At times, the number of things I need to do gets nearly overwhelming. I think the main reason I still manage to stay afloat, aside from the grace of God and the huge amount of help I get from my wife, is a reliance on systems to keep track and organize things. These have helped me a huge amount.

Today, I want to recommend a very practical step if you’re struggling with your priorities and how to organize your life. Get and read Tim Challies’ book “Do More Better: A practical guide to productivity”. This great book gives a bunch of very practical and valuable advice on how to organize our lives before God to make best use of the limited time we have here.

The book begins with some conceptual and foundational ideas – what’s life about? Why does God have us here? What does he call us to do? What does it mean to be productive? But it quickly gets to the very practical, dealing with how we waste time, lose track of things, get stressed out and overwhelmed, etc. To combat this, Challies gets very practical and presents his approach to managing his affairs. He gets into exactly how to set up a to-do list, how to use it, what goes on it versus on your calendar, etc. This is extremely useful.

While I don’t think Challies’ specific approach is exactly for everyone, I do think it’s quite helpful, and I think most people will benefit from carefully considering his points and either adopting his approach entirely or determining a variant of it which will work better for them. For example, he advocates having a mission statement, and doing daily and weekly reviews of our responsibilities and tasks.

I don’t think there is any perfect system that will ever allow us to accomplish everything we want to. Partly, the problem is that we want to do too much. Some of my friends have heard me say, “I’m trying to remember that I have enough time to do what God wants me to do, even if it’s not everything I want to do.” In keeping with that, Challies’ book doesn’t help me accomplish the impossible – but I believe it has helped me focus more on what’s important, and fail at fewer important things, than I would have otherwise.

“Do More Better” is reasonably priced, and relatively up-to-date. But if you’re on a tight budget, or just want to get a flavor of some of the main points, you can check out his earlier blog post series which he later adapted into the book. Here are the specific posts, if you want to get an idea of the range of topics considered:

  1. How to get things done
  2. Define your areas of responsibility
  3. Time, energy and mission
  4. Finding the right tools
  5. Organization and systems
  6. Task management. Note that his book recommends Todoist instead of the software described here.
  7. Using your calendar effectively
  8. Taming the e-mail beast
  9. Maintaining the system
  10. Deal with interruptions

I like this book enough that I went through it with my wife, Maura, fairly recently, and she liked it as well and is increasingly implementing some of the techniques. I believe she would recommend it as well.