Book Notes: The Productivity Project

The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy by Chris Bailey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quite often people think that productivity is about being busy , here the book focuses on what we accouplish. It is easy to get into a “factory” mindset focused on efficiency e.g. how many words did I write, however this is not productivity something such as writing a valuable book is.

To be productive we need three elements

  • Prioritise – not all tasks deliver as much value, limit to 3 per day
  • Biological Prime Time – work with your body, not against it find when you work best
  • Procrastinating – Tasks which are: Boring, Frustrating, Difficult, Unstructured or ambiguous, Lacking meaning, Lacking intrinsic reward – we naturally differ thing which match these criteria, instead we should lean on them e.g. if a task is boring how can we make it interesting?

Sometimes procrastinating is just a symptom that your life just doesn’t match what you’re interested in and … maybe you should do something else.

Tim Pychyl
  • Meet your future self – Make a vivid picture of you in the future as a real person, then you will less likely defer tasks to them
  • The Internet kills productivity – There are too many distractions, disconnect
  • Ignore time – manage your energy and attention to become productive not time
  • Working less – value space to refocus and recharge not time working even though working longer hours feels more productive it’s not
  • Cleaning house – group together low value/low attention tasks
  • Zen of productivity – we have to seperate the feeling of productivity from productivity itself, e.g answering emails are easier and give us enjoyment like Netflix, but don’t contribute to the high value items which we should be guarding
  • Shrink the unimportant – e.g. answering email feels productive but that does not mean it contributes to your highest value tasks so shrink the tasks which don’t.
  • Removing the unimportant – hire a (virtual) assistant to offload tasks
  • Emptying your brain – write down tasks so they don’t consume brain power
  • Rising up – review a list of “hot spots” e.g. finance, relationship to keep on track
  • Making room – having room so your mind can wander is great for problem solving
  • Attention hijackers – disable notifications, remote things which distract you
  • Mindfulness – focus on doing just one thing
  • Refueling – food, exercise and sleep have big impacts. Alcohol takes energy from tomorrow, caffeine from later today.

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