Matt Perman

The only way to be productive is to realize we don't HAVE TO be productive. Our goal is to PLEASE God, not APPEASE God.

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.

Shoddy work is not just shoddy work. It's a failure of love.

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.

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.

Superficial efficiency seems cheaper at first, but it costs more the long run, with the cost being pushed off onto someone other than the one who saves a few bucks.

When you don't have your work clearly defined, there can never be any finish point.

With gospel-centered productivity, peace comes first, not second. the mistake we often make is to make peace of mind the result of things we do rather than the source.

We are to be generous not just in the results of our work, but also IN our work.

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He must direct himself toward performance and contribution

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.

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.

The scarcity of time is the reason we have to concentrate on one thing at a time.