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Resources on Productivity

How to Plan Your Decade—Next Week’s Online Workshop

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Where do you want to be in 10 years?

2019 is ending, and a new decade is beginning. Don’t miss this opportunity to discover or recalibrate the long-term vision for your life!

We don’t achieve our goals on accident. Those who look to the future with purpose and make long-term plans are more likely to succeed and make good decisions than those who don’t.

In this upcoming online workshop—December 19th at 11:00 AM CST—Matt Perman will show you how to move from the GTD concept of a “weekly review” to a “decade review.” You will learn how to start your decade off right and make the most of your next ten years.

Spots are limited so be sure to reserve your virtual seat before registration closes on December 17th.

 

UPDATE: Registration for this event is now closed. Thank you.

 

Gratitude and Productivity

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What does gratitude have to do with productivity?

In a very real sense, gratitude is the completion of our productivity.

If we work and produce, but never appreciate the fruit of our labors, we never really benefit from them. We are always just on to the next thing. And then, what’s the point?

But even better than finding satisfaction in the work we have done is recognizing the source of our ability to achieve and the source of any success we have accomplished. And that is the grace of God. This is true in our spiritual and economic endeavors. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). “You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:18).

Without gratitude, we are not truly being productive because we are not ultimately being honest. We are overlooking God, who deserves the credit and recognition for all of the good things in our lives — including the things that have come about through our efforts in productivity.

So be truly productive this week by enjoying a break, feeling a deep sense of gratitude to God, and giving him thanks.

Don’t Save Your Own Time at the Expense of Others Time

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Sometimes we take shortcuts to save ourselves time, but which cost others a lot of time because of the sub-par work product our time-saving shortcuts created. This is not an overall savings of time, but a wasting of time. Hence, though it seems efficient, it is not. We must think deeper.

Garr Reynolds illustrates this very well in his excellent book Presentation Zen. Though his specific example pertains to presentations, the principle applies to anything you do:

I can save time on the front end, but I may waste more time for others on the back end. For example, if I give a completely worthless one-hour death-by-PowerPoint presentation to an audience of 200, that equals 200 hours of wasted time.

But if I instead put in the time, say, 25-30 hours or more of planning and designing the message, and the media, then I can give the world 200 hours of worthwhile, memorable experience.

Software companies advertise time-saving features, which may help us believe we have saved time to complete a task such as preparing a presentation and “simplified” our workday. But if time is not saved for the audience — if the audience wants its time because we didn’t prepare well, design the visuals well, or perform well — then what does it matter that we saved one hour in preparing our slides?

Doing things in less time sometimes does indeed feel simpler, but if it results in wasted time and wasted opportunities later, it is hardly simple.

 

Updated Application Journal

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We’ve been working behind the scenes to change a few things to serve you better. Here’s one of the resources we’re bringing back into our toolkit—the Best Next Steps Application Journal.

This PDF download is a simple tool designed to help someone get back to focusing on what’s best next in their life and work. It offers a taste of how the principles of God’s Word can help us address our motives and actions, and gives a simple way to organize thoughts and next steps.

Download for free from our online store.

 

Do Less, Then Obsess

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People often say that “doing less” and “saying no” is the key to productivity. But this advice actually doesn’t work — unless you include with it the necessary corollary.

When you do that, you have perhaps the guiding concept for being effective.

Why Character is at the Root of True Productivity

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This is an excerpt from chapter 6 of How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity, “Character: The Great Unsticking Force.”

Central to good time management is doing what is important, not merely what is urgent. 

Yet, how do you know what is important? Importance is something even deeper than your own goals. Important things are things that align with correct principles and God’s truth.

And that takes us to the heart of why character is essential to productivity, for principles bring us into the realm of character. There are two sources for knowing correct principles. First, the Scriptures: “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD!” (Ps. 119:1). And second, we have the capacity to discern correct principles through our conscience, which is directly informed by our understanding of the Scriptures. We have an inner compass that enables us to detect what right principles are.

The way to put first things first is to build this inner compass—that is, our character—so that we are able to discern what right principles are and desire to follow them. Character enables us to see and understand correct principles so that we can base our lives and decisions on them. That is why character is central to true productivity.

We then can articulate our mission and values flowing from those correct principles, and our personal vision can become an accurate way of identifying what is important. This is at the heart of time management and why productivity is rooted first in character, not techniques, for it is character that enables us to discern what is important and use the techniques well.

How Do You Define Value in Your Work?

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From Great at Work, which is now the best book on personal effectiveness I have ever read:

As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.

This may seem obvious in retrospect, but how many of us intentionally work this way? It is so easy to get caught up in accomplishing tasks, defining our productivity that way, rather than defining it in terms of the benefit our work actually brings.

If we take this outside-in view, I see two benefits. First, we will have more success in our jobs. That seems obvious, right? Second, we will be able to become more efficient, because now we have a criteria that allows us to identify unnecessary tasks or unnecessary steps in our tasks.

Beyond this, the outside-in view is very much in line with the gospel ethic, which is others-centered.

There is one nuance, of course: do not let this stifle innovation or too easily justify the status quo. You know the benefits of your work by how people act, not mainly what they say in response to your initial idea. Focus groups, for example, are usually a bad idea. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” What actually produced the greatest value was when Ford democratized the automobile — something people weren’t asking for initially.