren’t in a place to respond appropriately is what makes it a big deal. The trick is to identify and classify it so you can take appropriate action on it.

David Allen, the author of the Getting Things Done methodology, talks a lot about what he calls “emergency scan modality” – a constant state of putting out fires. A lot of people live this, and this is the default behavior for the person with 1000+ messages in their inbox.

Pro tip: If that’s you, accept that there’s no way you’ll get through all those messages – you’re better off nuking your inbox and starting over. It can be scary to get rid of all those messages, but let’s be real – you don’t know what’s in there, and you never will. If you wait until you process all that stuff to start chasing “Inbox Zero”, you’ll never get there. Just hit “delete” and work with a blank slate, and commit to doing better from this moment on. Go on – you can thank me later.

The person with 1000+ messages in their inbox is many times the person who is always pulling out their phone and checking their inbox 100 times a day. They know their inbox is a jumbled mess, and they’re worried that if they don’t check their email 100 times a day something important might get lost in that giant sea of unread text. Their subconscious belief is that if something is really important it will cause me to stop whatever I’m doing and I’ll deal with it, but how much of our time and attention is being robbed from the people and things that are most important to us?

My friends, you’re doing it wrong.

Here’s a few tips for dealing with your inboxes so you can stop worrying and start executing:

1. Turn off the notifications – you don’t need to know the second you receive spam or be interupted when a fake Twitter bot follows you. Try only checking your email 2 or 3 times a day. It sounds blasphemous, I know, but try it – you’ll see that things aren’t as urgent as they seem.
2. Simplify – take stock of how many inboxes you have (and how many you actually need). How many unknown inboxes are keeping you up at night? Consolidate. Get everything into a couple inboxes that you check and process regularly.
3. Have a system – when you check your inboxes, do something with them! Don’t just check your email and then leave every message in your inbox – file them appropriately. Tag them, put them in nested folders, I don’t care – just do something!
4. Just do it – stop procrastinating. Just like any kind of housework, it isn’t fun but needs to get done. Just get it over with and then you don’t have to worry about it anymore and it doesn’t have to steal your attention when you’re doing something actually important.
5. Be Consistent – you need to empty your inboxes at least once a week. Some inboxes (like email) need to be emptied more regularly, but the concept is the same – consistency is key.

Emptying your inboxes should become part of your weekly review. The weekly review is extremely important and helps keep your priorities straight. If during your weekly review you realize that you have a ton of unprocessed items in an inbox or you realize that you’ve achieved Inbox Zero but it took way too much work, it’s time to take a look at your processes and re-evalutate how you’re doing things.

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.