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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.

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.

Updated Application Journal

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We’ve been working behind the scenes to change a few things to serve you better. Here’s one of the resources we’re bringing back into our toolkit—the Best Next Steps Application Journal.

This PDF download is a simple tool designed to help someone get back to focusing on what’s best next in their life and work. It offers a taste of how the principles of God’s Word can help us address our motives and actions, and gives a simple way to organize thoughts and next steps.

Download for free from our online store.

 

Productivity Tip: Remember the Intangibles (and go to conferences)

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Remember the Intangibles

The tendency to focus only on immediate, directly measurable results is a common productivity fallacy for individuals and organizations.

Way back in 1982 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman termed this “the numerative bias,” and gave example after example of how a narrow concern for numbers leads managers and leaders to overlook the things that really make their products and services shine—and thus leads them to do things to “cut costs” and increase the bottom line that actually end up undermining their results in the long-term. 

This is the great irony: defining productivity mainly in terms of immediate measurable results actually undermines the measurable results in the long-run.

The time and energy and resources you invest in the intangibles is not lost; it is not a “cost of doing business.” It’s an investment that pays substantial returns in the long run. It’s just that you can’t always draw a direct and immediate line to the results. But the results are there, and the connection is there, just as the farmer who sows a crop in the spring sees results—not immediately, but in the fall, when it’s time to harvest.

We too need to have this longterm view when it comes to our effectiveness and productivity, both as individuals and as organizations.

Attending Conferences

One example here for the knowledge worker is attending conferences or industry events. I believe that all knowledge workers should go to every conference they can because these are prime opportunities to connect with people, benefit from excellent teachers, and share ideas—essential to knowledge work. But many think that going to a conference is a luxury or bonus, something to do only if you can get your other, “real” work done.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Going to conferences is a key part of the work of any leader and manager. It is one of the many intangibles at the heart of knowledge work in our day.

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Adapted from What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done. See also Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, especially chapter 6, “Close to the Customer,” where they note that high performing companies are “mainly oriented toward the value, rather than the cost, side of the profitability equation,” and chapter 2, “The Rational Model.” See also my article, Against Over-professionalism in Management: Managing for the Human Side

The Successful Virtual Office

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Melanie Pinola at Lifehacker has written a brief, helpful, new book entitled The Successful Virtual Office In 30 Minutes. As a part of series of 30-minute guides, this book seeks to “help telecommuters, consultants, freelancers, small business owners, independent professionals, and other types of remote workers set up and maintain a high-performance virtual office.”

And here’s a fun fact: In her book, she also quotes from my e-book How to Set Up Your Desk: A Guide to Fixing a (Surprisingly) Overlooked Productivity Problem. 

If you need help with your own virtual office, or if you are interested in learning about available tools that might help you in this area, check out Melanie’s book. She has been gracious enough to offer some complimentary PDF copies of her book to readers of What’s Best Next. Send an email to contact [at] whatsbestnext.com and explain why this book might help you. The first ten folks to email will win a copy. Enjoy!

How to Set Up Your Desk eBook on Sale for $4.99

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how-to-set-up-your-desk-cover3My short ebook How to Set Up Your Desk: A Guide to Fixing a (Surprisingly) Overlooked Productivity Problem is on sale for $4.99 through next Tuesday.

Whereas What’s Best Next gives a comprehensive view of why our work matters and how to be more effective in it, How to Set Up Your Desk takes a very specific area of productivity and shows you how to maximize it.

It’s easy to think that you don’t need to give thought to how you use your desk. But in reality, your desk setup matters immensely because your desk is actually a workflow system. Setting up your desk well minimizes the resistance to getting things done — and makes it a lot more fun.

So in this ebook I outline the basic principles for how to set up your desk well (yes, there are principles for this!). Then I apply them to help you make your whole desk setup more effective so that you can get get things done with minimal drag and get rid of the clutter that so easily sucks your energy and creativity.

(Note that I originally published this as a series on this blog, available for free, but I’ve updated the introduction and added some other things for the ebook. Also, getting the ebook is a great way to help support the blog!)

 

How to Set Up Your Desk The Ebook: Now Available

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I’ve turned one of the most popular series on this blog into an ebook, which I’m releasing today. The book is How to Set Up Your Desk: A Guide to Fixing a (Surprisingly) Overlooked Productivity Problem, and it’s available for your Kindle.

I believe that being productive starts with your worldview — you need to know your purpose and why it’s important to be productive at all. But once we have that worldview in place, it is crucial to also understand and utilize the best strategies and tactics we can find and develop.

The question of how to set up our desks is an area that affects all of us consistently, yet has received almost no good treatment. The common idea seems to be “just do what works for you.” But far from creating greater freedom, this notion actually creates inefficiency and annoyance. While it is true that we each have our own personal style, it is also true that there are certain fundamental principles applicable to everyone that make for an effective desk setup. If you don’t understand these principles, you will have an annoying, less effective workspace.

In other words, it is possible to have a smooth-running, efficient desk setup that will make make your desk setup both more efficient and more enjoyable to use. And this will increase your productivity, since when we like the way we have things set up, we not only use them more efficiently but are also inclined toward more productive behaviors.

This ebook shows you how to do that with your desk. It shows you how to get it set up right — in a way that serves you and is not annoying, and is based on sound principles that make sense and that you can apply to any situation.

Here are three endorsements:

“Matt Perman has served me so well in applying a Steve Jobs-like approach to my workflow: simple, intuitive, elegant, and efficient. I’ve followed most of his advice about setting up my desk (as well as processing my email), and it works beautifully.”

—Andy Naselli, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis; Research Manager for D. A. Carson; Administrator of the theological journal Themelios

“Your desk is probably standing in the way of your effectiveness at work. So are your email, office supplies, and task management systems (or lack thereof). Matt Perman is the master of all of these areas. His well-researched and documented methodologies have revolutionized the effectiveness with which I live out my callings in life.”

—Matt Heerema, Pastor of Stonebrook Community Church; Director of Mere Design Agency

“Sitting here in my office, I am able to look around at a well-ordered and organized system thanks to Matt Perman. This book drastically helped me with my physical workspace, and the results have been tremendous. I will now use this book for all new staff in our department.”

—Chris Misiano, Senior Director of Campus Recreation, Liberty University

This would be a good book for readers of What’s Best Next who want to go deeper on the tactical side, but you don’t have to have read What’s Best Next to benefit from this book. It will help anyone, anywhere, who is interested in implementing, as David Allen has said, “smooth running, silent systems” for greater productivity.

 

Naming Your Computer Files Well

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It is so completely strange to me that really odd naming conventions for computer files continue to persist to this day.

I have probably over 10,000 documents on my computer (Word documents, spreadsheets, keynote presentations, PDFs, and so forth). If I followed the usual naming conventions that most people seem to use, I would be totally lost. I’d never be able to find anything.

For example, one of the things I do in my consulting is write business plans for people. Sometimes, when the client takes the first attempt at writing the business plan, the file will be named something like “plan234.doc.”

???

It’s as though we think we need to intentionally give our computer files cryptic, obscure, hard-to-grasp names. This, in turn, makes it really hard to find the file when you are going to work on it, since it’s not like it’s the only file you have.

Far better to call it what it is. In this case, the best file name would be: “Business Plan for [Name of Company].doc.” Then, you know what the document is right away when you see it in your files. You don’t have to guess or, worst of all, open it in order to know for sure what it is.

I see this type of mistake made over and over again: people continually give their computer files names that are hard to decipher. I don’t know if the aim is to save space or what; if the aim is to save space, the need to do that went away about 20 years ago. It used to be that file names had to be kept very short, because we were limited to just a few characters. Those days are over.

And, spaces are OK!

In one of the call-out boxes in What’s Best Next, I summarize these principles as one of the immediately-applicable productivity tips I give. Here’s the box:

How to Name Your Computer Files Well

  1. Give the file a name that actually means something.
  2. Don’t abbreviate (it makes no sense and makes it harder to know what the file is at a glance!)
  3. Make the file name the same as the title of the document in the file.

Good name: “Bookstore Procedure Manual.” Bad name: “Bkstr_2305.”

If someone says: “The type of file name you suggest is too obvious,” my response is: That’s the point! If you don’t make it obvious, you’ll forget what the file actually is down the road or the next day. By making it obvious, you save time.

The principle for naming your computer files well is the same as the principle for making websites effective: “Don’t make me think.” That is, minimize your cognitive workload by making the file name something obvious. The aim is to know right away, at a glance, what the file actually is so you don’t have to spend time trying to figure out which file you are looking for after all.

Seven Principles for Setting Goals that Work

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My guest post today at Michael Hyatt’s blog.

Stephen Covey would often talk about people climbing the ladder so fast that they would get to the top, only to discover that their ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

So how do we set goals that actually take us to a place we want to be? I give seven principles. The first is that a good goal always starts by asking not “what do I want to do,” but “what needs to be done?” That’s the question that orients you toward contribution and service, which is the core principle for being effective in any area.

Read the whole thing.