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

by Chris Bailey

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

What Tim said during our first conversation set me more at ease than anything I had heard in a long time: “Everyone procrastinates.” Procrastination is simply human nature. Piers Steel, the author of The Procrastination Equation, backs that up, explaining that “across scores of surveys, about 95 percent of people admit to procrastinating.” (The other 5 percent are lying.)

Rita Emmett, the author of The Procrastinator’s Handbook, summed this up well in what she labeled Emmett’s law: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”

When you’re on your deathbed, you’re going to look back with satisfaction at all the cool and meaningful things you’ve accomplished, not that you stayed on top of your email.

Multitasking makes you less productive because it makes you more prone to errors, adds stress to your work, takes longer because it costs you time and attention to switch between tasks, and even affects your memory;

While our brains have evolved a bit since the Stone Age—2.5 million years ago—our bodies haven’t. Our bodies are built to walk five to nine miles every day to hunt and gather food, not to spend fifty-two hours staring at screens every week.