When You Feel Stuck and Unproductive, Matt Perman’s New Book is Here to Help
A Review of How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free From Barriers to Your Productivity
Being stuck is discouraging, demotivating, and frustrating. It sucks. It saps the energy and passion we once had toward our work and it whispers in our ears that we’re imposters who don’t belong in our position, or that we’re doomed to always be stuck. Oftentimes, we turn our frustration inward and curse ourselves for not being the next Stephen Covey. We think, it shouldn’t be so hard to make progress on our tasks and projects. It certainly doesn’t seem so hard for anyone else. Other times, we’re tempted to go on a never-ending detour to find the perfect task/project management app in an effort to find a satisfying quick fix (not that I’ve ever done that).
Regardless, if you’re like me and have a hard time getting unstuck, then there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that yes, we may be missing opportunities to be as effective as we can be. The good news, however, is that there is hope. In the newly-released book, How to Get Unstuck, Matt Perman shows us that we can actually become unstuck and begin to make progress again.
What does it mean to be “stuck”?
Perman explains that we realize we’re stuck “…when we are not making the impact that we are supposed to be making.” When we find that we are stuck, we cease to move forward with our tasks and projects. We are blocked internally or externally (or both) from making progress. At the core, when we’re stuck, our effectiveness doesn’t rise up to the ceiling of our capacity. We become stunted in our productivity and miss out on opportunities to make important contributions in our family or work lives for the glory of God.
Perman identifies 3 main ways of being stuck:
- We don’t know what God wants us to do.
- We know what God wants us to do, but we don’t know how to make it happen.
- Obstacles in our way are preventing us from doing it.
When we experience any of these scenarios, it’s easy to turn into Eeyore, but Perman offers us a refreshing perspective about being stuck:
The encouraging and surprising truth is that it’s okay to be stuck. Being stuck can be a mark that you are doing important things, because important things are often hard. And when things are hard, we are likely to get stuck.
This should encourage us, because if we never get stuck, then we probably aren’t challenging ourselves to do important things! What I appreciate about Perman’s book is that he shares openly his experiences with being stuck, so I felt as if he could actually relate to my struggles. He doesn’t come across as being a productivity android who never wrestles with human weakness. Because I could relate to his struggles, it opened me up to his suggestions and strategies for becoming unstuck.
How then do we get unstuck?
At the core of Perman’s strategy for being unstuck is to frame the topic of productivity in terms of personal effectiveness, which he defines as:
…the skill of leading yourself every day to get the right things done in the right way, for the right reason, and in the shortest possible amount of time. We could say it’s knowing how to get things done, make ideas happen, and do great work.
In the first section of the book, Perman addresses the causes of being stuck, and considers some fundamental principles of personal effectiveness. Then, Perman organizes the rest of his book under three main sections, which he describes as three different areas of personal effectiveness that address the three ways of being stuck:
- Personal Leadership (The Compass)
- Personal Management (The Clock)
- Special Obstacles (The Laser)
Under each section, Perman’s chapters are chock full of well-researched wisdom from the latest neuroscience and psychology, principles of productivity and leadership, and is grounded in Christian theology. Perman spends a lot of time integrating and distilling down information that we need to know, while also providing very practical steps we need to take if we want to become unstuck in our productivity.
Not everyone will appreciate the fact that he unashamedly addresses productivity from a Christian worldview, but even if you aren’t a Christian, there is a lot of helpful insight to be gained. I’ll briefly summarize two insights from How to Get Unstuck that have been tremendously helpful for me already.
First, we become unstuck as we allow our productivity to be driven by vision.
Perman argues in the first section of his book that one of the huge keys to productivity is understanding the distinction between urgency and importance. He emphasizes how critical it is to our effectiveness to be able to focus a lot of our attention on the projects and tasks that will create the most significant impact. Being effective is spending time doing the right things, being able to put first things first. Unfortunately, many of us spend a lot of time doing things that make little to no impact because as our task and project lists grow longer and overwhelm us, we tend to lose sight of the big picture and spend our time reacting to the urgent, rather than being proactive with what’s important. Our “why” gets drowned out by all the “whats.”
Perman explains in his section on personal leadership that the power of vision is that it “enables us to operate from the importance paradigm rather than the urgency paradigm.” The reason is that when we step back, regroup, and reflect on our vision for what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, our priorities move from the blurriness of the background to the clarity of our mind’s foreground. All of a sudden, tasks that have little to no impact in accomplishing our vision remind us that we should spend little to no time on them. They may become urgent, but they aren’t important. Perhaps we should delegate them, eliminate them, or spend 5 minutes on them instead of 2 hours.
Vision also rekindles our passion for our tasks and projects because we know that ultimately, we’re aiming for significant impact through what we do. When we get stuck on a project, vision gives us (and our teams) clarity, motivation, and fulfillment to get unstuck and produce great work that matters.
As someone who can easily miss the forest for the trees, this chapter inspired me to be clear with why I am a pastor to begin with, and to always write down my vision for each project I undertake, so I can be reminded when I get stuck why I began the project to begin with.
Second, we become unstuck as we declutter and refocus our priorities.
For some reason, I have the special (and not annoying at all) gift of seeing everything as high priority. What happens is that I tend to allow unimportant tasks and projects to live in the same space in my head as critical tasks and projects. When I review them, I have a tendency to think that they are all the most important things in the world, which inevitably stresses me out and demotivates me. Perman’s chapter entitled, “Set Your Priorities: How to Make Importance Truly Work,” has been a game-changer for me.
In this chapter, Perman gets highly practical, which is what I need. At the end of most weeks as a pastor, I feel like there isn’t enough time. There are always loose ends and more things I could have done. There are always more people I could have helped. I rarely get to the end of my week and think I’m done. Perman captures this by saying,
…no matter how well you can manage your time, you will always have more to do that you can accomplish. You will always have a time deficit. So you have to focus — concentrate, exclude, prioritize.
Perman explains that research is showing a couple of really crucial things regarding what it means to prioritize. First, he explains that the most effective workers are those who are excellent at concentrating on one big thing at a time. They eliminate distractions and direct their attention to work on one thing at a time. Research has shown that those who focus and work on fewer projects at a time are more productive than those who focus on a lot at once. Perman’s key point is that prioritizing a few small things creates a massive impact. So, when we get stuck in our productivity, we need to review if we’re spending a lot of our time and energy on tasks and projects of low value and impact, and reallocate a majority of our time to those that have a lot of value and make a big impact. And, how do we do that?
Perman suggests that we allocate about 15 hours a week that are devoted exclusively to high impact, high priority tasks and projects. He gets to that number based on the fact that most of us each day can only give the best of our mental energy for about 3–4 hours a day until we need to let our mind breathe and focus on low energy tasks that need to get done. He advises sitting down at the beginning of the week and identifying our top two priorities and scheduling 15 hours to work on them during the hours we have the greatest mental capacity, and then leaving our other 25 hours for meetings and everything else that simply needs to get done.
This approach has already had two effects on me: first, it’s given me healthier expectations about my week. It’s made me realize that I’m human, and that I have limitations. I shouldn’t reasonably expect to put out incredible work if I allow priorities to become so urgent, that I try to put in 20–30 last minute hours of high energy, high concentration tasks. I may get it done in time, but it probably won’t be my best work (unless God works a miracle). This limitation is motivating me to plan ahead more and to guard my concentration at all costs (moving meetings later in the day, closing my email app, silencing my phone, etc.).
Secondly, it’s decreased my stress caused by important tasks by spreading out my time. Before reading this book, I tried hard to devote whole days to certain important tasks such as sermon writing, event planning, etc. The problem is that if emergent situations came up on those days that I couldn’t ignore, then I would lose 7–8 hours devoted to what was important. Then, I would have to scramble the rest of the week or end up working way more than I should. Targeting to spend only 3–4 hours a day on my most important tasks/projects means that emergent situations don’t cripple me as much (and consequently, my anxiety doesn’t either).
I’ve only listed two insights that jumped out at me, but it was hard to narrow everything down. His chapters dealing with character, preparation, scheduling our time, doing deep work, and preaching to yourself were likewise extremely helpful.
If You’re Stuck, Give Perman a Try
Will this book change your life in such a way that you’re never stuck again? Probably not. However, Perman has written an accessible and relatable book for those of us who need a fresh jumpstart to our productivity. Many of us will be inspired by the wealth of Perman’s insight, but also encouraged by oodles of practical and helpful ways to apply that insight to our lives to get us unstuck and moving in the right direction.
When I get stuck again — which will probably be tomorrow or next week — Perman’s book will be my go-to reference for not only how to get moving forward again, but a much-needed reminder of why…
To love and serve others for the glory of God.
