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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.

 

 

How to Get Unstuck: Table of Contents

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(How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity is out today! Here is the table of contents. For more details on the book, see the next post.)

Introduction: We All Get Stuck in Some Way

Part 1. The Problem and the Principles: True North

1. How We Get Stuck
2. Flourishing: What it Means to be Unstuck
3. The Unstuck Cycle
4. Recovering Personal Effectiveness as a Force for Good
5. Understanding Urgency and Importance (For Real)
6. Character: The Great Unsticking Force

Part 2. Personal Leadership: The Compass

7. Understand the Power of Vision
8. Be Missional: Understand How Your Faith and Work Relate
9. See Yourself as a Professional (…Sort of)
10. Preparation: Get the Knowledge You Need

Part 3. Personal Management: The Clock

11. Start with Your Time, Not with Your Tasks
12. Set Your Priorities: Make Importance Truly Work
13. Deep Work, Part 1: The New Superpower of Knowledge Work
14. Deep Work, Part 2: Put Deep Work into Your Schedule and Overcome Distractions
15. Renewal: The Power of Preaching to Yourself

Part 4. Special Obstacles: The Laser

16. A Basic Approach to Getting Unstuck from Problems
17. Taking an Adaptive Time Management Approach
18. Building Your Willpower and Growing in Discipline
19. Making Your Workspace Clutter-Free
20. Getting Projects Unstuck
21. Overcoming the Number One Sticking Point for New Leaders

What Does it Mean to be Stuck?

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This is an excerpt from How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity, coming May 1. (Pre-order and get 6 bonus chapters and a preview of my next book also.)

How do we break free from the productivity obstacles that get us stuck? First, we need to understand the causes better. At root, we get stuck in our productivity in three chief ways:

  1. We don’t know what God wants us to do.
  2. We know what God wants us to do, but we don’t know how to make it happen.
  3. Obstacles in our way are preventing us from doing it.

We Don’t Know What God Wants Us to Do
Sometimes we aren’t sure what we need to do or want to do at all—with our lives, with our career, with the next project, or even with the next hour. When this happens we may feel disoriented, lacking direction, or just confused (that is, stuck!).

Lack of direction is a very significant—and much overlooked—source of being stuck. For you can’t get where you are going if you don’t know where you are going!
The problem here is lack of vision.

We Don’t Know How to Make It Happen
Very often, even when we do know what we need or want to do, we aren’t sure how to do it. We aren’t sure what the path is—or how to chart the path and move along it. This is like being in the water and seeing your destination, but not knowing how to swim. You know where you want to go but can’t move yourself there. This, also, is a much-overlooked cause of being stuck.

Here you can feel trapped stuck in the most literal sense. Stuck in the mud and immobilized. The problem here is lack of planning and execution.

Obstacles Are in Our Way
Beyond that, even when we do start on the path, obstacles threaten to throw us off. These obstacles often take the form of our being overscheduled, overbusy, and overwhelmed. And, interestingly, sometimes fear is an obstacle. One of the biggest obstacles is fear of risk—or even fear of success.

This is the problem of obstacles in the way. We know how to execute and may even be pretty good at it, but our execution has holes. We are more vulnerable to obstacles than we need to be. This is the most recognized cause of getting stuck, and it needs to be addressed. But it can’t be addressed first, because often the obstacles are actually symptoms of being stuck in one of the first two ways.

Summing It Up
We are stuck when we don’t know what we want or can’t accomplish what we want. Not knowing what we want is the problem of lack of vision. Not being able to accomplish what we want breaks down into two subproblems: we don’t know how to execute, and obstacles are in the way.

Lack of vision, lack of execution, and obstacles—those are what get us stuck.

The Alternative to Failure

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Great post by Seth Godin:

“What would you have me do instead?”

To the critic who decries a project as a worthless folly, something that didn’t work out, something that challenged the status quo and failed, the artist might ask,

“Is it better to do nothing?”

To the critic who hasn’t shipped, who hasn’t created his art, anything less than better-than-what-I -have-now appears to be a waste. To this critic, progress should only occur in leaps, in which a fully functioning, perfected new device/book/project/process/system appears and instantly and perfectly replaces the current model.

We don’t need your sharp wit or enmity, please. Our culture needs your support instead.

Each step by any (and every) one who ships moves us. It might show us what won’t work, it might advance the state of the art or it might merely encourage others to give it a try as well.

To those who feel that they have no choice but to create, thank you.

Why Success Often Starts with Failure

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A helpful article from the 99%.

Here’s the first part:

“Few of our own failures are fatal,” economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford writes in his new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. This may be true, but we certainly don’t act like it. When our mistakes stare us in the face, we often find it so upsetting that we miss out on the primary benefit of failing (yes, benefit): the chance to get over our egos and come back with a stronger, smarter approach.

According to Adapt, “success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time.”

A Series on Managing Stress that Actually Looks Helpful

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I’m not super in to “tips on managing stress” and the like. But stress is a significant reality in our era, and it’s worth learning some things about.

I just noticed that The Teaching Company — which has a host of excellent courses on all sorts of subjects, from science to philosophy to mathematics to history — has the course Stress and Your Body on sale for 70% off right now.

One of the things that looks interesting about it is the way it looks at the physical effects that stress has.

You can get it by audio download, CD, video download, or DVD.

Why Are You Overwhelmed?

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When you go through seasons where you feel — and are — utterly overwhelmed, here’s the ultimate reason:

“For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death itself. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9).

Obviously Paul is speaking of great affliction here. But that doesn’t mean this only applies literally when your life is in danger or at risk.

We often limit the scope of what suffering is to only large, dramatic things — and this is unbiblical, as I’ve argued elsewhere.

This passage here applies to all forms of suffering, great and small.

Even if it feels like a small thing in relation to everything else going on in the world, when you feel overwhelmed there is a purpose behind that: it is to to lead you to rely more and more not on yourself, but on God.

Excellence is not the Opposite of Failure

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Marcus Buckingham states this well in Go Put Your Strengths to Work:

The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence from studying failure.

This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence. That’s why we studied unhappy customers to learn about the happy ones, employees’ weaknesses to learn how to make them excel, sickness to learn about health, divorce to learn about marriage, and sadness to learn about joy.

What has become evident in virtually every field of human endeavor is that failure and success are not opposites, they are merely different, and so they must be studied separately. Thus, for example, if you want to learn what you should not do after an environmental disaster, Chernobyl will be instructive. But if you want to learn what you should do, Chernobyl is a waste. Only successful cleanups, such as the Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Colorado, can tell you what excellence looks like.

Study unproductive teams, and you soon discover that the teammates argue a lot. Study successful teams, and you learn that they argue just as much. To find the secrets of a great team, you have to investigate the successful ones and figure out what is going on in the space between the arguments.

Well said.

How Information Overload Affects Decision Making

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A recent article from Newsweek. Here’s the summary:

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.

And this is very interesting:

The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.