by Matt Perman
From Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, which I read last fall and really enjoyed:
In today’s mass societies, it takes only 1 percent of people making a dedicated choice — contrary to the mainstream’s choice — to create a movement that can change the world. (p. xiv)
by Matt Perman
As many of you have probably seen, my friend Justin Taylor is mentioned in the cover story for next week’s Time Magazine, 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now. My pastor, John Piper, is mentioned as well.
They didn’t mention Justin by name, but they mentioned his blog, Between Two Worlds. Great work, Justin!
by Matt Perman
I’m always forgetting how to spell this, and spell check never seems to suggest it when I need it, so I’m putting it here:
And, its anti-particle:
by Matt Perman
I recently watched a very helpful message by Andy Stanley on Systems. He made the very, very illuminating point that systems trump intentions and mission statements.
Here’s what that means. You might have a great mission statement, but systems are what create behaviors. So if your systems are out of sync with your mission, then your results will be off-mission too.
This will be true in spite of the best of intentions. Even if everybody in the organization wants “change,” the change will not happen if the systems are set up in a way that produces and rewards the opposite behavior.
Your systems must align with your strategy, which must align with your mission. Intentions and even mission statements are not enough. You must have people that give attention to making sure that your systems align with your principles and the results you want to produce.
Vision is essential. But it is part-one of a two-part picture. The second component is your system. Organizations — including creative, bold, and visionary organizations — need to have good systems in order to be effective. Otherwise you may just be a crazy maker.
As an aside: This is why I’m not a big fan when people say “I’m great at vision, but I ignore the details.” To me, that seems irresponsible. It’s like saying, “what I like to do is create a bunch of work for people that I don’t like to do myself.” True, leaders can’t get too deep into the details. But they will have to delve into some — and then make sure that they have and can effectively give strategic direction to the other leaders on their team that are good at systems.
by Matt Perman
I would be really interested in knowing how many hours a day everyone out there spends doing email.
How much time do you spend on email each day?
How many emails a day do you get?
And, if desired: How do you feel about that?
by Matt Perman
Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, makes a point about large monitors that I completely affirm:
Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you’ll recover the investment in less than a year. (The typical corporate overhead doubles the company’s per-employee cost; always remember to use loaded cost, not take-home salary, in any productivity calculation.)
Apple and Microsoft have both published reports that attempt to quantify the productivity gains from bigger monitors. Sadly, the studies don’t provide credible numbers because of various methodological weaknesses. My experience shows estimated productivity gains of 5-10% when users do knowledge work on a big monitor. This translates into about an 0.5-1% increase in overall productivity for a person who does screen-focused knowledge work 10% of the day. There’s no doubt that big screens are worth the money.
I personally use a 2048×1536 display, and I wouldn’t even call that a really big screen. Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals.
Starting at 1600×1200, users rarely stretch their browser windows to the full screen because few websites work well on such a wide canvas. Big windows are magic for working on spreadsheets, graphic design, and many other tasks, but not for the current paradigm of Web pages. Today, big-screen Web users typically utilize their extra space for multiple windows and parallel browsing.
In sum: Get a big monitor — at least 1600×1200 resolution and 24 inches. It might cost a little more, but in a very real sense it may be wasteful not to.
As an aside, here is a very interesting comment that he makes on where the web may be going as monitor resolution grows even more. Very, very interesting:
To serve Web users with truly big screens in the future, we’ll probably need a different paradigm than individual pages. Perhaps a more newspaper-like metaphor or a different information dashboard will prove superior down the road.
by Matt Perman
I recently came across a helpful article by Rick Warren on defining your life’s mission.
Warren, obviously, is most well-known for his book The Purpose Driven Life. Now, I would want to say that we should be promise-driven people rather than purpose-driven. (The promise is the gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection for us. God acts on our behalf. Therefore we can work.)
I doubt Warren would disagree with that. I see it as very important for understanding the role of a mission statement correctly. In sum, a mission statement is not the ultimate motivating purpose in our life. God’s work on our behalf in Christ is. Our purpose — and motivation for it — flows from that.
Now, within this context, I think that personal mission statements are useful and important. They help guide your direction in life so that you are not aimless, but rather focused on what is most important for you to be doing.
In this regard, I’ve found that Warren’s article provides very helpful insight into creating an effective mission statement. He points out that there are really five questions to address:
What is so unique and helpful about this is that we often think of a mission statement simply in terms of what we should do — the ultimate, overriding aim that we are to achieve in our life.
But Warren points out that our mission involves more than just what we are to accomplish. It involves what we say through our lives — the overriding message we communicate in all we do — and, further, our mission should not be conceived apart from a context of relationships with others.
His thoughts on the center of your life echo what Covey has to say about that in The Seven Habits. Covey speaks of the problems that come from being possession-centered, or career-centered, or self-centered, or person-centered, and advocates being principle-centered. I think that the true and ultimate expression of that is to be God-centered, and Warren hits that well here also.
Anyway, enough commentary. Read the whole thing.
by Matt Perman
I’ve mentioned often that GTD is very good at the lower altitudes (projects and actions) but not as developed at the higher levels (goals and roles). Within the proliferation of online task management tools in the last couple of years, many of them also reflect this same strength at the lower levels, but less developed approach to the higher levels.
Recently an online service named GTD Agenda was pointed out to me. It is a productivity tool that was designed for implementing GTD with both the higher levels and lower levels in mind. So — after having this on my project list for far too long! — I’ve given it a quick spin to see how well it does.
As I talk about what I think it does well and what its gaps seem to be, this post might also give you a small window into the big picture of my own productivity approach.
by Matt Perman
I recently came across the outline of a presentation I did a few years ago and found these six principles that I listed as type of appendix at the end.
I don’t know exactly what to call them. They are definitely not comprehensive philosophy of work — far, far from it. They seem to focus on unexpected places where work comes from. I think I originally wrote them down after a particularly busy and frustrating week when new work just kept showing up, no matter how much I got done.
If I were to summarize their main point of these six insights, it would be: Don’t be fooled into thinking that the way to get all your work done is simply to do your work. That’s a necessary component, but it will not lead you to the sometimes very elusive sate of being all caught up.
I find these principles helpful to keep in mind. At some point, maybe it will be worthwhile to craft them into a more systematic article. Here they are:
by Matt Perman
That’s the title of an article I recently came across again in my files, from a couple years ago in Fast Company. Sure, that’s a bit of an overstatement, but it’s actually a pretty good principle.
Here’s what it says:
Smart organizations ignore the urgent and focus on the important.
Is it realistic to ignore the urgent, though? Well, here’s the problem: Focusing on the urgent just causes more urgent things to come up. The only way to really minimize the appearance of the urgent is to focus on the important:
Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.
Ignore the urgent so that you can do the important things that are necessary to make the urgent fires stop happening in the first place.