The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy by Chris Bailey (A Short Book Review)
This book is the result of a year’s worth of productivity experiments coupled with a literature review on the subject as well as interviews with some key figures. Each of the short 26 chapters focuses on one specific thing which improved the author’s productivity and usually ends with an experiment you can try for yourself.
What I Liked:
The book is very practical. It focuses on the strategy of chipping away systematically at large objectives focusing on small changes that add up and are easier to form into a habit. The author has spent a year conducting various experiments and condensed the results into a single book so that you don’t have to. Some of the findings are obvious like the value of sleep, exercise, and meditation, but other things are debunked such as people who wake up earlier are more productive. Basically, you’ll come out of the reading with several very concrete ways to change your life in order to improve your productivity. You’ll also be taught the author’s “system”, his daily routine to ensure maximum productivity, which you can adopt in its entirety or you can adapt to better suit your own personality and lifestyle.
What I Didn't Like:
This book did seem like it had a bit of “fluff” in order to reach its word count. I believe it could have been shorter to the same effect. And for some reason, the author’s personality just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was his chapter introductions which were more often than not off topic or the way he referenced topics like cosmology and Yo-Yo Ma overtly gratuitously. Or maybe just the fact that he namedropped Mila Kunis, not once, not twice, but THREE times in reference to something being sexy. In short, I liked the content but not the delivery.
Three Takeaways:
Productivity is not only about managing time. It’s also about managing Attention and Energy. That was really eye-opening for me. What it means, in my opinion, is that you can’t just schedule tasks throughout the day rigidly and go from one to the next. You’re better off setting goals and being mindful of your attention and energy levels, and handpicking the tasks that make the most sense for you at that specific time of day. Sometimes it’s better to put something off if we can’t focus because we’ll do it faster once we’re once again rested.
Be kind to your future self. When we procrastinate, we’re borrowing time from our future self, making today easier but tomorrow worse. Also, when we push something to tomorrow, we make assumptions on our future state of mind. For example, there’s no way for us to know that we won’t be just as tired tomorrow. I find trying to be as productive today as possible with the mindset of making tomorrow easier is really motivating. It makes a lot of sense to me because working in restaurant kitchens, even if you have nothing specific to prepare for today, you’re alway trying to get ahead for tomorrow and the rest of the week. I find it’s a very helpful way to frame things, at least for me.
It’s extremely important to externalize what’s on our mind. One way to do this is brain dumps, or writing everything that we have to do which comes to our mind. Once everything is on paper, you are much less distracted while you work. It also gives you the chance to come up with a thought out and well planned strategy on when to tackle what.
You Should Read This Book If:
•You want to improve your productivity
•You make your own schedule
•You’re trying to accomplish a particularly large project