Faculty Project at The King's College
And how to navigate the deluge of content and pervasiveness of work
Welcome to another edition of the Mueller Report!
This week I highlight some of my colleagues’ projects and the challenge of information overload, discuss my April reading list, and offer a few thoughts about productivity.
Colleagues’ Projects
Dr. Bob Carle is the chair of the Religious and Theological Studies program at King’s. But he also writes on many social, cultural, and political topics. He recently published an essay about New York City’s problems that won’t go away with more vaccinations or the big federal bailout it received from the stimulus bill.
Dr. Matt Parks has been producing a podcast with a former colleague, Dr. David Corbin, who is now the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Providence Christian College in California. Both men are thoughtful and well-read. Their podcast, Democracy in America Today, offers excellent commentary on the headlines of today with respect to America’s founding principles and many other debates in political philosophy and economics.
Dr. Joshua Hershey has been working on an online textbook introduction to science from a Christian perspective. Faithful Science has been the work of many years and I recommend it as a wonderful concise introduction to many different scientific fields with consideration to some of the challenges and controversies regarding reconciling faith and science.
Dr. Anthony Bradley has also recently begun a podcast, The Anthony Bradley Show, discussing issues in almost any field you care to name. Perhaps it will be a more Christian and interdisciplinary version of EconTalk, a podcast I have listened to regularly for close to a decade.
Fox News Contributor: Professor Brian Brenberg has been a guest on various Fox business TV shows for years now. He has even begun guest hosting. You can tune in to Fox and Friends or other such shows to hear his insight on the economy.
Centers Associated with The King’s College
As you can see, a great deal is happening at King’s! Having an energetic faculty is a major part of what I love about the college. Still, activity comes with a question: to what end?
We live in a world saturated with content: video, audio, and the written word. Much of this content is worthless but a huge amount of it is interesting and insightful, or at least entertaining. One major puzzle I have yet to solve is curation. As a consumer this super abundance of content is bewildering - especially with the limited time we all have for our hobbies, for literature, for family, for visiting with friends, for building, and for all the other things we enjoy doing with our lives.
How do people curate their content (educational, informational, etc.)? How should they curate their content? The answers to these questions have deep implications for my own line of work - teaching, writing, speaking, and creating content. This primarily revolves around my work as a professor but it also includes what I do as an elder in a church (what content should we give the congregants? How do we train and equip them?) and as an entrepreneur. What technology or skills should I invest in? What kind of services or programming or advertising materials should I create?
Though I am far from arriving at a satisfactory answer, my working thesis is that focusing on relationships and networks while building deep meaningful knowledge in a few limited areas, while trying to remain aware of broader issues, is the way forward. This newsletter is both an exercise in creating content from my somewhat scattered thoughts, conversation, and reading of the week and perhaps the beginning of building a network of folks interested in similar ideas.
What I am reading in April (maybe)
Many excerpts from Tocqueville and Adam Smith for a Liberty Fund conference at the end of the month. Tocqueville’s “Memoir on Poverty” is fascinating. He argues that increasing wealth brings increasing senses of relative poverty with it. An excerpt:
“Among very civilized peoples, the lack of a multitude of things causes poverty; in the savage state, poverty consists only in not finding something to eat….If all these reflections are correct, it is easy to see that the richer a nation is, the more the number of those who appeal to public charity must multiply, since two very powerful causes tend to that result.”
18 Words by J. I. Packer is a shortish reflection on the use of important words in the Bible to express the doctrines of the Gospel.
I recently ordered books about cryptocurrency and about a rogue trader who stole billions of dollars.
There are also a couple of books on critical race theory in my stack...
Thoughts on Productivity
My favorite productivity book, by far, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. He does a great job of discussing both the philosophical and the practical. He explains why we so often feel disorganized and unproductive when we have “open loops” of unfinished things that we are worried will fall through the cracks. These “open loops” cause anxiety and distraction. Furthermore, things do tend to fall through the cracks when we don’t have a trusted system of organizing and keeping track of what needs to get done.
He has many practical suggestions for organizing your life including a good filing system, keeping your email inbox at zero, and a system for processing tasks. What I appreciate (and struggle to follow) is his exhortation to deal with tasks, problems, questions head on rather than procrastinating or ignoring them.
A trap I fall into regularly that Allen says to avoid is using your inbox as a to-do list or for reminders. Don’t do it! Either respond to the email immediately if it will take less than two minutes to do so, or decide what further actions are necessary to address the email (file, forward, add action or project to the to-do list, etc.)
Another aspect of being productive involves scheduling days or even blocks of time to work on particular projects or tasks. Success does not simply mean accomplishing more things, it also means having times where you are not working and you are not thinking about work!
You can only experience this fully, Allen says, when you have gotten all of your projects, big or small, out of your head and into a system you trust. You can only be truly free from work, on a regular consistent basis, if you don’t have open loops running in the back of your mind.
So, go close some of your open loops now and I will too!