The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

by Chris Bailey

I think productivity tactics—like the ones that I discuss in this book—exist to help you accomplish everything you have to do in less time, so you can carve out more time for what’s actually important and meaningful in your life.

It is also the difference between having no time or energy left at the end of the day and having a ton of time and energy left over to invest however you want.

For The Productivity Project I have selected the twenty-five productivity tactics that, among the thousands I’ve encountered, I believe will make the biggest impact on your work on a daily basis.

Meditation had such a profound effect on my productivity because it allowed me to slow down enough so that I could work deliberately and not on autopilot.

when you work on autopilot, it’s virtually impossible to step back from your work to determine what’s important, how to think more creatively, how to work smarter instead of just harder, and how to take control over what you’re working on instead of working on the tasks that other people throw (or in most cases, email) your way.

Meditating all day may bring you inner peace, and working at a frenzied pace may be incredibly stimulating, but productivity has nothing to do with how much you do, and everything to do with how much you accomplish.

The most productive people work at a pace somewhere between the monk and the stock trader—fast enough to get everything done, and slowly enough so they can identify what’s important and then work deliberately and with intention.

Productivity is about how much you accomplish.

That requires you to work smarter instead and manage your time, attention, and energy better than ever before.

Productivity is about how much you accomplish Productivity requires we manage time, energy and attention

every lesson I learned fell into better management of one of three categories: my time, my attention, and my energy.

Every lesson on prodctivity

the most productive people not only manage their time well—they also manage their attention and energy well.

Perhaps most important, if you can’t manage all three—time, attention, energy—well, it is next to impossible to work deliberately and with intention throughout the day.

When we waste time, we’re procrastinating. When we can’t manage our attention well, we’re distracted. And when we don’t cultivate our energy levels, we’re tired, or “burned out.”

Your effort toward taking control of your time, attention, and energy will be fruitless when you don’t first take stock of what tasks are the most valuable and meaningful to you.

I discovered that there is absolutely no difference in socioeconomic standing between someone who is an early riser and someone who is a night owl—we are all wired differently, and one routine is not inherently better than another.

It’s what you do with your waking hours, I discovered, that makes the difference in how productive you are

perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from this experiment was just how important it is to deeply care about your productivity goals, about why you want to become more productive.

Why is important to be productive Your deep purpose and goals will help you implement the productivity tactics

Working deliberately and purposefully throughout the day can make or break how productive you are.

The intention behind your actions is like the shaft behind an arrowhead—it’s pretty difficult to become more productive day in and day out when you don’t care about what you want to accomplish on a deeper level.

Investing countless hours becoming more productive, or taking on new habits or routines, is a waste if you don’t actually care about the changes you’re trying to make.

Questioning why you want to make a change to your life can save you countless hours or even days of time, when you discover that you don’t really want to make the change in the first place.

Work on my longterm goals Have more fun Read books/learn something new

I think the best way to measure productivity is to ask yourself a very simple question at the end of every day: Did I get done what I intended to?

Intention and deliberateness are two sides of the same coin, and I think both are essential if you want to live more productively.

While my meditation experiment helped me to improve my focus more than anything I had tried up to that point, the experiment had another effect I hadn’t anticipated: it let me manage my time better, because it made it much easier for me to identify what was important, which let me work smarter instead of just harder.

not all tasks are created equal. Put another way, there are certain tasks in your work that, minute for minute, lead you to accomplish more.

Activities that are connected with your deepest-held values will lead you to be happier and more motivated, and activities that are primary to your work will let you become more productive in the same amount of time.

Productivity isn’t about doing more things—it’s about doing the right things.

Before you invest in increasing your productivity, it’s crucial you determine which areas you want to become more productive

is difficult to become more productive when you don’t first take stock of what you should actually be productive

three tasks (or four, if you have a fourth that’s as important as your top three) are the 20 percent of your tasks through which you contribute at least 80 percent of your value.

Having a great system for managing what you need to get done is important, but it’s just as important to work on the tasks you organize in your system deliberately, with intention.

The rule is dead simple: 1. At the beginning of every day, mentally fast-forward to the end of the day, and ask yourself: When the day is over, what three things will I want to have accomplished? Write those three things down. 2. Do the same at the beginning of every week.

“Simplicity makes it easier to evolve and innovate and deal with complexity.”

In addition to deciding on the three main things you want to accomplish, select other small tasks you intend to accomplish over the course of the day. The three things you intend to accomplish may be your primary focuses for the day, but there will almost definitely be other smaller tasks you need to accomplish, too. Keep in mind your constraints.

When planning, keep your highest-impact tasks in the back of your mind. And if you decide to try the rule in your personal life (which is worth a shot, especially when you have a lot of personal goals), keep in mind how connected your three accomplishments are with your values.

Set two alarms during your workday. When they go off ask yourself: Do you remember what your three daily goals are? Do you remember your three weekly goals? If you do, are you on track to achieve them?

At the end of the day and week, reflect on how realistic your three ...

Did you have a good understanding of how much time, attention, and energy you would have to accomplish the three items? Reflecting on how realistic you were will l...

perhaps you procrastinate (Part Two of the book), spend too much time on low-impact tasks that get thrown your way (Part Three), don’t spend your time intelligently (Part Four), feel overwhelmed (Part Five), are constantly distracted and can’t focus (Part Six), or don’t properly cultivate how much energy you have (Part Seven). From what I’ve experienced, that is perfectly normal.

your energy levels can fluctuate quite a bit over the course of the day.

After you drink a coffee, you may feel a sudden energy boost, and then an energy crash later on.

your energy levels may crash in the early afternoon,

If you have no fuel in the tank to do good work, or you’re burned out because you don’t cultivate your energy levels throughout the day by eating well or getting enough sleep, your productivity will plummet, regardless of how well you manage your time or attention.

you can work on your highest-impact tasks during your BPT—when you are able to bring the most energy and focus to them—and work on your lower-impact tasks when your energy levels dip.

The most productive people don’t just manage their time well, they also manage their energy and attention well.

Research shows that your brain’s prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for creative thinking—is the most active immediately after you wake up. That means that even if you’re low on energy after you wake up, if you do a lot of creative work, you may want to consider working in the morning instead of when you have the most energy, focus, and motivation.

getting a handle on your body’s natural rhythm is one of the best ways I’ve found to work smarter instead of just harder.

find that you consistently put important things off, you may need to invest in battling procrastination (Chapter 5), working out your attention muscle (Chapter 18), or reducing the number of distractions around you (Chapter 19).

see drinking alcohol as a way of borrowing energy from tomorrow; and because you invariably crash after a caffeine high, drinking caffeine is a way of borrowing energy from later on in the day.