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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.

What Does it Mean to Glorify God?

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Most Christians agree that our purpose in life is to glorify God.

However, we can also struggle with having a clear idea of what that means. Which makes it hard to apply and give direction.

Hence, it is helpful to understand more precisely what it means to glorify God. There are lots of ways to do this. One that I’ve found helpful recently is this: To glorify God means to give him weight. To give him ultimate significance and centrality in your life and actions.

In other words, to glorify God means to act in ways that show he matters most in each decision you make. It is to have ultimate regard for him in all that you do, coming from love for him.

I’d like to give some examples here, but what might be most helpful to illustrate this is for each of us to ask ourselves: what is something we did recently that gave God weight? And then ask: how can we do more things like that?

Changing the World Through Gospel-Driven Productivity

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That’s the title of the message I gave at The Summit Institute this spring. They are a fantastic ministry of Summit Church (North Carolina) that equips Christians to more effectively engage in the mission of God, especially through their work.

Check them out! You can watch the video on their site at the first link above, or here:

Gospel and Work | Matt Perman from The Summit Institute on Vimeo.

5 Ways Efficiency Undermines Productivity

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When most people think of productivity, they think of efficiency—getting more things done in less time. It seems logical. If you have a lot to do, your tendency is to speed up.

Surprisingly, if efficiency is your first and primary goal, it might actually undermine productivity. Here are five reasons why:

  1. You can get the wrong things done. If you don’t give thought to what the “more” is that you often unconsciously take on, you might end up being incredibly efficient at the wrong things. Or at least not the best things. If my wife asks me to go to the store to get a carton of milk, and I get there and back in record time with a carton of orange juice, I haven’t been productive. More important than how much we get done and how fast we do it is whether we are getting the right things done at all.

  2. Efficiency doesn’t always solve the problem. In many cases, efficiency doesn’t even alleviate our hectic pace. It is good to exercise control over our environment. In fact, it’s one of the purposes God gave us (Gen. 1:28). Yet it’s important to recognize that we can’t control everything. Sometimes there are simply more things we could do than humanly possible. Sometimes we make mistakes. Our approach to getting things done has to acknowledge our God-given limitations. We can’t require ourselves to keep up with everything perfectly, to know everything there is to know, to be in more than one place at one time, or to see everything go precisely the way we intended it to. We are not God. If we continue approaching our work with these kinds of expectations, it will only multiply our frustration.

  3. The quest for efficiency can undermine people. Many organizations suffer from the myth that the best way to make a profit is to be militant about cutting costs. This approach tends to undermine employees—making their work more frustrating, lowering morale, and decreasing the organization’s overall productivity (not to mention increasing turnover). Worst of all, when employees are viewed as “cost centers” rather than the true source of value in an organization, they are treated like interchangeable parts. Organizations end up hiring the most cost-effective employee rather than the most qualified employee.

  4. Efficiency is the enemy of innovation. There is an inverse relationship between efficiency and innovation: the more you focus on efficiency, the less innovative you tend to be. In may not seem efficient to slow down to brainstorm, dream, strategize, or reevaluate when you’re looking at your already crowded weekly planner. But it will make you more productive in the long-run.

  5. The quest for efficiency overlooks the importance of intangibles. Intangibles are arguably the main source of value in our knowledge economy. Technology, hardware, and capital can be copied easily. What can’t be easily replicated is the culture and human capacity that create those in the first place—and does so in a way that engages not just functionally with people but also emotionally, so that people want what your organization offers. Effectiveness is more about the intangibles because effectiveness comes from people first, not things. Things are replicable. People aren’t.

Here is the great irony: defining productivity mainly in terms of immediate measurable results undermines measurable results in the long run. So productivity is not first about getting more things done faster, it’s about getting the right things done.

What steps do you need to take to prioritize productivity over efficiency?

This post was adapted from Chapter 2 of What’s Best Next.

Reclaiming Monday

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Getting back into your work rhythm after a weekend can be a challenge. Here’s a simple framework for planning your workweek so you can dive back into your most important work:

Pray

  • “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” – Ps. 127:1
  • “Commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established.” – Prov. 16:3

Plan

Review your mission and values.

  • Am I still aiming for these long-term goals? Do I need to update?
  • Does this work align with my values? Does it move toward my mission and goals?

Define your priorities for the week.

  • What do I need to do this week? What would I like to do?
  • What should I do this week to fulfill each of my roles?
  • What should I do this week to move towards my goals?
  • What should I do this week for each of my major projects?
  • What should I do this week from my action list?
  • What is on my calendar this week?
  • How could I help people in need, fight injustice, or promote my family’s/church’s/community’s good?

Organize your priorities in a way that makes them easy to do.

  • Which of these items are small? Which will take more time or investment?
  • Is this list doable within one week? If not, what should I eliminate or delay? What is most crucial?
  • Which of these items need to be scheduled? When should they be done?
  • Which of these small actions can I accomplish right now?

For more detail on weekly planning and applying these questions, see Chapter 19 in What’s Best Next.

Throwing Sheep into a Pit: The Discipline of Sabbath Rest

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Guest post by Rachel Poel

When I was a student, I would justify studying on Sunday by quoting Matthew 12:11-12: “He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” But many weekend afternoons, exhausted from a full week of classes, work, and studying, I would put off studying for a Monday morning test or drafting a paper due on Tuesday—effectively throwing that sheep into the pit myself.

Taking a Sabbath takes intentionality. Resting well is hard work.

There will be days when sheep are leaping into pits, when your kids all get the flu on a Sunday or your venue falls through days before a retreat. When these days come, do that work well. Your standing before God does not depend on how clear your Sunday schedule is.

But if you find yourself regularly planning projects for Sunday afternoon, consider the heart of Sabbath. God calls us to join Him in His rest. He gives us the Sabbath as a gift: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28).

How are we receiving this gift?

We don’t rest to maximize our productivity later.
We rest to remember that our worth does not hinge on our productivity.

Our struggle to let go of our to-do lists and inboxes for a day shows how much we really need this rest. We don’t rest to maximize our productivity later. We rest to remember that our worth does not hinge on our productivity. We rest because we are children and God is the Father. We rest because we are creatures and God is the Potter. We rest because we are saved and God is the Savior.

How will you plan this week to take time to know that God is God?


Rachel Poel recently graduated from Wheaton College with a BA in English Literature. Since graduating, she has been working on projects with Useful Group. Rachel lives in Aurora, Illinois with too many books and a very large puppy.

 

How Leaders Accomplish More by Doing Less

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A remarkably high number of new executives fail within their first 18 months, and it’s not because they were promoted above their skill set. Often it’s because they keep filling their schedules with the tasks they did well in their previous role instead of leading.

What does it look like to lead productively?

Matt Perman helps you think through your leadership priorities and develop strategies to succeed.

Download the free article “How Leaders Accomplish More By Doing Less.”