There is nothing better than education if you’re serious about improving your productivity. The first step towards improving your productivity is admitting to yourself that you can do better. The second step is learning how to measure your current productivity levels so you know where you are struggling with managing your time and efforts. In this post, we will take a look at some of the best productivity books to help you improve your performance and manage your time more effectively.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
This book is one of the most popular books when it comes to productivity and becoming a more effective individual. This book has helped people of all levels improve their daily habits and take their productivity to new levels. The 7 habits include:
Habit 1: Be Proactive
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Habit 6: Synergize
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
Who This Book is For?
This book is for people who want to identify their current productivity problems and learn how to re-wire their thought processes to focus on improving their daily habits. It helps you define your path to productivity by focusing on simple principles to help you get there.
Why Read this Book?
You should read this book if you have trouble developing habits in your life that can help you improve your productivity. This book can help you develop the right habits in your life to eliminate poor behavior and focus on improvement.
Quote from the Book
“Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” – Stephen Covey
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
In this book, Charles Duhigg does a great job of breaking down how habits get formed and how they can be changed if the individual wants to change. He strongly believes that the key to improving your productivity and your overall habits is by first understanding how habits work and develop over time.
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Who This Book is For?
This book is for people who want to learn the process behind how forming a habit works and the nature of human behavior to get there. There are great examples that break down how willpower impacts habits and how you can use discipline to create positive long-term habits.
Why Read this Book?
You should read this book because it can help you not only discover the healthy habits of the individual, but also habits of successful organizations and societies. This book does a great job of distinguishing between how these habits differ and how you can tap into them to improve yourself.
Quote from the Book
“If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real.”- Charles Duhigg
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Deep Work offers a very unique approach to becoming productive because it helps you learn the necessary practices that help you to focus deeply on tasks without any distractions. In this book, author and professor, Cal Newport, makes a strong argument about how distracted people are in the 21st century. He goes on to provide proof that deep work is necessary to create quality work, become productive, and get ahead in life.
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Who This Book is For?
This book is for people looking for a guide to help them eliminate unnecessary distractions in their life that are hindering their personal and professional growth. Cal Newport provides simple, yet powerful ways in which you can eliminate distractions in your day-to-day life to maximize your time and develop a deep work ethic.
Why Read this Book?
You should read this book if you have problems focusing on tasks for long periods. It’s also extremely helpful in helping you discover how deep work can help you get ahead in a shorter period of time. This book will teach you the importance of focus and how you can tap into it to improve your productivity at all levels.
Quote from the Book
“Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.” – Cal Newport
Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee
In Do Nothing, by Celeste Headlee, the author advocates for a new approach to taking care of our internal problems. Instead of searching for solutions and the next quick fix gimmick, she urges people to simply take time for themselves without any sort of agenda and redefine what is most important and worthwhile to us. Her approach discusses how we fall into the widespread trap of efficiency and how we get caught up in so much so quickly that we tend to lose what is most important to us.
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Who This Book is For?
This book is great for people who want to learn how we fall into traps when it comes to working and how most people’s lives are centered on working instead of focusing on their self-interests. The book also discusses how we can shift our lives out of the cult of working and back to living our lives.
Why Read this Book?
You should read this book because it will open up your perspective about what we have commonly been taught about work. It can help give perspective on what is important in life and how you can cut certain things out of your life to help make your life simpler.
Quote from the Book
“The truth is, productivity is a by-product of a functional system, not a goal in and of itself. The question is not whether you are productive but what you are producing.” – Celeste Headlee
Indistractable by Nir Eyal
In Indistractable, Nir Eyal reveals the underlying psychology that tends to drive people to distractions. Distractions erode your ability to focus and to remain productive. This book explains why we shouldn’t eliminate things that distract us, but instead how we should learn to effectively manage them.
Who This Book is For?
This book is great if you want to learn why distractions occur in the workplace or when you are doing work and how you can fix it. It touches on important factors in our modern world that make distractions much easier. The book also gives you a proper way of managing distractions so you’re in control of them instead of the other way around.
Why Read this Book?
You should reach this book if you have trouble managing distractions in your day-to-day life and want a solution that will help you get rid of distractions that add no value. It will also help you learn how distractions tend to creep in your life without you even realizing it and how you can become more conscious of them.
Quote from the Book
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” – Nir Eyal
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
Tiny Habits, written by BJ Fogg, a habit expert from Stanford University, discusses his methodology for building effective habits quickly and easily. This book reveals how small subtle changes to your daily routine can slowly improve your productivity with little effort on your part. BJ Fogg reveals step-by-step how you should be designing your habits and making them stick with positive emotional reinforcement while celebrating your milestones.
Who This Book is For?
This book is for people who have trouble forming habits and need an effective way to start building positive habits. If you want to lose weight, get more productive, read more, sleep better or destress, Tiny Habits can help you get started on the right path. By starting small and taking things slow, you can develop habits that can transform your life over the long term.
Why Read this Book?
You should read this book if you want to start developing habits in your life that will help you become more productive. The step-by-step approach discussed in this book is extremely easy to follow and can help anyone develop small but effective habits.
Quote from the Book
“Step 1: Write this phrase on a small piece of paper: I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.” – BJ Fogg
Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt
Free to Focus isn’t just a book, it’s a productivity system on how you can achieve more by simply doing less. Something great that this book points out and helps people to understand is the cost of misspent time and talent. Once you understand how important your ability to focus is, you can take the necessary steps to remove distractions out of your life that doesn’t add value. Some of the things you will learn from this book include:
- How to redefine your work so it works for you
- The optimal way to filter your tasks and prioritize your commitments
- How to eliminate interruptions and distractions
- The right way to set boundaries to protect your focus
- Leveraging your time and energy to gain maximum productivity
- How to build momentum for long term success
Who This Book is For?
This book is for people who want to follow a system that will help them become productive by learning to eliminate things that don’t drive productivity. It’s essential to realize things in your day-to-day that don’t add value to your time. Once you identify these, you learn to properly remove them from your daily habits to improve your productivity long term.
Why Read this Book?
You should read this book if you have trouble managing your time and distractions throughout the day. The lessons in this book will open your eyes to things you aren’t aware of that are making you lose focus every day. Once you eliminate distractions and learn how to redefine your work, you will naturally become more productive over time.
Quote from the Book
“In a world where information is freely available, the focus becomes one of the most valuable commodities in the workplace.”
FAQ’s
Do Productivity Books Work?
Productivity books can have a profound impact on how you manage your time, prioritize your tasks, and leverage how you use your energy. All these factors combined are responsible for your productivity and how productive you can become. The lessons in these books are invaluable in helping you learn how to manage yourself to your full potential.
How Can Books Improve Productivity?
Education paves the way to helping you discover more of yourself. Books can help you discover things you may have never considered before. By learning what kinds of things impact your productivity, you can get gain a better understanding of your struggles and what you can do to change to improve yourself.