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Writer's pictureAudrey Sie

Lessons from a book: The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey

Updated: May 13, 2020

Why I wanted to read this book

Chris Bailey turned down two job offers when he graduated university to do something he loved: experiment on productivity for a whole year. Admittedly, I felt a little envious when I read that. Needless to say, I’m very curious to what he learned in that year, and that is why I picked up his book.

Summary In this book, Chris Bailey shares the lessons he has learned while being his own productivity guinea pig for a year. He advocates slowing down to work more deliberately, he explains why multi-tasking is so, so bad for your productivity, he argues that in this day and age, we are paid for our attention instead of our time, and other interesting insights.I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil too much. :-) It’s an informative yet entertaining read.

How I am applying this book in my own life

  • While I was already aware of the fact that one's energy levels have a major impact on their productivity, for some reason this book gave me the last push to actually start tracking my own energy levels. I found a spreadsheet online, copied it, tweaked it, and now have a system in place to monitor my energy levels. If you want to read more about my energy levels, visit this page [coming soon].

  • Not only tracking your energy can give you more insight in how to plan your days, it is also helpful to track how you spend your time. I have always had conflicted feelings about tracking my time. On the one hand I was very curious to where my time went, on the other hand I was also afraid of the results. Reading Chris’ time tracking results in this book inspired me to finally start tracking my time. Interestingly, I knew I spent quite some time on social media, but the day I started tracking my time, I was less inclined to open the social media apps. In that sense, my time tracker acts as an accountability partner.

  • This book breaks down the mechanism of procrastination. I always thought of procrastination as a lack of discipline, but it’s more nuanced than that. It is actually possible to get rid of procrastination behavior, once you dissect the reason for procrastination. I dedicated a blog post to this topic here.

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