The Productivity Project
Chris Bailey · 2016
After turning down two corporate job offers, Chris Bailey spent a full year running wild self-experiments on himself, from 90-hour work weeks to 35 hours of meditation, to discover what actually makes us productive. The verdict: real productivity isn't about managing time, it's about deliberately managing your time, attention, and energy together.
A year of self-experiments distilling the most effective, evidence-based productivity tactics.
Three of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The Productivity Project pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.
- Productivity has three ingredients, not one: time, attention, and energy. You can't buy more time, but you can deliberately manage your focus and your energy, which is where the real gains hide.
- Use the Rule of 3: each morning pick the three outcomes you most want by day's end, and do the same for the week. Three concrete intentions beat an endless to-do list.
- Find your highest-impact tasks with the 'one task' test: if you could only do one item on your responsibility list all day, which would deliver the most value? Then defend time for it.
The other 4 — and the full 10-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 10 chapters
The whole summary runs about 10 minutes, read or listened to.
- Productivity Is Time, Attention, and Energy
- Start With Why You Want to Be Productive
- The Rule of 3
- Find and Protect Your Highest-Impact Tasks
- Beat Procrastination by Naming Its Triggers
- Work With Your Biological Prime Time
- Shrink the Unimportant: Maintenance Days and the 90% Rule
- Quiet Your Mind With a Brain Dump
- Build Your Attention Muscle and Single-Task
- Refuel Your Energy and Why Working Less Wins
Finish The Productivity Project tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 10 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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