About

About Matt Perman

I am senior director of strategy at Desiring God in Minneapolis, MN. My wife, Heidi, and I live in the Minneapolis area with our two children.

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About the Blog

The Quick Summary

Here’s the quick summary: This blog is about two things: (1) how to best manage our lives and work, and (2) how to best think about the way that the businesses and non-profits that we work for — and communities that we live in — should be led.

These two things are interwoven because productivity is not only about how to manage yourself more effectively, but also about how to enable your workplace or organization or community or country or church to function more effectively.

At the end of the day, being productive and effective comes down to making good decisions. Making good decisions, in turn, depends upon having a good understanding of the big picture that we can utilize in making those everyday decisions. So this blog is about tying the big picture to everyday decisions so that we can be more effective in our personal lives, our jobs, our organizations, and society.

The Longer Summary

If you are interested in more details, here’s the longer summary:

With Nearly Unlimited Options, It’s Hard to Know What to Do (or Think)

Modern society has given us an unprecedented opportunity to be more productive and do good through increased freedom over our lives and the proliferation of technology. We have thousands of choices to make and an unlimited number of options for each of them, from the basics of what to do with our day to the large scale issues of how to manage (and think about) our life or career or company. But this also creates a challenge: when you have nearly unlimited options, decisions are hard to make.

Being Productive Comes Down to Making Good Decisions

Yet good decisions are at the heart of living a useful, productive life. In a real sense, productivity ultimately boils down to making good decisions—knowing the best thing to do (or think), next. This involves not only doing things better (efficiency), but also doing better things (effectiveness). And thinking better thoughts—because our decisions do not come out of the blue. The way we think governs what we will do. On top of this, what we think about an issue is often important in and of itself, as a decision in its own right apart from any immediately pressing actions.

We Need to Have a Broader Concept of Productivity

The need to make good decisions pertains to all aspects of our lives—it is no longer just about what we do at work, but about how we manage all of our lives and think about the wider issues in society generally. For many of us, the complexity of our personal lives rivals the complexity of our work lives. Further, most of us care not only about how to make ourselves more effective, but about how the organizations we work for can be more effective and even how the society we live in can be more effective. Productivity is not just about making ourselves more effective, but about making our organizations and communities more effective.

There Are Four Areas of Productivity

That’s why this blog is going to focus on how to do things better (and do better things) in these four major areas:

1. Life

This involves everyday productivity—how to manage your digital pictures, organize your garage, manage your in-box, keep up with all your responsibilities, and so forth. It also involves 50,000 foot stuff like purpose and values.

The two best books I’ve read on personal productivity are David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The interesting thing is that David Allen is really good on the runway and 10,000 foot level things of how to manage your next actions and projects, but is weak on how to manage the higher levels of roles and responsibilities and goals mission. Covey, on the other hand, is very strong on the 20,000-50,000 foot stuff of roles and goals and mission, but weak on how to bring this all down to implementation at the level of projects and actions—the runway of our everyday lives.

I hope to present a perspective that synthesizes these two approaches and is strong on both the level of implementation and the level of goals and purposes.

2. Work

This involves being productive on your job — how to manage your inbox, keep all of your projects in motion, organize your workspace, and so forth.

Obviously there is a lot of overlap here with regular life productivity. This arena focuses on applying those productivity practices to our jobs.

3. Business

In addition to being effective in our own work, I think we all want to know how the organizations we work for can be more effective as well.

This applies directly to those of us who are in management — we want to know how to manage people effectively, how to lead, how to avoid making stupid policies, and how to manage the organization in general for effectiveness.

And those of us who aren’t directly in management want to know how to think about these things so we can know what our organization should be doing, and encourage it in that direction.

4. Society

The organizations that we work for are not the only institutions that we want to see making better decisions. Society itself can also be more effective or less effective, depending upon how it thinks about key issues and what actions our leaders decide to take.

So this involves how to think about the larger issues of our day. For example, how should we think about the free market? (Initial answer: Very highly.)

So, How Do We Make Good Decisions?

So, how do you make good decisions in all areas of your life — and thus leverage opportunity and technology to be more productive and useful — in an age of unlimited options? That’s what this blog is about.

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