{"id":16786,"date":"2024-11-19T11:04:23","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T19:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=16786"},"modified":"2025-11-13T14:03:52","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T22:03:52","slug":"10-important-books-productivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/19\/10-important-books-productivity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Key Lessons from 10 Important Books on Productivity"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m nearing the end of the second month of my Foundations<\/a> project\u2014a year-long effort to improve twelve different foundations for living well. This month\u2019s focus was productivity<\/a>. If you\u2019re curious, you can read my essays on the first month, fitness, here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Next week, I\u2019ll share some of my reflections on the month, but this essay is devoted to what I learned from my reading. Each month, I\u2019m doing a deep dive into some important books and research on each topic. This month, I finished ten books.<\/p>\n

Productivity is a familiar topic for me. I read most of the classic books on the topic years ago. Before starting my second book<\/a>, I even briefly flirted with writing another Complete Guide on the topic and spent a couple of months researching the roots of the thinking in this area. As a result, a lot of the books I tackled this month were re-reads\u2014books that were major influences in my youth and which I wanted to view again from a fresh perspective.<\/p>\n

The 1-Minute Summary of What I Learned<\/h2>\n

Here are the basic takeaways from this month\u2019s research:<\/p>\n

Enthusiasm is the key to productivity.<\/strong> Happy workers are productive workers. Stress as a vehicle for producing great work is overrated.<\/p>\n

Productivity is a key to happiness.<\/strong> Despite productivity’s much-maligned image as a metric of capitalist oppression\u2014most people want to contribute meaningful work and to feel effective in their professional lives.<\/p>\n

Managing energy and motivation beats managing time. <\/strong>We treat ourselves like machines, rather than biological systems, ignoring the importance of recovery.<\/p>\n

Simple cognitive scaffolding can significantly enhance results.<\/strong> Checklists and simple tools for tracking work can offload the psychic burden of work, freeing us up for exceptional performance.<\/p>\n

How much you work is a personal choice based on priorities.<\/strong> Regardless, productivity should be a central aim since it is, at its core, about aligning our human needs with our desire to do meaningful work.<\/p>\n

Brief Notes on the 10 Books I Read<\/h2>\n

My favorite book was a re-read: Stephen Covey\u2019s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People<\/a>. Despite the somewhat cheesy title and folksy way Covey writes, this book is a profound meditation on what it means to be an effective person and how we should strive to live.<\/p>\n

For those interested in a practical system that can deliver immediate results, you can\u2019t go wrong with David Allen\u2019s Getting Things Done<\/a>. Re-reading this book was a pleasure, as it has enormously influenced my thinking about productivity.<\/p>\n

Finally, for an entertaining read that has immediate value, I suggest Atul Gawande\u2019s The Checklist Manifesto<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1. Getting Things Done<\/a> by David Allen<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Getting Things Done<\/em> is a cult hit among productivity junkies for a reason: this system forever changes how you think about getting work done.<\/p>\n

The central idea is to create a full-capture system in which all of your tasks, appointments, ideas and projects reside so you can fully focus on your work and not be distracted by worrying about whether you’re forgetting something.<\/p>\n

2. The Power of Full Engagement<\/a> by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Managing energy, not time, is the key to peak performance. We should work the way athletes train, oscillating between periods of intense focus and deep recovery.<\/p>\n

The opposite pattern, linearity, is more common in our working lives. We\u2019re expected to perform continuously, without rest, for days, weeks and even years. Our foundations of energy begin to crumble as we feel crushed by the burdens placed upon us.<\/p>\n

The solution is to redesign all the aspects of our lives, from fitness and diet to our purpose and life\u2019s goals, so that we can adopt more natural rhythms that allow us to maintain high levels of energy and enthusiasm.<\/p>\n

3. The Effective Executive<\/a> by Peter Drucker<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cEffective executives, in my observation, 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Peter Drucker is the guru\u2019s guru on productivity. He coined the term \u201cknowledge worker,\u201d and pretty much every idea about working effectively in modern society can be traced, directly or indirectly, to his thinking. I enjoyed re-reading this book, whose central ideas of tracking your time, focusing on your contribution (rather than the work), and emphasizing strengths remain relevant today.<\/p>\n

4. The Progress Principle<\/a> by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Harvard professors Amabile and Kramer conducted a large study looking at tens of thousands of daily work diaries of employees in several firms and industries. They concluded that a positive inner work life is essential to workplace performance and that, in turn, the feeling of progress is the most important ingredient in a positive inner work life.<\/p>\n

This may seem obvious, but in surveys, most managers ranked \u201csupporting progress\u201d dead last in the list of factors influencing morale, and many still hold to the view that high-pressure environments bring out the best performance.<\/p>\n

5. Flow<\/a> by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

I\u2019ve read a lot of Csikszentmihalyi\u2019s academic work, so it was interesting to re-read his magnum opus on the role of optimizing conscious experience in the pursuit of the good life.\u2028\u2028<\/p>\n

On the one hand, I find many of his examples and arguments persuasive. On the other hand, I feel like I understand flow less than when I started\u2014since this concept appears to encompass not only the feeling of absorption while engaged in deep tasks and hobbies but also all sorts of other life conditions Csikszentmihalyi describes positively. Perhaps it\u2019s just my expectations being violated here, but I had been under the impression that flow was a much more rigorously defined academic construct.<\/p>\n

6. The Checklist Manifesto<\/a> by Atul Gawande<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Checklists save lives. Yet many professionals resist using them, feeling that, as highly trained experts, something as simple as ticking off a box is beneath them.<\/p>\n

Gawande argues persuasively that we need the cognitive safety net checklists provide precisely because we live in a time of such intensive expertise. Our work has become increasingly complicated, and following \u201cbest practices\u201d perfectly is beyond the capabilities of even the smartest of us.<\/p>\n

7. The 4 Disciplines of Execution<\/a> by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling, Beverly Walker and Scott Thele<\/h3>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Most business training is in strategy, but execution is what trips up most projects. 4DX is a great resource for how to make execution happen in big organizations\u2014and for yourself. The four disciplines are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Choose a single focus, a \u201cwildly important goal\u201d you\u2019ll try to achieve above and beyond the day-to-day whirlwind of your working life.<\/li>\n
  2. Track your progress on the goal. In particular, separate the lag measures you care about from lead measures you can actually influence.<\/li>\n
  3. Put up a scoreboard so everyone can see your progress.<\/li>\n
  4. Stay accountable through a weekly meeting where you see how you can make progress happen.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This book has an \u201cin the trenches\u201d feeling, covering many nuances that have come up in applying this framework to hundreds of organizations.<\/p>\n

    8. The Now Habit<\/a> by Neil Fiore<\/h3>\n
    \n
    \"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

    Why do we procrastinate? Psychologist Fiore argues that the beliefs and self-talk we engage in keep otherwise top performers from consistently engaging in their best work. By rescripting our inner dialog, we can stop ourselves from destructively delaying doing the things we need to do.<\/p>\n

    I particularly like Fiore\u2019s suggestion of an \u201cunschedule\u201d or booking, in advance, your guilt-free time off. Too often, we procrastinate, feel there isn’t enough time, and then commit ourselves to a hypothetical schedule of unending work. Yet this schedule is so unappealing that we unconsciously rebel and procrastinate on starting, thus exacerbating the underlying problems that caused us to propose the onerous schedule in the first place.<\/p>\n

    9. Managing Oneself<\/a> by Peter Drucker<\/h3>\n
    \n
    \"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

    This book is quite short, more of a long essay rather than a book. (As more books should be.)<\/p>\n

    Perhaps the biggest takeaway I got was Drucker\u2019s advice on managing the midlife crisis. He argues that a person who has reached the apex of their career, which often happens in one\u2019s 40s, will likely feel bored. The solution, he argues, is to cultivate secondary hobbies and volunteer pursuits that will sustain engagement in the second half of life.<\/p>\n

    10. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People<\/a> by Stephen Covey<\/h3>\n
    \n
    \"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

    Most books are clever. Few are wise. Covey\u2019s is one of the latter.<\/p>\n

    I first read this book as a teenager. Perhaps because I now have children of my own, the interpersonal lessons in Covey’s book struck me as particularly relevant. Covey himself had nine children and frequently references parenting in his examples.<\/p>\n

    If there\u2019s a central idea in this book, it is that being good precedes being great, and conducting yourself in ways that demonstrate true character must take priority over tactics that merely get a result.<\/p>\n

    Moralizing self-help is unfashionable these days. Perhaps it smells too much like organized religion, which has been undermined through culture-warring and the well-publicized failings of many organized sects. As a result, there\u2019s a bias to present value-neutral tactical advice\u2014strategies for achieving results that are agnostic to deeper motivations.<\/p>\n

    Maybe it\u2019s just me getting older, but I\u2019m increasingly convinced that doing what\u2019s right and doing what\u2019s effective cannot be separated, and that strategies to maximize our desires, without first asking whether those desires ought to be maximized, are ultimately self-defeating.<\/p>\n

    _ _ _<\/p>\n

    That\u2019s it for my notes this month. Next week, I\u2019ll provide a recap of how this month\u2019s efforts to improve my productivity systems went, before I embark on the third foundation in my year-long project: money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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