My Favorite Productivity Advice From Books (so You Don’t Have to Read Them All)

Many of us whose professions center around writing have worked hard in a bookstore to make ends meet, myself included. When I worked at Barnes & Noble in college, I was stunned by the number of books on productivity and self-improvement. Granted, they couldn’t all contain nuggets of wisdom. This is certainly money repatriation aimed at taking advantage of people’s doubts. In many cases, this is true; but I learned that some of them have great value to share. The problem is, if you spend all your time reading about an author’s productivity, you won’t have much time to improve your own. Choosing wisely what you want to read is a major first step toward productivity and better time management, but I’ve gone ahead and done some legwork for you. Here are the best productivity insights and the books they come from.

The Best Productivity Tips From Books

Getting Things Done (GTD)

GTD is a method from David Allen’s infamous 2001 book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivitywhich was updated in 2015. GTD has been popular for a long time and is all about organizing your to-do lists, priorities, and calendar in a way that keeps everything manageable. You use five pillars: capture everything in a notebook, app or planner; clarify what you need to do by breaking it down into concrete steps; organize the steps by category and priority; think about the to-do list; and get to work streamlining your planning, thinking, and action. It’s stayed this long because it’s effective, but that means it’s now also recognizable. This is a solid entry-level productivity plan that has been widely written about, has a large following, and makes sense in the real world.

The method of action

The method of action comes from Scott Belsky’s 2010 book, Making Ideas Real: Overcoming the Barriers Between Vision and Reality. Like GTD, it aims to organize your ideas and priorities, paving the way for more action than deliberation. You write down your tasks, then organize them into action steps (the specific tasks you need to accomplish and those with actions behind them), baselines (the additional information you need to accomplish those tasks), and background tasks (more nebulous goals that don’t need to be accomplished at the moment). Use a planner or spreadsheet to create the three columns, keeping in mind that references and background items are usually items that complement the action steps, so you should always check them as you approach the action steps. And always remember that, if left unattended, a background issue can quickly turn into an actionable item, so take this one if you need advice but really want to stick with it.

Zen by the way

At the heart of Zen to Done is the idea that your sense of well-being is an integral part of your overall productivity. This comes from Leo Babauta, who wrote books like Essential Zen Habits: Mastering the Art of Change, in a Nutshell And The power of less: the art of limiting yourself to the essential… in business and in life. As you read his work, you begin to see the value in changing your habits and building new ones gradually and peacefully. Because you change your habits over time and in a relaxed manner, you can focus on the actual work you need to do. ZTD contains 10 habits in total, but Babauta says you can focus on the first four to start: “Collect” by always taking notes on what you need to do and the ideas you have, “process” by making quick decisions about the tasks that are in front of you right now, “plan” by setting goals every Monday, and “do” by selecting a task and focusing on it and only it.

Deep work

I talk a lot about deep work because it’s an important concept that impacts a lot of other productivity techniques. Deep work is the ability to concentrate completely on a demanding task without becoming distracted, according to Cal Newport. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. His work focuses on distinguishing between deep work and shallow work, or the type of work you can still do while distracted, and then building time into your schedule to take care of the deeper tasks. Mastering the art of slipping into a flow state and engaging in deep work is fundamental to any other approach to productivity, so this comprehensive book may be worth a read.

Eat the frog

This approach to productivity requires you to tackle your most important and demanding task in your day first, so that everything afterward seems easier in comparison. The evocative phrase “eat the frog” comes from a quote usually attributed to Mark Twain, but it was Brian Tracy’s. Eat this frog series of books that made it successful. According to Tracy, your “frog” is the task that “you’re most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do anything.” In workbooks and quick advice books, he helps you understand your frogs, then develop strategies to motivate you to take on them. Committing to eating the frog is an integral part of other productivity approaches and planning techniques, like the 1-3-5 list and the pickle jar theory, so the more familiar you are with the idea, the better off you’ll be.

Power hour

Power Hour is a productivity technique that aims to allow you to reclaim some of your daily time and dedicate it to something intentional, whether it’s a passion project or a major task at hand. This comes from Adrienne Herbert’s book, Power Hour: How to Focus on Your Goals and Create a Life You Loveand is complementary to Newport’s concept of deep work. Herbert suggests finding an hour in each day that you can use for an intentional, completely focused project. During this hour you will use deep work, but Herbert’s strategy focuses more on finding and defining that critical hour in your schedule rather than training yourself to get in the zone and avoid distractions.

The 168 hour method

You may not think that having 24 hours in a day is enough, but what about 168 hours in a week? Laura Vanderkam wrote 168 hours: you have more time than you think to encourage people to stop thinking about your time in terms of days and start thinking about how much you can accomplish in a week. Spend a week tracking your time using time tracking software or a spreadsheet, keeping your entries as detailed as possible. At the end of the week, look at your data and determine when you wasted time, spent too much time on something, or could have done something else. Using Vanderkam’s method, you can make more time for the things you want to do by clearly understanding how you allocate your existing time over seven days.

Flow theory

You’ve probably heard of flow theory, the brainchild of psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who invented it in 1970 and later wrote several books about it. According to him, a flow state is similar to when someone is floating, carried by water. The person works so efficiently that he advances without problem and the State practically propels him. (It’s quite similar to deep work, mentioned above, so it would be a good read along with Newport’s book.) There are eight characteristics of being in flow, ranging from being completely focused on the task to finding intrinsic rewards in the work and feeling like you have the skills to complete it, and these offer almost a step-by-step guide to getting into deep work, the method mentioned above.

The Best Book Combo for Busy People

Having trouble deciding which books to choose? I would suggest one of Csíkszentmihályi’s books on flow theory, Newport’s book on deep work, and Herbert’s book on working hours, as they all describe similar practices, but offer complementary tips that add up to help you choose a specific time of day to complete work easily and efficiently. It’s important to remember that motivation can – and does – come from a variety of sources, including downtime, having a goal, and getting things done. The combination of these three authors’ approaches leaves plenty of room for all of this, which will really make you want to get to work.