Ploductivity - Doug Wilson

Interesting title. Ploductivity. Don't try googling it. Google auto-corrects the spelling. I think it'll hurt his sales. But that doesn't bother Doug Wilson. He will just plod on.

Ploductivity is “the practice of plodding away at a pile of work, instead of frantically trying to sprint through it all, being stable and graceful, like a buffalo upon the plains, not frantic, like a prairie dog or roadrunner”.

I’ve had my fair share of roadrunning, so I decided to give this little book’s main idea a go. 

The book consists of a foreword followed by two parts, each divided into 8 short chapters. A couple of hours of reading. If you’ve read any books on the theology of work you’ll find much of the first section familiar, except perhaps for Wilson’s robust prose.

It’s the forward by his daughter Rebekah Merkle that I found particularly helpful. “Since Douglas Wilson is my father, I have had a front row seat throughout my entire life and can testify that you will never meet a more productive and fruitful man. And this is quite astonishing if you know him because he is never in a fluster. Never scurrying about in a panic trying to meet the deadlines…” 

She describes how he has managed in his patient, steady way to build a house, a magazine, a school, a college, a classical education movement and a church denomination. I find all of this so helpful because it is his daughter writing this. He did not alienate her in the process of doing all this. “The man is endlessly patient, endlessly diligent, shockingly ambitious, and never in a flurry.”

In part 2 he gets into the practicalities. A number of things I’ve learned:

1. Seek God’s blessing on the work of your hands (Dt 28:5, Ps 90:17). “Would you rather try to live on 100% of an unblessed income or on 90% of a blessed income?” So pray and ask for the Lord’s blessing over you work. 
2. The work that we do and will do is actually very, very small. “God will say well done to (faithfull) pipsqueaks with a couple of fists full of nanoworks.” The only way our work can be truly large and fruitful is if it takes it’s place in God’s really, really big work. So that calls us to obedience and faithfulness at our tiny posts. 
3. But, work ambitiously. Don’t settle too quickly for the sake of avoiding too much responsibility or too much work. 
4. Work with skill (Prv 22:29, Ps 33:3, Ex 28:6, 31:6) by taking responsibility for the results of your work. That means master what you do, don’t just do it to be seen. One can learn skill by imitating good examples, over and over again. Repetition develops skill. 
5. The power of plodding. This helps to avoid the dependency on the short-term intensity that comes in response to an approaching deadline. That means we need to work with a rhythm. Many of us hope we can “carve out” an uninterrupted 6 or so hrs, days, weeks or months to only work on one project. That’s a false expectation. Work in short, doable chunks daily, with a certain regularity and rhythm and you’ll apparently be surprised by how much you can get done. 
6. You can walk farther than you can sprint. So work at a pace that you can keep up. Btw, a friend of ours in SA who has finished the comrades marathon 25 times says everyone is always asking him about the secret to his success. "It’s simple", he says. "Just ask yourself, can I keep running at the pace that I’m currently running for the next 12 hrs, or however long is left on the clock before the race closes. If the answer is no, slow down. If yes, then just keep going."
7. Towards the end he gets a bit more philosophical - rejecting the lie that technology is evil and needs to be avoided. It’s a tool and it needs to be harnessed, used. Doing that is at the heart of what it means to be human. He applies that to Twitter, Facebook and other social media. The reason: because Jesus is Lord over everything - including all this. 

Much to enjoy in this little book - particularly in its founding principle. Jesus Christ is already the Lord of everything, seated and reigning. We are not engaged in some last ditch attempt to get Him on the throne, but working and living because he is.