What It's About

A road-tested formula for improving your professional performance, from one of the business world's most successful and productive executives – with practical suggestions and takeaways in every chapter.

Discover the secrets to professional productivity and high performance. Extreme Productivity is for anyone feeling overwhelmed by their existing workload—facing myriad competing demands and multiple time-sensitive projects. Offering antidotes to a calendar full of boring meetings and a backlog of e-mails, Robert Pozen explains how to determine your highest priorities and match them with how you actually spend your time.

Pozen demonstrates that in order to be truly productive, professionals must make a critical shift in their mind-set: from hours worked to results produced. In a knowledge-based economy, what’s important is what you’ve accomplished, not how many hours you’ve logged at your desk.

Pozen teaches you how to efficiently complete your large projects and quickly move through the small stuff. He shows you how to delegate functions and manage your boss. He helps people at all stages of their careers read, write, and make presentations more effectively. He provides professionals with practical tips on how to efficiently use their time—while leading full and productive personal lives as well.

My Thoughts

I liked it learned new things about how to write properly, I didn’t think that would be included. Learnt about how writing depicts the mind of the writer be it a clear fully organized one or a dramatically chaotic one.

Notes

What’s in it for me? Crank your productivity up to the max.

People believe that increased productivity is going to be exhausting. They believe that they’ll have to work all the time at full capacity to fulfill their ambitions.

The more productive you are, the faster you can finish your work.

Productivity is about developing a certain Zen sense of busyness, expending minimal effort for maximum results.

Prioritize your tasks and invest your time accordingly.

To get yourself thinking more long-term, begin organizing your work.

Split up tasks into aims, objectives, and targets so that you can begin to prioritize.

Priorities are projects on which you’ll spend the majority of your time.

To ensure you’re doing this effectively, you should track your workday monitoring how you allocate your time.

You might discover that you spend lots of time on activities that don’t have much to do with your objectives or targets.

How you allocate your time is crucial to your productivity, which leads to procrastination.

Fight procrastination with mini-deadlines that hold you accountable.

Break your projects into smaller targets for which you can set mini deadlines. Instead of waiting until the last minute to churn out a sloppy piece of caffeine-fueled work, a better approach is to set smaller deadlines that split tasks into more manageable chunks.

That way, you can finish your work step by step, well ahead of its due date. When using this approach, you should set your deadlines at similar intervals and avoid having them pile up at the end.

It’s also key to reward yourself after successfully meeting a deadline. So treat yourself to a nice meal or an interesting book to let yourself know you’ve done well.

Quickly handle low-priority tasks by keeping your perfectionism at bay.

At one time or another, you’ve probably spend so much time on small, simple tasks that you never got around to completing that tasks that truly matter. That’s why, when doing work, it’s important to get the smaller pieces out of the way right off the bat.

Spending too much time on a small, low priority task will waste both your time and your patience. So instead of allocation a lot of time to work that’s not super important, do the simple things quickly to free up more time for the meatier tasks. Ohio principle — only handle at once. Make the decision right away.

Fight the temptation to be perfect when it comes to your low priority tasks. Remember not everything needs to be done flawlessly. You should reserve this privilege for your top-level work.

Handle such tasks accordingly, get through them quickly, and move on to the important stuff.

Write with efficiency by finding structure and quiet.

Anytime you read anything, whether it’s a novel or a blog post, you get a glimpse inside the mind of the author. Pretty quickly, you can ascertain whether that mind is neatly ordered or dramatically chaotic.

And if you yourself are a writer, your readers will learn much about the inner workings of your brain from the flow of your prose. So to improve the efficiency and quality of your writing, you need to ad structure to the process. You can do this by brainstorming, categorizing, and them outlining. In the brainstorm phase, write down whatever thoughts come to mind about the subject. Don’t worry about order and structure. Pain the broadest strokes possible.

Efficient writing isn’t just about structure. It also requires time and quiet. After all, how are you supposed to focus with your phone ringing, emails constantly flying into your inbox, and colleagues pestering you?

The product you deliver matters more than the time you spend on it.

Results are what count. The number of hours spent on any given project is irrelevant. It’s totally irrational to value the number of hours you spend on something over the quality of the result.

Cutting back on long hours, gives more time for private life — whether it means an outing with your family or getting some exercise.

Prioritize your private life and find a flexible place to work.

Most people just work and work and work, thinking that’s the most productive approach. But productivity is about much more than work.

It’s also closely connected to your personal life and general lifestyle. After all, the point of being efficient at work is to make time for your life outside of work. It’s important to prioritize non-work related activities and to stick to the standards you set. This is essential for protecting your personal and family time.

For instance, you could make a rule that you'll always be home by a certain hour. If something urgent comes up that absolutely can't be postponed, make a plan with your boss to finish it from home or come in early to finish it up.

Remember, making sure you have time to spend with your family is essential, whether that means cooking together, sharing a conversation over dinner, or if you have kids, reading them a bedtime story. However you do it, it's key to make sure that you're there for the ones you love. But to make such a goal a reality, you need to show your boss that you're reliable. Build trust with her and she'll allow you to go home earlier or make up time another day. If possible, learn to say no to late meetings. Simply postpone them, making a strong point that you need to go have dinner with your family.

And in the best case scenario, just take a job at a company with flexible working hours.

Final Summary

The key message is productivity relies one efficiency. That means nothing will stop you from becoming a faster, smarter worker if you set clear goals and priorities. This results-driven approach will do away with procrastination, break up big projects, and clearly define your working hours.

Increase your productivity by reading faster. The key to reading faster isn't to read more words per minute, it's to read fewer words in total. To try this out, just pick up a book on a topic that interests you. Read the introduction, then the conclusion, and end by skimming the body for the information you want.

You will almost certainly have gleaned the most important information you were looking for and saved yourself a lot of time.