Always Productive, Never Frenetic
A Look at Douglas Wilson's Book, Ploductivity
“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get…” So reads a little plaque in my parents’ kitchen; inherited from a family member, if I remember correctly. That little saying has held a firm residence in my mind since I was a child. Into adulthood, I’ve often thought about how appropriate it sometimes feels. Like the heads of a hydra, no matter how many tasks I manage to check off the list, more crop up to take their place.
The problem, though, is that this isn’t sustainable. Burnout and ill health are the typical side effects of a life spent rushing from thing to thing to thing. Many of us, myself included, often think of productivity as simply getting things done. But there is a different way of conceptualizing effectiveness.
Ploductivity
In his book, Ploductivity, Douglas Wilson lays out a different vision for being productive. He calls his methodology “plodding.” Small but consistent, methodical progress on projects gets things done, he says. Need to read a three-hundred-page book? Read a couple of pages a day, which takes an average reader around five minutes, and you’ve got the book done in about five months. Most of us have a spare five minutes lying around if we’re honest with ourselves. And while five months from now isn’t next week, having the book read in five months is better than letting it gather dust on the shelf for years while it waits for that vacation or elusive block of time we keep promising it.
Wilson begins the book, though, by outlining his view of technology. He asserts that technology is wealth.
Wealth is the technical ability to summon the labor of others, either in person or through the application of tools, but the person in possession of that wealth has to have the ability to know how to do it.1
Given that definition, technology is a kind of wealth. It gives us the ability to summon the labor of others, even if it’s through a tool they’ve developed. Maybe it’s an app on a smartphone, a word processing software, or a smartphone itself; regardless, that tool is the fruit of someone else’s labor which saves me labor. But as the quote above suggests, this wealth comes with responsibility.
We are responsible for being good stewards of our wealth, both time and technology. He likens our smartphones to 10,000 servants in our pockets which, if we’re honest, are usually sitting on their butts doing nothing. But what if we were to focus on only possessing tools that we could use effectively and then using those “servants” to the best possible and most efficient ends we could? The gifts we’ve been given in our time are tremendous, but we so easily take them for granted.
After establishing a foundation of technology as a form of wealth and connecting this foundation to the fact that wealth is a blessing from God, Wilson moves into actual recommendations for “ploductivity.” Of course, he reviews biblical passages of God’s word dealing with the lazy fool and the diligent worker. The lazy man is often a talker, while the diligent man is a doer. The lazy man has excuses for everything, while the diligent man gets things done. But all of his suggestions focus on what I mentioned above: slow and steady will win the race.
Takeaways
Much as I wrote here, the biggest principle to take from this book is that consistently getting small amounts done will often yield more overall productivity than waiting for opportunities to indulge in long bouts of work.
Something I love about the principle Wilson lays out in this book is that he is eminently practical. If there’s an article that needs writing and he has three weeks to complete it, he sets himself a deadline, counts how many days he has between that deadline and today, and breaks the work down into as many chunks. Then it’s simply a matter of setting aside the necessary time to get it done. It’s also practical in that breaking projects down like that allows someone to work at a human pace. Sometimes, yes, you have to just bite the bullet and get less sleep than you’d like or spend less time with your family than is typical. But, in general, spreading work out over time will compound. Rather than living a lifestyle of constant 100m dashes, always busy and never able to enjoy where you are, you end up living life as a productive person. Yes, productive, but still a person, not a machine.
Conclusion
I’ve read this book twice now, and I know that, Lord willing, I’ll revisit it in the future. The book is full of such practical wisdom that, when you read it, you think, “You know, I know that, but I’m not really living like I know that.” Wilson provides great help to both the productivity junkie, which he describes as always looking for the next productivity system, and those who haven’t thought much about how to organize their work and are, therefore, looking for help.
Unfortunately, I tend more toward the productivity junkie side of things. I easily fall into the thinking that if I just found a new and better system, my frenetic pace could be slowed. In reality, what I need is what this book supplies: constant reminders of foundational wisdom, reminders that it’s not that I don’t have the right system or the right software or the newest shiny do-dad. It’s that I need to simply slow down and apply the wisdom God gives in His word. It’s that I need to remember we are not machines, but creatures, and creatures God made to live within limits.
So, whether you’re more of the type who’s read a hundred productivity books or the type who couldn’t name a productivity book if paid to do so, I think you’ll find this book helpful. Take a few weeks, read a couple of pages a day, and let Wilson show you the power of plodding.
Wilson, Douglas. Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work and Wealth. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2020. Quote referenced from: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/72771539.