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Archives for March 2020

Coronavirus and Your Job Search

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My full-time job is to help students at The King’s College launch their careers. So I’ve been paying attention to how this Coronavirus pause is going to be affecting their job search.

This is one of the most helpful articles I’ve seen so far. It’s concise and insightful. It’s from The Muse, which is one of the best career development websites out there.

So if you were already in the middle of a job search when this Coronavirus pause hit, this article can be of use to you. Or, if you have found yourself out of work because of the economic hiatus we are on, these may also be of use.

The article is called What Does the Coronavirus Pandemic Mean for My Job Search? Here is a fantastic except:

As companies move to remote work to fight the coronavirus pandemic and an increasing number of workers are being laid off or furloughed, you might be wondering if you should continue to send out resumes or just assume that no one is hiring for the foreseeable future. It’s true that economists are predicting a recession, but career experts say it’s best to keep networking and applying, provided you change your approach a bit to acknowledge these are uncertain times.

“Companies might not be hiring today, because they’re trying to figure out how to do business virtually, but they will be hiring,” says Danielle Beauparlant Moser, managing director and executive coach with bltCareers in Asheville, NC “The people who continue to relationship-build and share their ideas will be in a better position when companies start hiring.”

What’s Best Next Video Lectures Now Available (and 50% Off)

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This seems to be a week for lots of product announcements!

I recently created an online course for What’s Best Next in conjunction with Zondervan. I went out there and recorded lectures on each chapter in the book. Then, they turned that into an  online course–complete with readings, reflections, and other assignments.

The course is excellent and available on the Zondervan online course platform. In the course you will learn:

  • A new way of looking at productivity, that is centered on the gospel
  • Why productivity matters — immensely — for Christians
  • How to fit time for hard thinking into a busy schedule
  • How to plan your week
  • How to identify your life mission and vision
  • How to get your email inbox to zero every day
  • And much, much more

The lectures are also available on their own — and, for this week only, they are 50%. You can watch them on Vimeo or get them on DVD.

Why get the video lectures? Teaching on the material is actually my favorite part. One of the big reasons I write on a subject is so that I can talk about it.

So by watching the video lectures, I hope you will experience the content in a new and deeper way. You will also gain some insights that I didn’t have space to go into in the book itself, along with new discoveries I’ve made since writing the book.

How to Plan Your Decade Webinar: Now Available

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If you weren’t able to join us back in December for our 60-minute webinar on how to plan your decade, the recording is now available for everyone in the store. In addition to the presentation, I also respond to the great questions from those who attended online. It is $12.

Why Do You Need this Webinar?
A long-term perspective has been shown to be one of the most essential ingredients for living a productive life. Thinking deliberately about your vision and goals for the 2020s is a great opportunity to cultivate that habit and set yourself up to make the most of the next ten years. Even more, it is very motivating.

Many of you are familiar with the GTD concept of the weekly review. The weekly review is the linchpin of any productivity approach, and is a very versatile concept. It can be adapted into monthly reviews, quarterly reviews, and yearly reviews. In this workshop, I adapt that to the concept of the decade review.

So take a concept you are already familiar with and amp it up to set yourself up for success for the next ten years.

Of course, there are two objections we might have to this concept.

Hasn’t the Decade Already Started?
The first is: hasn’t the decade already begun–so isn’t it too late? The answer is that while a new decade does create a special type of motivation (it’s called a “temporal landmark”), this motivation is something that endures for a period of time. It doesn’t have to be a single point. Any time in the first six months, or even first year or two even of a new decade, can be an effective time for your decade planning.

And aside from that, the concept of a decade review can be utilized in many different ways other than the turn of a decade on a calendar — for example, when you enter a new personal decade like turning 30, you hit an anniversary in another area of life (in your business, marriage, etc.), and just in general whenever you want to create a long-range vision. So this concept is very useful at all times.

Hasn’t Coronavirus Thrown Off All Our Plans?
Second, we might say: hasn’t the Coronavirus changed everything? The plans a person made in January for the decade are likely all shot now. So why plan at all?

If this is your question, you will enjoy the webinar all the more. I talk about how the fact that circumstances change is not a reason to dismiss planning; rather, it is one of the greatest reasons we need to plan in the first place.

Getting clear on what you want (and what God wants for you) for the next set of years enables you to adapt to new situations more effectively and harness unplanned opportunities. As I discuss in the webinar, we actually need to distinguish a vision from a plan. A vision is much more broad and flexible — there are many ways to get there, and you adapt as circumstances require.

We call this “decade planning,” however, because that is the more common term that more easily connects. But really this webinar is about creating a vision for your life, and then from that vision, yes, creating more detailed plans — but you adjust those plans as needed in your other reviews (yearly, quarterly, weekly, and as otherwise needed).

So this webinar will help you be even more agile and adaptable in these uncertain times — while staying fixed on a foundation of a core purpose and God-centered values that do not change.

You can purchase it now in the online store.

How Can You Be Productive from Home During the Coronavirus?

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The second week can be the toughest.

The first week of working from home can be a challenge, to be sure, as you make the adjustments. But you still have a bit of the novelty and new freedom to temper that.

The second week tends to become the greatest challenge. That’s when you realize the need to refine your habits and find ways of working that are sustainable and effective.

We’ve been thinking hard about how to best serve you during this time of the Coronavirus. We have many resources on managing yourself and creating a good schedule, which are central practices.

But we thought that the most helpful thing might be a one-on-one Q&A session. There are lots of good articles out there on working from home during this time. What there isn’t much of is real-time interaction that can allow you to get your specific questions answered and challenges addressed.

So that’s what we’d like to do for you. We have a limited number of spots where you can schedule a live, 60 minute Q&A session with Matt. Sign up here and then bring your toughest productivity and work challenges. Our goal is to help create solutions that are based on the best productivity research, which will last, and which will serve you well during this time of unprecedented change.

Defining Productivity

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This is one of the best definitions I’ve come across. It’s from Charles Duhigg’s Smarter Faster Better:

Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle.

I like this definition because it brings together two things that are both necessary in defining productivity well.

First, the focus is on getting the right things done—not just getting things done more quickly. The aim is to “figure out the best uses” of what we have and to seize “the most meaningful rewards.” It does not matter how much you are getting done, or how fast, if you are not getting truly useful and helpful things done.

Second, it doesn’t overcorrect and forget that efficiency does matter. We do need to try to accomplish things with “the least wasted effort” and get things done “with less stress and struggle.”

This is the magic combination: get more of the right things done, in less time and with less friction and frustration.

In your quest to be productive, remember both sides. When all you care about is quick and cheap, you run the risk of helping to fill the world with useless things. But if you don’t care about speed and efficiency, it’s going to take forever to get your great work out to the world. Caring about both of these sides is a big challenge–but it is well worth it.