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An Interview on Coronavirus and Productivity

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A few weeks ago Daniel Kaufman, one of the members of our team, had the idea of sharing a behind the scenes look at what each of us is doing during this unique season. He created a set of interview questions for each us, and here are my answers. If possible, we’ll have interviews with Daniel and James coming up.

How has the current pandemic affected your work habits?
I much prefer to be in the office, and then working from home maybe one day a week if possible to focus on large projects. But there are two main ways I’m aiming to make the most of this.

First, I’m trying to get more rest and sleep. Because of not having a commute, I feel less pressure to do extra work in the evenings. I try to take that time to relax more and get rested (though I don’t always do that). I think this will have long-term benefits after things are back to normal. 

Second, I’m able to make more progress on some large, long-term projects I’ve been working on. These projects involve lots of writing and development of systems, which is hard to do when you have more interruptions.

What one piece of advice would you give to people who are suddenly having to work from home?
Lots of people right away say to make a schedule and respond quickly to emails from your boss so they know you are working. While those things may be important, they fail to take advantage of the new paradigm that working from home creates.

Working from home saves time in two big ways: no commute, and less in-person interruptions. Now, not all in-person interruptions are bad. I think they are an important part of what makes work human and effective, actually. However, the reality is that now you have less of them.

So you need to take advantage of this extra time created by increasing your professional development. Invest the extra hour a day, or something like that, to intentionally get better at the skills required by your job. That could look like taking some online classes at Skillshare or Coursera or Udemy, or self-directed learning. 

I would especially recommend that everyone learn about management. Many who are managers never received training; and those who aren’t in management now may be one day but, even if that is not the case, everyone needs to know what good management practices are so they can be supportive of them. The best book on management is Marcus Buckingham’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. 

Have you been able to get to anything that was on backlog prior to this?
Yes, I am spending a lot of time getting backlogged projects completed, which is one of my favorite things.

How does your view of the gospel affect your productivity during this time?
My view of the gospel is leading me to think hard about what the best strategies are to minimize the spread of the virus and help America get back to work. Someone might say that’s just for government leaders to care about. However, the NT was one of the first ancient documents to acknowledge that all people are equal, and it is the gospel which brought that truth into new focus.

Because all people are equal, that leads to the concept of self-government—which we have in America. This means that every citizen has a duty to think hard about our government policies and cultural strategies for dealing with large problems. This is a right and duty we all have, and society is better when everyone is exercising their critical thinking.

How does the call to love people look different when working remotely from home?
Working from home brings a unique opportunity to give more time to important but not urgent tasks. I think loving people well in this time means making sure we take initiative to make progress on those tasks, and not let our extra time simply be taken up by more email and Zoom meetings.

Be deliberate about where the extra time you now have available goes. It is easy for that to be taken by new kinds of urgency, or the wrong-headed value of instant responsiveness (unless you are literally in a customer service position). The projects with long-term value that no one is pressuring you to do–those are often the way to make the biggest impact in people’s lives and in your work. So protect the time to identify and do more of those projects.

This is a Time to Innovate the Way We Get Work Done

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Jack Welch was right: we live in a time of dazzling innovation. Not just in terms of cool products and solutions to engineering problems, but also in terms of how we get work done.

Now this is even more true during the Corona economy, as so much of the workforce is having to adapt to remote working.

Remote working is a different paradigm from in-the-office working — which is often overlooked. If you simply try to adapt it to the rules of working well at the office, you will be unable to harness the unique advantages it offers.

Here are two books that can help you think through and make the most of the unique advantages of remote working. These ideas will remain useful even after people are able to go back to the office. Why? Because they articulate an improved way of thinking about work in the connected economy altogether.

Interestingly, both of these books are now several years old. But the concepts are still catching on and these are still two of the most helpful.

Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. I wish this book was called something else. However, the concept of a “results only work environment” is huge. The principle is this: work where you want, when you want, as long as the work gets done. The full implementation of this might not be for every organization, but the underlying concepts of trust and freedom — with accountability for results, not methods (a core principle of good management) — are important for all contexts.

Remote: Office Not Required. By the founders of 37 Signals (now Basecamp; I actually liked the former name better). The authors can overstate things too much in some of their writings, but there is nonetheless a lot to learn from them and I enjoy their willingness to be unconventional and their lively style of writing.

What Results Are Expected of You?

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A key question for staying on track with your work is this: what are the results expected of me? Each week, each quarter, and each month?

You need to have a general answer for this, and then you need to translate that specifically to each week and each day.

It works best to define your tasks from those results—rather than starting with the tasks and trying to get to the results. Start with the results and work backwards. That may sound easy, but most of us (including me) all too easily start the other way around—tasks to results.

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.

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.

 

 

The Decade Review, Part 1: Learn from the Last Ten Years

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From the current series How to Plan Your Decade: Start the 2020s Well. 

Last week I talked about why it is a good idea to plan your decade. A new decade is a type of temporal landmark which switches on our motivation. It makes sense to harness this in the cause of creating a great future, both for yourself and the good of others.

You can do this through what I call a decade review—an adaptation of the GTD concept of the yearly review.

I did an online webinar on this last week. For those who attended, it was great to talk with you and thanks for joining! If you didn’t attend, we’ll be making the recording available in our online store soon, along with the supporting documents and templates we provided. For those who don’t want to go to that level, or who want a short intro to accompany that, I’m going to cover a few highlights of how to plan your decade in the rest of this series.

So how do you carry out a decade review?

Interestingly, the first step is not what you would expect. Instead of simply looking forward, you first have to look back. Then the next two steps have you looking forward. Hence, the three steps are:

  1. Look back at the last ten years
  2. Cast vision for the next ten years
  3. Plan the next year

Here is a brief checklist on how to do the first step: learning from the last ten years.

Pray

Create a Document Called “2010s Decade Highlights”
As you go through the next two steps, add the key things to this document.

Review Your Reference Materials (if you have them)

  1. Review your knowledge journals (quick scan of all; if needed, maybe create as task to do over a few weeks)
  2. Review some notes you’ve taken on books, sermons, conferences, and so forth (if needed, also create as task to do over a few weeks)
  3. Review key checklists in your planning system if you have some
  4. Look over your bookshelves for great books you’ve overlooked!

Review Highlights from the Decade

  1. Review your life journals (focused on events and life experiences, as opposed to ideas–the journals in the previous step).
  2. Review your photos.
  3. Review your calendar for highlights. This can be one of the funnest things. You’ll recall great vacations, meaningful events, even memorable business trips and meetings.
  4. Review your completed tasks (goals, projects, next actions), if you keep a record of those.

Learn from the Previous Decade

  1. Journal briefly on the decade. You could do this by year, or considering the decade as a whole. Just write on the main things that stand out to you–describe some key events, challenges, and so forth.
  2. Reflect on what can be learned from the decade and journal on the top three things.

Finalize the “Decade Highlights” Document

Review what you have in it so far and ask: is there anything else I want to add? What else did we finish, handle, and experience that is not on here? Add that, and then this document is done.

Posts in this series:

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