Perman, Matt. What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done, 2014.
In What’s Best Next?, Matt Perman combines a comprehensive knowledge of the best self-development and personal productivity books in the field with a commitment to glorifying God and enjoying him forever. When someone says they would like to see a secular topic examined “from a Christian worldview”, they are imagining a book like this one. Perman worked for John Piper’s Desiring God organization for over a decade and describes the book as working out the horizontal dimension of Christian hedonism, Piper’s name for the teaching that, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” Accordingly, personal productivity allows us to extend that satisfaction in God to those around us so that His glory is most fully known.
Thus, the answer to the title question is this: loving your neighbor. That’s what’s best next. Always. Figuring out how to do that effectively is the subject for the rest of the book. You are not going to read that kind of theological insight in books by Seth Godin, David Allen, or even Steven Covey. It’s one thing to say it’s important to be principle-focused (as Covey does in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). It’s another thing to say the key to personal productivity is to be God-focused and gospel-driven. If that shift intrigues you (and it certainly intrigued me), then you need to read this book.
The book has four main sections which spell out the acronym DARE: define, architect (an oddly verbed noun, but that’s fine), reduce, and execute. Perman argues that three villains impede our productivity by giving us too much to with too little time in which to do it: ambiguity, input overload, and lack of personal fulfillment. The problem is what most worth doing with our limited time and resources. Perman puts his content where his heart is. The tactics are buried at the back of the book in the execute section. His point? Personal efficiency without effectiveness—judged from God’s perspective—is worse than personal inefficiency. Perfecting the habits of efficiency while forgetting the purpose of effectiveness is gaining the whole world and losing your soul. Who cares if you can do something better if you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place?
We begin to define the purpose of personal productivity by recognizing that the gospel means we don’t have to be productive. Perman equates productivity with the “good works” Jesus identifies in the Sermon on the Mount as bringing glory to God. At a spiritual level, we couldn’t “produce” enough good works to save ourselves. Thus, our productivity comes out of the realization that because Christ’s righteousness has saved us, we can be productive out of gratitude and joy rather than mere duty and necessity. Consequently, our life vision should by definition be spiritual. God defines ultimate productivity, and consequently, our vision for glorifying Him and enjoying Him forever is the thing most worth pursuing. Our life goal, a tier below the life vision, is something like William Wilberforce’s mission to abolish slavery or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream for civil rights. These goals should be ambitious, other-oriented, and God-exalting, because though we may not complete them in our lifetime, our work toward them can bear fruit even after we’re gone. Finally, we should define our roles in our various spheres of life: all the places we have been given responsibility. These are the roles God has called to be productive in during the coming days, weeks, months, and years.
With those definitions in place, Perman turns to the ways we build—or architect—our productivity. His major argument here is that the key to planning productivity should be a weekly review where we set a basic time map designed to build six sustainable routines into our weekly schedules. When these routines become habits and get slotted into a weekly schedule—long enough to account for variety but short enough to be flexible—we’ll become less dependent on lists and more open and flexible to loving our neighbors. These six routines include Bible reading and prayer, rest, getting up early (or, for the rare nightowl, staying up late), planning your day, and executing your workflow.
Next, Perman tackles reducing the amount of work we try to do. If a good definition of productivity—that it is properly gospel-driven—helps fight the enemy of ambiguity and lack of self-fulfillment, reducing the amount of work we do tackles the problem of input overflow. Perman gives us another acronym—DEAD—to help us remember to delegate, eliminate, automate, and defer. The first is most notable because Perman’s Christian view of delegation is about building up those to which work is delegated rather than pawning off things you don’t want to do on underlings. Delegation is a way of loving our neighbor. This is much easier to say than do, and it’s one of the most convicting parts of the book.
Finally, Perman details how to execute this plan. He focuses on weekly scheduling and project goals here, with special attention paid to emptying your email inbox and capturing ideas and actually working on them.
The book retains several features of the personal productivity genre. There’s the foreword from the person whose far more famous than the author (in this case, John Piper). Each chapter begins with an inspirational quotation, and of course, there are the end of the chapter summaries and “For Further Reading” Lists. The book is filled with personal examples from Perman’s own efforts at applying what he describes as well as reminders to check out particular blogs Perman has written (this is a move Tim Ferriss makes a ton in his The Four-Hour Workweek). There are links to bonus online content including tool recommendations and longer interviews that didn’t make it into the book.
What makes the book unique is its theological grounding (especially the connection between “good works” and “productivity”) and personal interviews Perman includes with everyone from Seth Godin and Mike Allen (Politico) to Albert Mohler and Bubba Jennings. Perman has thought more about and actually worked with David Allen’s Getting Things Done than I’ve spent reading it, and willingness to admit that he loves work and wants to do it better is a breath of fresh air.
Alas, there’s so much here, I often feel overwhelmed by the book’s input overflow. I’ve read the book three times now and have yet to feel the specific emotional call to action I’ve felt when listening to Tony Robbins or Gary Vaynerchuk’s content or reading Seth Godin’s books. Perman’s arguments makes sense intellectually, and he knows how important the heart is to being productive. Love, as he often reminds us, is what’s best next: for God and others. I am still working at implementing the DARE approach to my own productivity.
What were my takeaways this time? As always, God defines productivity, what’s best next is loving your neighbor, and the key to doing that is deciding what’s most important and put it first. My three action steps: plan my week, pray and search the scriptures everyday regarding the purpose and direction of my work, and make my biggest goals about others, not myself.