University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
The Productivity Project
Book

The Productivity Project

Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

Chris Bailey
Crown, 2016
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Editorial Rating

9

Recommendation

Productivity expert Chris Bailey has delved into this specialty for his whole career. After college, he took a year off to research productivity and to conduct carefully controlled and monitored productivity experiments. After that, Bailey spent ten years investigating “thousands of productivity hacks” to determine what people can do to increase their productivity and become consistently more productive. Bailey used that decade of experimentation to identify 25 effective productivity techniques. To get the most from your time and effort, getAbstract recommends checking out his insights and methods. 

Summary

Make Your Time Count

You get 24 hours every day to live your life and pursue your dreams. If you’re like most people, once you take care of your obligations, you’ll still have about two and a half hours of discretionary time left. That’s not much time to achieve what really matters to you.

The only way to find more time is to increase your productivity by becoming more deliberate in everything you do. Productive people don’t operate on autopilot. They work smarter and more efficiently, move slowly, focus on what’s important and handle everything with purposeful attention.

Productivity Components

Productivity has three components: “time, attention and energy.” To become more productive, you need to manage all three – individually and simultaneously. You can exert maximum energy and a laser focus, but if you waste your time, you won’t be productive. And, if you’re always tired, having time and focus won’t help.

For maximum productivity, prioritize your tasks and duties. Assess what matters most to you and in what order, and direct your productivity efforts to those tasks. Then you’re ready to embark on a full-fledged...

About the Author

Chris Bailey is an author and productivity consultant. During his year-long productivity project, he wrote more than 216,000 words (864 pages) about productivity in his blog, A Year of Productivity.  

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