The Productivity Project

Key Concepts

Productivity = management of time, attention, and energy

“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.” (p. 14)

“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.” (p. 15)

“Managing your time becomes important only after you understand how much energy and focus you will have throughout the day and define what you want to accomplish.” (p. 92)

“But studies show that after roughly thirty-five or forty hours, your productivity begins to plummet.” (p. 96)

It’s not about doing a lot; it’s about doing what’s most important

“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? When you accomplish what you intend to, and you’re realistic and deliberate about the productivity goals you set, in my opinion you are productive.” (p. 29)

“Put another way, there are certain tasks in your work that, minute for minute, lead you to accomplish more.” (p. 30)

“The absolute best technique I’ve found to work deliberately and with intention every day is the Rule of 3. The rule is simple: at the beginning of each day, before you start working, decide what three things you want to accomplish by the end of the day. Do the same at the start of every week.” (p. 36)

Identifying one’s “biological prime time” (peak energy), protecting it from distractions,  and then putting the most important tasks during that window leads to a big productivity boost

“When you take the time to observe how your energy fluctuates over the course of the day, you can work on your highest-impact tasks during your Biological Prime Time—when you are able to bring the most energy and focus to them. In a similar way, tracking how you spend your time over a week will let you see how intelligently you use your time, and how well you focus throughout the day.” (p. 43)

“The best time of day by far to work on your highest-impact tasks is during your Biological Prime Time. The reason for this goes without saying: during your BPT, you bring at least double the energy and focus to whatever it is you’re working on.” (p. 102)

“Quick productivity win: Right now, jump into Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or whatever your calendar of choice is, and block off your BPTs for the next several weeks. Make sure you set a reminder thirty and fifteen minutes before your prime time is about to start, and use that as a cue that you’re about to hunker down on one of your most important and highest-impact tasks.” (p. 103)

Distractions kill productivity; disconnecting from the internet can help

“The best way I have found to prevent the internet from wasting my time has been to simply disconnect from it when working on a demanding or unappealing task.” (p. 78)

“Though studies like Tim’s show us how much time we waste every day on the internet, they don’t account for one more huge impact on your productivity: the internet tempts us to work on lower-impact tasks. Though we are technically working when we do things like continually check our email, we’re not as productive, because we don’t accomplish as much through those tasks.” (p. 80)

Shrink the time you invest in lower leverage tasks

“By controlling how much time you spend on a task, you control how much energy and attention you spend on it.” (p. 95)

“Every single support task in your work can be either shrunk, delegated, or even, in a few rare cases, eliminated entirely. After you have a better grip on how much time and attention you spend on your problem tasks, the maintenance tasks in your work are a lot easier to deal with.” (p. 123)

One can be more productive by emptying the brain

“Externalizing your tasks and writing them down is a powerful way to free up mental space and get organized. Performing a “brain dump” not only reduces stress and helps you focus, it also motivates you to action.” (p. 147)

Give you mind time to wander to be more creative

“Giving your mind the time and space to wander lets you carve out more attentional space, think more deeply about everything on your plate, and as many studies show, help you work smarter instead of just harder.” (p. 169)

Build your attention muscle to boost productivity

“Research shows we only focus on what’s in front of us 53 percent of the time. Developing a strong “attention muscle” is what makes it possible to focus more on the task at hand, which lets us spend our time and attention more efficiently in the moment.” (p. 179)

Better decisions about food, drink, and exercise are also important

“Luckily, what is good for your brain is good for your body. To drink for energy, drink fewer alcoholic and sugary drinks, drink more water (which is incredible for your brain health), and learn to drink caffeine strategically, when you’ll actually benefit from the energy boost—not habitually.” (p. 225)

“Biochemically speaking, exercise allows your brain to fight stress in a productive and controlled way.” (p. 239)

“Nurturing your energy levels will ultimately save you time, because you’ll be able to bring more energy and focus to your work, and get the same amount accomplished in less time.” (p. 242)

Quotables

“Productivity is what makes the difference between someone who runs a company and the employees who work for her.”(p. 3)

“I’m going to present you with a crazy idea that will begin to make more and more sense the deeper you dive into this section of the book: if you want to become more productive, managing your time should take a backseat to how you manage your energy and attention.” (p. 90)

“After slogging through one ninety-hour week and one twenty-hour week, I quickly discovered something breathtaking when I was looking through my experiment logs: I accomplished only a bit more working ninety-hour weeks than I did in my twenty-hour weeks.” (p. 94)

“The second invaluable lesson I discovered from the experiment was that even though on paper I accomplished about the same in both long and short weeks, I felt twice as productive working longer hours.” (p. 95)

“My Maintenance Day ritual is incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful: throughout the week, I simply collect all of my low-return maintenance tasks on a list—everything from going grocery shopping to cutting my nails—and instead of doing them throughout the week, I do them all at once.” (p. 110)

“During the productivity project, I found that email was sucking up a ton of my time, so in addition to blocking off three periods throughout the day to focus on emptying my inbox, I also made a rule that every single email I sent would be five sentences or less. I simply made a note of my actions in my email signature (“For your benefit and mine, I keep every email I send to 5 sentences or less”), to be as transparent as possible.” (p. 128)

“When I found it hard to make a response shorter than five sentences, I discovered it was a cue that a phone call was usually a more productive way to handle the matter, anyway.” (p. 129)

“One of the most memorable experiments I conducted during my project was to use my smartphone for only an hour a day for three months.” (p. 170)

THE WANDERING CHALLENGE: “My challenge for you this time is to let your mind wander for at least fifteen minutes tomorrow, and to capture any valuable thoughts, ideas, or things you have to do that break through your attentional barrier.” (p. 175)

THE NOTIFICATION CHALLENGE: “I challenge you to dive into the settings on your phone, computer, tablet, smartwatch, and every other device you own, and disable notification alerts on them all.” (p. 189)

“In addition to drinking caffeine at more strategic times, here are a few suggestions for drinking caffeine strategically in general: (p. 231)

• “Don’t drink any sugary or alcoholic caffeinated drinks. They’ll only cause you to crash quicker and harder.” (p. 231)

• “Be careful about drinking caffeine before working on a creative task, because caffeine has been shown to hurt your performance with tasks that involve creativity.”

• “Be mindful that you don’t consume caffeine less than eight to fourteen hours before bed, so it doesn’t affect your sleep.” (p. 231)

“Every morning, the very first thing I do after waking up is to drink a liter of water. And on most days I don’t stop drinking water until I go to bed.” (p. 232)

“During my project, I came up with a simple rule to live by for sleep and productivity: for every hour of sleep I missed out on, I lost two hours of productivity. This rule has no scientific backing whatsoever—from what I experienced, the negative effects can be even greater—but as far as pseudoscientific rules go, I think this is a pretty good one.” (p. 246)

“Create a nighttime ritual. ...Don’t be afraid to have some fun with it: your nighttime routine should be custom-built to be both relaxing and meaningful to you, and let you ease out of the day and into the next one. I worked meditation, reflection time, and more into mine.” (p. 249)

“Expose yourself to less blue light. ...To combat this, I recommend a nightly electronics shutoff ritual, where you shut off your electronics two to three hours before bed (this also helps you switch off your autopilot switch and begin slowing down).” (p. 249)