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

by Chris Bailey

Every day we get twenty-four hours to live our lives in a meaningful way.

I just didn’t want to throw the limited time I had into a black hole that did nothing more than provide me with a paycheck every second Friday.

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.

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.

When you have more to do than ever before, less time to do it, and unparalleled freedom and flexibility with how you get it done, productivity is no longer about how efficiently you work. Productivity is about how much you accomplish.

Somewhere toward the end of my project, I arrived at an epiphany: every lesson I learned fell into better management of one of three categories: my time, my attention, and my energy.

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.