Review: What’s Best Next

I’ve just finished reading What’s Best Next by Matt Perman. It’s a book about productivity, and unlike many other productivity books it’s written from a specifically Christian perspective.

I must confess to not really reading productivity books (there are so many of them, it’s difficult to know where to start) – but I’d heard good things about this one, so I decided to give it a go. It’s definitely worth the money.

Here are a few things about the book I found helpful:

• I really appreciated the focus the book had on the ‘big picture’. Although I haven’t read much in the way of productivity books, you see a lot of blog posts about this kind of thing around and most of them focus on how to improve your efficiency – how to do things more quickly, or get more done in a certain space of time. This is all good, but this book argues that efficiency is no use if you’re doing the wrong things to start with! So the first part of the book deals with how we assign our priorities and goals.
• The focus on creating a schedule, rather than simply blocking in a list of things which need to get done. I hadn’t really thought about this aspect of productivity before, but it’s very helpful.
• Only after discussing pretty much everything else does the book talk about efficiency and creating lists etc! This seems to me to be a workable and effective solution to a lot of problems around time management.
• Finally, the ‘Christian’ focus of the book I found particularly helpful – i.e. orienting things from God’s perspective rather than just giving us licence to do whatever we want to do better.

All in all, I think this will be a book I will come back to – there is a lot of wisdom here for organising your time. Don’t worry if you – like me – have never read a book on productivity before!