So this is another episode of Five Lessons,

which is a little mini show here

on this channel where I take useful lessons

from a book that I have read recently

and share them with you, and on today's episode,

I'm going to be sharing some lessons

from The Productivity Project,

which is a book that tries to cover productivity

in kind of a general sense.

Now, I haven't read a whole lot of other books

that are huge overviews of productivity.

I've definitely gotten into more specific books

on things like habits, but I haven't really read

any of the other general productivity books out there

so I can't really make a comparison here.

That being said, I really enjoyed this book

and I wanted to provide you with

five of the best lessons that I took from it,

starting with the first one,

which is actually the subtitle of the book:

Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time,

Attention, and Energy, and that's really

Chris' main idea in this book,

which is that productivity is the product

of managing your time, attention, and energy equally,

and these three resources are vitally important

and they are all equally important.

Now in past generations where people

worked in factories or when they worked on farms,

time was the most important element.

You punched in at the right time,

you did work that wasn't incredible mentally taxing,

didn't require a whole lot of creativity,

and there weren't a whole lot of distractions

to kind of pull you away from that work,

so time really was the most important aspect.

But today, more of us are doing creatively

demanding work that requires a lot more knowledge,

requires a lot more brain power, and because of that,

our energy and our attention are just as important

as our time, and I think this is really important

to think about deliberately because time management

is probably the aspect that is most asked about

and most focused on, but when you have

a productivity problem, it's just as important

to ask yourself, "Am I managing my energy correctly?

"Am I managing my attention correctly?

"Or am I trying to put in too many hours

"and trying to brute force my way to more productivity?"

And learning this and kind of integrating into your life

will help you to do things like

take more regular breaks,

to pay more attention to your health,

to sleep, to get more hydration,

to go exercise.

Even though these things take away

from the raw amount of hours you can work,

they're going to make you more productive.

So lesson number one, this is the big overview

of the book, when you're trying to make

yourself more productive, try to consider

all three of these factors.

So the second lesson that I wanted to share

with you from this book is that

there are six procrastination triggers,

basically facets or aspects of a task

that make your brain more averse to doing them.

So the six triggers are whether a task

is boring, difficult, frustrating,

unstructured or ambiguous,

lacking in personal meaning,

and lacking in intrinsic value,

such as it's fun or it's intriguing to do.

So the next time you find yourself procrastinating,

you can sit down and ask yourself,

"For this task that I don't want to do,

"which of these triggers are present?

"Is it boring?

"Well, maybe I can change my location

"and go to a coffee shop that makes it

"more fun to work on.

"Is it frustrating or is it unstructured?

"Well maybe I can break it down

"into some concretely defined steps,

"and then tell myself this is the very next step

"to work on, I have a very clear vision

"in my mind of what the road is forward,

"and now I can start working on it."

The third lesson that I took from this book

is that each of us has our own

individual time during the day

where both our energy levels and our ability

to focus are highest.

It's not the same across the board,

and Chris calls this the Biological Prime Time,

and he discovered his own Biological Prime Time

through the results of two different experiments.

First, he took the often cited advice

that the early bird gets the worm

and tried an experiment where he woke up

at 5:30 AM every single morning thinking,

"This will obviously make me an all-powerful

"productivity robot."

And the results of that experiment

where diametrically opposed to those expectations.

Chris found that, number one, he absolutely hated

getting up at 5:30 in the morning,

and hated going to bed as early as he needed to

to get up and get enough sleep,

but also, it really didn't make him

any more productive than he usually was.

So he scrapped that experiment

and did a second one where he recorded

his energy levels at each hour throughout the day

for a certain number of days.

And what he found that was for him,

between 10 AM and noon, and then five PM

to eight PM, his energy levels

and his ability to focus were highest.

So, as a result, he now considers that time sacred

and he tries to schedule his most important,

most challenging, and most boring work

during those hours.

He doesn't put meetings there,

he doesn't put any sort of like

maintenance tasks there.

All those tasks are relegated to the other hours

when his ability to focus is a little bit lower.

Now the fourth lesson from this book

is a really interesting one that I had actually

not heard of at all before,

and it's that our future selves

are actually the same as strangers

to our present selves' perception.

Chris talked to a UCLA researcher

who put people in brain scanning machines

and asked them to think about strangers

and then to think about both their present selves

and their future selves.

And what he found is that when people

think about strangers, they actually have

the same brain scans, the same activity

in the same brain regions as when they think

about their future selves.

And by contrast, when they think about

their present selves, their brain scans

are quite different, which shows that

when we think about our present selves,

we do not consider the same limitations,

the same stresses, the same stuff we're going through

right now, even though, logically,

we can tell ourselves that the future

version of ourself will probably

be going through those same things.

So what Chris actually did is he used

an app called Aging Booth to create

an old-looking picture of himself,

basically himself in several years,

and he put it up on his wall.

Now, I did that, and I'm probably

not gonna put this on my wall,

but it did teach me to start to deliberately think

about what my schedule's going to look like

a few weeks in advance because,

if I don't think about it deliberately,

I can think, "Oh, my future self

"is going to be totally carefree,

"there's nothing gonna be going on.

"Sure, I'll take that meeting in two months

"or three months," even though, logically,

I can look at my calendar three months ago,

I can look at my calendar now,

and I know that my schedule does not

get less busy over time.

The opposite is true.

And the fifth and final lesson

from this book is actually something

that Chris learned himself from David Allen,

the author of another book called

Getting Things Done, and it's to have

an addition to your task list,

your to-do list, a waiting for list.

Basically, a list of all the things

that you're waiting on someone else to do

before you can take action on it

or before it can be finished.

So if somebody owes you money

or waiting for someone to respond to an email,

maybe you're waiting for a package

to be delivered, these are all things

that kind of weigh on your mind,

they're things that have, sort of,

a part in your life, but you can't

do anything to resolve them right now.

So it's good to have a separate list of those things

and to check it maybe once or twice

a month at least, just to make sure

that for everything where the ball

isn't currently in your court,

it does come back and it doesn't

slip through the cracks.

So, those are five of the lessons

I learned from The Productivity Project.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book

and I found that it was a pretty good overview

of many of the different problems we face

when trying to be productive.

If you want to see other recommendations

I have for books that I think every student should read,

you can check out my Essential Books for Students list,

which you can get to by clicking

the card on the screen right now

or the link down in the description.

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