My husband is in tech, and also works from home, which gives me a fascinating peek into a completely different way of engaging with work, with colleagues, and with the projects that their organizations take on. In his corner of vocational life, there is a near-pathological obsession with productivity theater, with marking tasks as complete in the system, even if there’s not much actual movement to show for it. 

They have a saying, “no zero progress days.” It sounds valiant enough, a call to not waste time, to continue to find pathways for productivity even when there are obstacles. But honestly, it annoys my tech-y husband almost as much as it annoys me, because it implies that any progress is better than the right progress, and that the feeling of creating something might matter as much as what you create. 

I’ve engaged with a variety of productivity systems (Gantt, stoplight, agile, etc) and while some of them are useful for some teams in some contexts, I find that they often suck people into the trap of becoming more interested in succeeding at the system then accomplishing the task the system supposedly helps accomplish. The goal of “no zero progress days” can tempt people into a hamster wheel of production that doesn’t really get them closer to their goals. 

Sometimes you need zero progress days. Sometimes the most effective step you can take to reach a destination is to turn the engine off, get out of the driver seat, and make sure you’re even headed in the right direction. All of us fill our weeks with productivity, with emails and meetings and sermon-writing and newsletter drafts. But what are the days we have scheduled to make sure all of this work is actually getting us somewhere? 

Balcony time, the scheduled practice of working on your ministry and not just in it, is one of the key practices we try to get clients to take on in our work at Ministry Incubators, and it can be a great starting point in getting some altitude in where you’re actually trying to progress to. In addition to that, I think we as Christian leaders should be inherently cautious of systems directly imported from worlds like management and tech. We obviously can learn something, but let me tell you, I’ve shared an office with a man working in big tech, listening to meetings, proofreading emails and memos – they are not smarter than we are. They don’t have some secret ingredient, they are just like us, and all spend about as much time as we do staring off into the mid-distance wondering if all this work has really gotten us anywhere. 

Also, we have a gift that they don’t have, if we are willing to really embrace it: we know there are no true zero progress days. We know that days spent graveside, bedside, sitting in coffee shops, just listening to our people – days spent without a word written, an email responded to, a text sent – those are still days where progress is made, those days still matter, and maybe matter most of all. 

Because those days, and not the days when we knocked through the most emails, or scheduled our newsletters for the month, or drafted 3 years worth of Advent devotionals, are the days where we could most make progress on what really matters – joining in with the Holy Spirit in creating the Kingdom of God here on earth. Those days, spent still, spent listening, spent with our phones on do not disturb and our laptops at home, are the days when the veil feels truly torn and heaven can be on earth. 

We have no zero progress days, because every single day matters. Every act of love, every loaf of bread broken, call returned, coffee meeting had, counts for something. This week, as we engage in our work, take some time to consider what kind of progress you’re really chasing, and what productivity might look like for us.