The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey

Posted April 14, 2016 by shooting in Uncategorized / 12 Comments

The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey


Review by Lauren


source: copy from BloggingForBooks; all opinions are my own


Official Summary-GoodreadsChris Bailey turned down lucrative job offers to pursue a lifelong dream—to spend a year performing a deep dive experiment into the pursuit of productivity, a subject he had been enamored with since he was a teenager. After obtaining his business degree, he created a blog to chronicle a year-long series of productivity experiments he conducted on himself, where he also continued his research and interviews with some of the world’s foremost experts, from Charles Duhigg to David Allen. Among the experiments that he tackled: Bailey went several weeks with getting by on little to no sleep; he cut out caffeine and sugar; he lived in total isolation for 10 days; he used his smartphone for just an hour a day for three months; he gained ten pounds of muscle mass; he stretched his work week to 90 hours; a late riser, he got up at 5:30 every morning for three months—all the while monitoring the impact of his experiments on the quality and quantity of his work. 

Review: I’ve always liked certain nonfiction books, especially memoirs. However, in the last year or so, I have started to branch out and try more nonfiction books that I’ve come across. This was easy to do when I was working at a public library because I’d often browse the shelves or see what other people checked out and returned.

At any rate, when I saw this book available for review, I had to grab a copy! I don’t always read this type of “self-help” books with changing myself in mind, but I do find what they have to say very interesting. Plus, I love this new trend of doing something for a year, experimenting and researching what works best. I discovered this with the book The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and now I try and find similar books when I can. This is what Bailey did to write The Productivity Project. This was a topic he had been fascinated with for years, so it wasn’t new to him.

However, by not accepting any jobs after graduating college and dedicating a whole year to this topic, he had more time and abilities to be able to research productivity and figure out what works and what doesn’t work to make yourself more productive. For example, multi-tasking doesn’t work, even if you think it does. You’re still putting half the effort into each piece of work, instead of fully focusing on one chore/job/assignment. Working less but more diligently is better than working longer hours, because after awhile, you aren’t really working as hard. Longer hours doesn’t equal more work finished. These are just a couple things that Bailey took note of in his book.

Overall, I really liked this book. It was a fairly quick read. There are definitely tips and ideas that I think are worth checking out, especially if I’m involved in a big project. It’s good to know what will make me more effective!

12 responses to “The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey

  1. This sounds like a fascinating book! I've heard of these books where the author spends a year doing something specific but haven't read any of it. I'm always complaining about not being productive enough, so maybe I'll take some advice from this book! Great review! 🙂

  2. I definitely need to branch out into more nonfiction so perhaps I'll start with this one. Great review, Lauren, and thanks for putting this on my radar! 🙂

  3. It sounds like an interesting and helpful book. And productivity is a topic almost everyone cares about. I haven't read a lot of non-fiction books so far as so far I haven't really found many that appealed to em and I don't really know where to start, but if a nonfiction book catches my attention i will give it a try.

  4. The only non-fiction books I can get into are biographies, so I don't know if I'll ever go far with this one. Glad you tried it, and have learned a thing or two in the end.

  5. Oh vey, yes on the multi tasking point. I do it all of the time. There are about 10 things going on at once around here and I never enjoy it and actually feel like I might lose my mind while doing it!

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