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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.

Bring Your Best Questions to Tomorrow’s Online Workshop

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One of the best things about the online workshops is that they provide an opportunity for questions. I also happen to love questions–the more challenging, the better. Q&A is one of my favorite things.

So if you’ve signed up for tomorrow’s workshop, bring some of your hardest questions! After the presentation, you can ask anything about how to get unstuck from your most difficult productivity challenges or about productivity in general. You might ask things like:

  • I get stuck from having so much email. How do I cut it down or process it better?
  • My project is at a plateau. How do I move it forward?
  • I get stuck from constant interruptions. How do I handle them better?
  • My to-do list annoys me; how do I make it better?
  • I feel pulled in a thousand directions and constantly torn. How do I create more balance?
  • What is the process for getting unstuck from anything?
  • What does it even mean to get unstuck?

These are just a few ideas. We are going to give a lot of focus to questions tomorrow, so come with your most relevant and challenging questions and we will try to get you unstuck!

And if you haven’t signed up yet for the webinar, you can still do so until midnight EST tonight.

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

 

 

How to Get Unstuck in 2020 Using Design Thinking—Next Week’s Online Workshop

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

The new decade has begun…and most of us have probably already blown our New Year’s resolutions. Is there a way to get back on track?

Or, even apart from any New Year’s resolutions, we often have goals and meaningful projects that we are pursuing–but we’re stuck. We keep hitting obstacles (whether external or internal) that get in our way.

How do we get unstuck and accomplish our goals—with less effort, greater impact, and more margin? And how do we do this in a gospel-centered way, arising from God’s grace rather than sheer willpower? It is possible! Part of the answer is learning how to think like a designer and applying design thinking to our obstacles.

In this upcoming online workshop (next Tuesday, February 18th at 11:00 AM CST), Matt Perman will give you 4 tools, based in design thinking, for getting unstuck in a gospel-centered way that you can put into practice right away.

Spots are limited so be sure to reserve your virtual seat before registration closes on February 16th.

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

 

 

From How-To to When-To: Why to Plan Your Next Ten Years

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New Year’s resolutions. Are they useless? Is it a myth that the new year is a good time to start fresh?

Based on the lack of success most people have with their resolutions, it might seem so. And, after all, doesn’t the idea that a new year represents a new start seem kind of arbitrary? Why would January 1 be a more powerful day than any other?

But it turns out that our intuitive sense that there is something to a new year is actually correct. As shown in Dan Pink’s book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, a new year is what researchers call a temporal landmark. These temporal landmarks help us navigate our way through time, just as physical landmarks help us navigate our way through space.

A temporal landmark switches on our motivation, and makes it possible for us to start (or re-start) in a stronger way. And this matters very much. “In most endeavors, we should be awake to the power of beginnings and aim to make a strong start…Beginnings have a far greater impact than most of us understand. Beginnings, in fact, can matter to the end.”

Researchers have found that a temporal landmarks help us in two chief ways. First, they allow us to:

open “new mental accounts” in the same way that a business closes the books at the end of one fiscal year and opens a fresh ledger for the new year. This new period offers a chance to start again by relegating our old selves to the past. It disconnects us from that past self’s mistakes and imperfections, and leaves us confident about our new, superior selves. Fortified by that confidence, we “behave better than we have in the past and strive with enhanced fervor to achieve our aspirations.”

Second, “these time markers is to shake us out of the tree so we can glimpse the forest.” They take our focus off of our day-to-day minutiae and lift it up to the big picture. This wide-angle view of our lives allows us to see more clearly and focus on our goals. It slows down our thinking so that we can deliberate at a higher level.

It turns out that you can do this with lots of days, not just the new year. Birthdays, anniversaries of any major event, the start of a new school year, the beginning of a month, and so forth. “Imbuing an otherwise ordinary day with personal meaning generates the power to activate new beginnings.”

So if you don’t plan your decade, all is not lost. Nonetheless, here we are presented with an incredible opportunity to create a fresh start and take in the big picture. For we don’t just have he power of a new year starting; we have the power of a new set of ten years starting.

This is a unique temporal landmark that we can harness to clarify our vision and amp our motivation in a greater way than the start of a standard year. You can use the beginning of this new decade to harness the fresh start effect and create a strategic turning point in your personal history. And it just so happens that thinking ahead ten years is about the perfect amount of time to clarify a good vision for your life that is long enough to give you good direction but not so long that it seems unattainable.

So where do you want to be in ten years? What are the milestones along the way? And what are the key lessons from the last ten years? These are important questions to ask, and science now confirms it.

What we need now is a process to do this. A process for planning our decade. I call it a “decade review.” Most of us now are familiar with David Allen’s concept of the weekly review from Getting Things Done. I have long adapted the concept of the weekly review to other important time markers as well: the monthly review, quarterly review, and yearly review. Now it’s time for the decade review.

I’ll give some tips on how to do it in the next two posts. But if you want to go deeper and learn about how to do a decade review live and more directly, I am doing a webinar this Thursday, December 19, at 11:00 am Central Time. You can sign up here. It will be new stuff that goes beyond what I will be posting next on how to do it, so I encourage you to join us! UPDATE: Registration for this event is now closed. Thank you.

 

“Shifting our focus—and giving when the same weight as what—won’t cure all our ills. But it’s a good beginning.”

— Dan Pink

 

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.

 

The What’s Best Next Study Guide is Out Today!

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There is now a study guide for What’s Best Next, and it is out today! Zondervan has done an excellent job with it and I commend it to you in two ways.

First, it can be helpful for individual review and study. If you’ve read What’s Best Next and would like to review the concepts or go deeper, this is a great way to do it.

Second, the study guide now makes it much easier to go through the book in groups. Group study and discussion is one of the best ways to understand the concepts and get them to stick. Now this study guide can help you do that.

The study guide can be used simply in conjunction with the book itself. But here is some more good news: it can be also used in conjunction with the new video series from Zondervan. Either way, the study guide is a helpful resource.

So if you have benefited from What’s Best Next or are interested in checking it out, I commend the study guide to you.

And if you know of someone who has been helped by What’s Best Next, would you consider letting them know that this resource is now available? Thank you!

Invest in Yourself or Others in 2020

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At some point we all need help getting from point A to point B. We make resolutions to change and we go after them with intense focus for a few weeks. You know what happens next. 

You miss a day, cheat the plan, or run into opposition—and you start to lose focus and the desire to get back to your noble pursuit. Imagine if things could be different.

I’m convinced that one of the main reasons we fail in our desires to change is because we’re so accustomed to working on our own. But we’re not meant to journey alone. We were meant to do it with other people. 

That’s why we’re advocates for coaching at What’s Best Next. Some of you have personally experienced the benefit of having a WBN coach help you grow in gospel-driven productivity—an approach to life that understands God has a lot to say about how we spend our days. 

Do you know someone in your life that would benefit from productivity coaching? Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s a new team member, maybe it’s a friend moving to a new role outside their comfort zone. What’s Best Next would love to be a partner on the journey. 

Send them our way or contact us today if you’re ready!

 

 

Coming Next Week: The What’s Best Next Video Study (and Study Guide)

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I cannot believe that What’s Best Next has been out for more than 5 years now. The book continues to sell and I am constantly hearing from people about the impact it has had on them — as well as from people who have just picked it up and are reading it for the first time.

I have exciting news for those who would like to go deeper with the book or go through it as a group experience: we have created a video study and study guide, and they release next Tuesday.

The Video Study

I went to the Zondervan headquarters to record the video sessions last November. I taught through the entire book, doing each chapter as one session. This is one of my favorite things to do. I enjoy writing (usually after it is done), but most of all I enjoy doing speaking events and being able to present on the book through keynotes or workshops.

The video study allowed me to do that in a format that is now accessible for anyone. For each session, I teach on the most importance concepts in the chapter while introducing some new insights as well. These sessions are good to watch as part of a Bible study or church group, or individually.

You can get them as a DVD through Amazon. Since less and less people have DVD players these days, you can also watch them online by taking the What’s Best Next online course at the Zondervan website (releasing next week). If you like, the course also has a couple assignments as part of it, in addition to the videos.

The Study Guide

The study guide is an excellent companion to the videos or just for going deeper with the book itself. Beth Graybill developed the questions and content for each chapter, based on the video sessions and the book. She did an amazing job. I myself have found the study guide to be a helpful review of the book and to provide excellent questions that get me to think more deeply.

So I highly recommend picking up the study guide, whether for yourself or to take a group through in your church, small group, ministry, or workplace!

 

Productivity and Career Development: Updates on What’s Best Next

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If you haven’t seen it on social media, I have an update: Last year I started as director of career development at The King’s College in New York City. In my role I help students launch meaningful careers that will impact the culture through remarkable excellence, professionalism, and service.

I am thrilled to be at King’s and it is a great place. One reason it is such a good fit is that I believe that Christians are called to influence culture, and that is exactly the mission of King’s:

Through its commitment to the truths of Christianity and a biblical worldview, The King’s College seeks to transform society by preparing students for careers in which they help to shape and eventually to lead strategic public and private institutions, and by supporting faculty members as they directly engage culture through writing and speaking publicly on critical issues.

King’s has a fantastic philosophy of education that focuses on seeing the connections across disciplines, and is one of the best Christian colleges in the nation. The opportunity to obtain a rigorous Christian education in the heart of NYC is something that you cannot find anywhere else, and I believe that through this King’s is making a crucial contribution to the call of the gospel to engage the culture winsomely. You can learn more about my role here.

What does this mean for WBN? We are expanding! As we mentioned the other day, Daniel Kaufman, who has many years experience doing training for Chick-fil-A, just joined our team as our newest coach. I highly recommend reaching out to set up a series of coaching sessions with him. I am also available for our 2-Hour DARE coaching package.

My plan is to resume posting regularly and continue creating new products. We have a new book coming in the months ahead, which we will be sharing more about soon. And in December a new study guide and video curriculum for What’s Best Next launches from Zondervan.

In sum, Lord willing, great things are ahead!