Productivity forms the backbone of any self-improvement effort. If you can’t organize your time, accomplish your tasks and complete your projects, what chance do you have to reach any other goal you’ve set for yourself?
At the same time, few topics are so frequently misunderstood. Overwork is often equated with productivity. Burnout, stress and exhaustion, it is argued, are all symptoms of our cultural obsession with productivity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Productivity is about getting more from less. How might you increase the efficiency of your hours, so you don’t need to work late to get all your work done? How can you manage your to-do list stress-free, confident that everything will be done on time? How do you hit your targets without endless grinding?
Below are my picks for the ten best books to help you begin:
1. Deep Work by Cal Newport
Long, unbroken periods of focus are essential to productivity. The reason is simple: the brain was not designed for multitasking. Every time you interrupt a task, you lose focus and must restore the active state of the problem you are working on to your conscious attention. This takes time.
While an inattentive mental state may be okay for emails or Slack chats, it is devastating for complex problems — the most valuable ones to solve.
Unfortunately, our environments have made focus harder than ever. Social media and smartphones offer ever-present temptations for distraction. Open office plans, non-stop Zoom meetings and collaboration over email make scarce the conditions needed for deep work. This is why deliberate efforts to cultivate focus are so important.
2. Work the System by Sam Carpenter
Sam Carpenter was struggling. He had an unprofitable business and worked eighty-hour work weeks to barely keep up. Like many entrepreneurs, he solved his problems by working more, by grinding, and the problems kept piling up.
Carpenter’s transformation came from shifting his view from doing the work to working on the systems underlying the work. By creating sets of procedures and policies for handling routine work, he greatly diminished the amount of time he spent putting out fires. Eventually, this enabled him to expand his business significantly while putting in a fraction of the work.
3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Covey’s bestseller integrates the ideas of personal character and effectiveness. In Covey’s mind, being effective in one’s work is not merely a product of being rational or efficient. Instead it is taking responsibility for your actions, doing what you say you’ll do, and seeking to understand other people.
Covey sees our development as a continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence. We start out dependent on others and gradually gain self-sufficiency. Being independent isn’t enough, however, as we need to grow to become interdependent with others to become fully mature.
4. Getting Things Done by David Allen
When I started writing online, productivity was virtually synonymous with Getting Things Done. To have a productivity blog meant you were one of Allen’s acolytes, newly converted to the cult of productivity.
The devotion is well-deserved. When recommending books on productivity, I always start with GTD.
The central idea of GTD is that you shouldn’t rely on your memory to keep track of your tasks. By creating a system for capturing, processing and reminding yourself of the work that needs doing, you can save precious mental bandwidth for doing the work, not just thinking about it.
5. The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
“Effective executives,” Drucker writes, “do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.”
Drucker, who famously coined the term “knowledge worker,” is responsible for introducing many of the bedrock ideas of productivity. Track where your time goes. Ask what you can contribute. Focus on your strengths. Drucker’s advice remains timeless a half-century after it was written.
