My Favorite Productivity Tips From Books (so You Don’t Have to Read Them All)
There are so many productivity books out there, and many of them contain valuable information and advice. But if you really want to be productive, you can’t spend all your time reading about other people’s productivity. Choosing which books to read, if any, is important, so here are some top tips from some of them. If this interests you, pick up the book (or just get the gist here).
The best productivity tips from books
Getting Things Done (GTD)
GTD is a technique taken from David Allen’s infamous 2001 book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity , which was updated in 2015 . GTD has been popular for a long time and is designed to help you organize your to-do lists, priorities, and schedules in a way that keeps everything manageable. You use five basic principles: write everything down in a notebook, app, or planner; clarify what you need to do by breaking it down into actionable steps; organize steps by categories and priorities; reflect on your to-do list; and get to work—to optimize your planning, thinking, and action.
Method of action
The method of action is taken from Scott Belsky’s 2010 book Bringing Ideas to Life: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality . Like GTD, it aims to organize your ideas and priorities, giving you the opportunity to do more than think. You write down your tasks, then break them down into action steps (the specific tasks you need to complete and those with actions behind them), links (additional information needed to complete those tasks), and fallback tasks (more nebulous goals that don’t needs to be achieved right now). Use a planner or spreadsheet to create three columns, remembering that references and backups usually complement the action steps, so you should always check them as you work through the action steps.
Zen to the end
At the core of Zen to Done is the idea that a sense of well-being is integral to your overall productivity. Its author is Leo Babauta, who has written books such as Essential Zen Habits: Mastering the Art of Change, in a Nutshell and The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to What’s Important…in Business and in Life . As you read his work, you begin to understand the value of gradually and peacefully changing your habits and creating new ones. Because you change your habits over time and in a calm environment, you can focus on the real work you need to do. ZTD contains a total of 10 habits, but Babauta says you can focus on the first four to get started: “Collect,” always taking notes on what you need to do and your ideas, “process,” making quick decisions on tasks that are in progress. in front of you at the moment, “plan” by setting goals every Monday, and “do” by choosing a task and focusing on it and only that.
Deep work
I talk a lot about deep work because it is an important concept that influences many other productivity techniques. According to Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World , “deep work” is the ability to fully focus on a complex task without allowing any distractions to get in your way. His work focuses on distinguishing between deep work and shallow work, or the work you can still do while distracted, and then making time in your schedule to tackle deeper tasks.
Eat a frog
This approach to productivity requires you to tackle the biggest, most challenging task of the day first, so everything subsequent to it seems easier in comparison. The catchy phrase ” eat that frog ” comes from a quote usually attributed to Mark Twain, but it was Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog series of books that really made it popular. According to Tracy, your “frog” is any task “you’re likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.” Through workbooks and quick prompts, he helps you figure out your frogs and then come up with strategies to help you get motivated to solve them.
Power hour
Power Hour is a productivity technique that aims to give you the opportunity to free up some of your daily time and devote it to something focused, be it an exciting project or a large task that needs to be completed. It is taken from Adrienne Herbert’s book The Power Hour: How to Focus on Your Goals and Create a Life You Love and complements Newport’s concept of deep work. Herbert encourages you to find an hour each day that you can use for a completely focused and focused project. You’ll have deep work to do during this hour, but Herbert’s strategy is more focused on finding and identifying that critical hour in your schedule than training yourself to get into the zone and avoid distractions.
168 hour method
You may not think that 24 hours in a day is enough, but what about 168 hours in a week? Laura Vanderkam wrote the book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think to encourage people to stop thinking about your time in days and start thinking about how much you can get done in a week. Spend a week tracking your time using time tracking software or a spreadsheet, keeping your notes as detailed as possible. At the end of the week, review your data and see when you wasted time, spent too much time on something, or could have done something else. Using the Vanderkam Method, you can allocate more time to the things you want to do if you are clear about how you allocate your time over the seven days.
Flow theory
You’ve probably heard of flow theory , the brainchild of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who came up with it in 1970 and then wrote a number of books on it . According to him, the state of flow is similar to when someone is swimming, being carried away by water. A person works so effectively that he simply glides forward without problems, and the state practically pushes him. There are eight characteristics of being in flow, ranging from being completely focused on a task, to finding intrinsic rewards in the job, to feeling confident that you have the necessary skills to complete it. We work using the method indicated above.
The best book selection for busy people.
Can’t decide which books to get? I would recommend one of Csikszentmihalyi’s books on flow theory, Newport’s book on deep work, and Herbert’s book on the power clock, as they all describe similar practices but offer additional tips that together will help you choose specific times to work. day to get the job done easily and efficiently.