Insights on Boosting Productivity: 'Smarter Faster Better' Review Summary

This books addresses many topics, such as teams, decision making, processing data, and creativity. The highlight of this books is it starts with real world scenarios and discusses the specific skill.

Great examples of how small incremental changes can lead to big changes. Use an engineering mindset to breakdown problems and estimate the future impact like when someone asks you to do them a favor. Use data in any context to understand and identify trends. A 1% change every week can lead to a 52% change over the year. Lots of great examples and how to apply them to your life and work.

Heavy on story telling. Light on science/advice.
(20 pages about the history of The West Side Story, 40 pages about the history of Frozen, etc)

1. Productivity is about making choices: The most productive people don't necessarily work harder than others; they work smarter by making better choices about how to spend their time and energy.

2. Focus on your goals: The most productive people are clear about what they want to achieve and have a plan for reaching their goals.

3. Use mental models: Productive people use mental models to help them make better decisions. Mental models are frameworks or tools that help you think about problems in a more structured way.

4. Build mental toughness: To be productive, you need to develop mental toughness. This means being able to stay focused, motivated, and resilient in the face of obstacles and distractions.

5. Create good habits: Productivity is about creating good habits that help you stay on track and make progress towards your goals. Good habits are automatic and don't require a lot of willpower.

6. Use small wins: Productive people use small wins to stay motivated and build momentum. Small wins are small, achievable goals that help you feel like you're making progress.

7. Manage your energy, not your time: Productivity is not just about managing your time; it's also about managing your energy. You need to take care of your physical, emotional, and mental energy to be productive.

8. Embrace disfluency: Disfluency is the idea that making things a little bit harder for yourself can actually improve your productivity. For example, taking notes by hand instead of typing them can help you remember more.

9. Use stretch goals: Stretch goals are goals that are just out of reach but still achievable. They can help you push yourself to do more and achieve more than you thought possible.

10. Collaborate effectively: Productivity is not just about working hard by yourself; it's also about collaborating effectively with others. You need to be able to communicate well, build trust, and leverage the strengths of your team.

I’m a sucker for self-improvement books. This one isn’t bad, but it goes on a bit too long and lacks a cohesive focus. If you were to set about writing a book on improving productivity, you might break the concept of productivity down, study all the aspects, come up with illustrative case studies, and present them as a coherent whole.

The author does present plenty of interesting case studies, and many have something to do with productivity. However, I’m not getting the gestalt. It seems more likely the author had done a lot of research into fascinating events and people, threw them all together, and then decided on the subject of the book.

I guess I was looking for something more like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, but focusing on productivity.

That said, the various pieces of advice given in the book seem sound, and I hope to become more productive as a result.

I was prepared to like this book but it is top-heavy with facts and testimonials, and I just got too bored to continue. I almost never do that. Now, I feel both bored and guilty about it but glad I only paid $5.