Getting Organized for the Glory of God
How many mornings have you woken up, ready to meet the day, only to roll over and see your phone begging you to check something really quick? Before your day has even begun, you’re already distracted. That clear sense of purpose you awoke with has been enveloped by a fog of anxiety-inducing noise. And that’s just the morning. All throughout our day we are bombarded with interruptions, obstructions, and diversions that beg us to do something, anything, other than what we set out to do. We all know lack of focus is a problem. Nevertheless, most of us go about fighting distraction in exactly the wrong way.
Most people think the key to fighting distraction is willpower. We think if we just grit our teeth and muster up some stoic self-discipline, then we can block out the noise. The better path to focus, however, is to not allow yourself to be distracted in the first place. How do you do that? You get organized.
Optimizing Your Environment. If you’ve ever gone on a diet, you know that the worst thing you can do is keep your favorite snack foods in the house. It’s the same with distraction. If you really want to live a focused and productive life for God’s glory, you’ve got to put the things that tempt you to distraction far out of reach. But the reason we often fail to do this obvious thing is because it takes planning. It takes being organized. And the results of being organized are not always felt immediately.
In the Image of an Orderly God. There’s something so nice about sitting down at an organized desk. Having everything in its proper place promotes hard work, clear thinking, and a sense of peace. Though it can often be easier to live in a state of disorderliness, no one really enjoys it. Even the messiest among us desire to live a more orderly life. We are drawn to orderliness because God is a God of order, and we were created in His image.
When the apostle Paul wrote his first letter to the church in Corinth, he addressed some serious problems. One of those problems was that their church services were completely out of control. Things were so wild that Paul was legitimately concerned that outsiders would come and think the Corinthian Christians were insane (1 Cor. 14:23). Paul gave them specific instructions for how to quell some of the chaos that was happening in their services, but in doing so he appealed to a broader principle: God is a God of order. “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Cor. 14:33).
But because the world is indeed under a curse, we do not see that orderliness everywhere. If left unattended, gardens become overgrown or eaten up by pests. And it’s the same with our lives. The only way to fight back against the slow creep of chaos is to vigilantly lead orderly lives. Doing so honors the orderly God in whose image we were made, it ensures we are maturing, and it results in long-lasting fruitfulness. To be productive, you need to get organized. But where to begin?
Your Bedroom. The bedroom might seem like an odd place to start when talking about organizing for productivity. But a great morning begins with a great night’s sleep. Here are a few simple ways you can prepare your bedroom to make it easier to get the best sleep you can.
First, get blackout curtains. Having the room totally dark signals to your body that it’s time to go to sleep and stay asleep. Second, eliminate noise. If you can’t get total quiet in your bedroom, consider getting some ear plugs or a white noise machine. Then, look at your bedside table. One of the most important things you can do is not keep your phone beside your bed. But almost everyone does this. We’ve all sat in bed in the morning way longer than we planned to because we started reading the news or checking our email the moment we woke up. Then we begin the day in an anxious brain fog. Why not charge your phone across the room instead? Or better yet, in another room entirely. A phone is the worst thing you can keep on your bedside table.
Researcher Anne-Laure Le Cunff argues that you should keep just three sets of items on your bedside table: pen and paper, book and lamp, and alarm clock.
The pen and paper allow you to journal or jot down stray thoughts before bed or upon waking. The book and lamp allow you to wind down with analog reading and avoid the blue light of your phone, which has been shown to suppress melatonin levels, thus disrupting your body’s ability to make you feel sleepy. A physical book also helps you avoid the endless buffet of information nuggets presented by the internet. And a good old-fashioned alarm clock allows you to wake up on time without depending on your phone.
Your Work Area. If you want to steward your work well for God’s glory, you need to keep your knives sharp and your ingredients at the ready. Here are three practices that can be helpful for getting any work area organized and ready for use.
First, purge the unnecessary. If your space is out of control, you don’t just need to tidy up, you need to take radical action. Block off an hour or two. Depending on the size of your workspace this might require even more time. Start by clearing a big area and making two piles: “Keep” and “Go.” Now go through everything, placing items into the two piles as you go. Be ruthless.
Second, have a place for everything. Now that you know what you want to keep, make sure there’s a place for all of it. Depending on your situation, you might already have places for each thing, but this is still a good chance to reevaluate how you organize your stuff. And if you don’t already have designated homes for your different items, now is the time to figure that out. Put the things you use most frequently closer to the center of your work area. Now, hopefully, your work area is starting to feel more functional. But if you don’t watch out, disorganization will quickly reenter the picture.
Third, schedule a weekly tidy up. Dedicate a few minutes each week to putting things back in order, and you won’t have to do a giant half-day purge quite as often. When I’m faithful to this weekly routine, my work area stays clear and consequently so does my mind.
When we organize our physical world, it has a clarifying effect on our mental and spiritual worlds as well. If you want to play the game of productivity on hard mode, then stay disorganized. But if you want to optimize your life so you can be as faithful of a steward as possible, then organize your environments. Start with your bedroom and work area. And just watch how the God of order uses the means of your organized environments to enable your God-glorifying productive efforts.
Adapted from Redeeming Productivity: Getting more Done for the Glory of God by Reagan Rose (© 2022). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.
Reagan Rose is the founder of Redeeming Productivity, a media ministry focused on a biblical approach to personal productivity. Reagan has a Master of Divinity from The Master’s Seminary and lives in Michigan with his wife, Kim, and their two children.