Matt Perman > Quotes

“While efficiency is important, it is secondary. More important than efficiency is effectiveness — getting the right things done. Efficiency doesn’t matter if you are doing the wrong things in the first place.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“the foundation of effectiveness is not first techniques or tools, but character.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“One of the best places for efficiency is being efficient with things so that you can be effective with people.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“We are to be generous not just in the results of our work, but also IN our work.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“To be productive, in fact, glorifies God because when we are productive we are not only obeying him but imitating him. Wayne Grudem perhaps captures this best: “It may be that God created us with such needs because he knew that in the process of productive work we would have many opportunities to glorify him. When we work to produce (for example) pairs of shoes from the earth’s resources, God sees us imitating his attributes of wisdom, knowledge, skill, strength, creativity, appreciation of beauty, sovereignty, planning for the future, and the use of language to communicate. In addition, when we produce pairs of shoes to be used by others, we demonstrate love for others, wisdom in understanding their needs, and interdependence and personal cooperation (which are reflections of God’s Trinitarian existence).”2”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“We are most productive not when we seek to tightly control ourselves but when we seek to unleash ourselves. Productivity comes from engagement, not control and mere compliance. This is why operating in our strengths is so important.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others. We need to understand their situation and their needs accurately, and this comes from listening to them, not coming in with our own assumptions.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“The scarcity of time is the reason we have to concentrate on one thing at a time.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“The curse of the fall didn't affect only manual work, as we often seem to think. Excessive ambiguity that prevent us from figuring out how to navigate is really a form of confusion. Overload is one of the forms that frustration takes. The inordinate challenges we face in knowledge work can be traced to the fall just as much as the challenges in manual work. Send it especially lies behind the villain of lack of fulfillment. The reason we lack fulfillment is because we aren't fulfilling our true purpose, that is because we have sinned and deviated from God's path.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“The fundamental way to know what’s best next — to make good decisions in an age of unlimited options — is to be a person of character.”
― Matt Perman

“We feel unfulfilled when there is a gap between what is most important to us, the realm of personal leadership, and what we are actually doing with our time, the realm of personal management. You are satisfied with your day when there is a match between what you value and how you spend your time.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“A lack of white space on one’s calendar correlates with a lack of white space in one’s brain.”3”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“As John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“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. Further, God meets us where we are stuck. In fact, it’s when we are stuck that he often meets us most deeply.”
― Matt Perman, How to Get Unstuck: Breaking Free from Barriers to Your Productivity

“Technology, hardware, and capital can be copied easily. What can't be copied easily 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.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“Aimless, unproductive Christians contradict the creative, purposeful, powerful, merciful God we love. — John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. — Tim Kizziar”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“We need to care about beauty and not just the utility of our products because people are not only rational but also emotional. We need to treat people as whole people. This means caring about purity and the emotional side of human nature, not just utility.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“One way to know if you are working in your strengths is to ask yourself, “Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?” That’s what you want for your role: You want to be doing what you do best every day.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”*”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all. — Peter Drucker”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“Productivity comes from engagement, not control and mere compliance.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“The only way to make the right decisions is first to be the right kind of person (Rom. 12:1 – 2; 2 Peter 5:1 – 8).”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“The human brain simply cannot focus on two things at once. God is the only multitasker.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“There is a second reason for not scheduling yourself at full capacity: you operate better when you have space to think.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“Just as we do good works from justification rather than for justification, we are also to do good works from peace rather than for peace.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“True productivity is not first about efficiency — doing things right and doing them quickly — but effectiveness — doing the right things.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“Technology, hardware, and capital can be copied easily. What can’t be copied easily 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, in work and life, is thus more and more about the intangibles because effectiveness comes from people first, not things. Things are replicable; people aren’t.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“When you don't have your work clearly defined, there can never be any finish point.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

“We need to measure productivity by results, not by time spent working.”
― Matt Perman, What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done