Chris Bailey: “The Productivity Project” | Talks @Google

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Published on Jan 17, 2017

Chris Bailey is on a mission to share his journey of exploring his passion: productivity. For a full year he tried everything to become more productive, conducting dozens of productivity experiments on himself. Since then and over the last decade, Bailey has researched and experimented with every technique under the sun to discover what works and what doesn’t. His best selling book, “The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy,” offers insights and best practices that will help everyone accomplish more.

A fresh, personal, and entertaining exploration of a topic that concerns all of us: how to be more productive at work and in every facet of our lives.

Chris 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.

The Productivity Project—and the lessons Chris learned—are the result of that year-long journey. Among the counterintuitive insights Chris Bailey will teach you:
· slowing down to work more deliberately;
· shrinking or eliminating the unimportant;
· the rule of three;
· striving for imperfection;
· scheduling less time for important tasks;
· the 20 second rule to distract yourself from the inevitable distractions;
· and the concept of productive procrastination.
In an eye-opening and thoroughly engaging read, Bailey offers a treasure trove of insights and over 25 best practices that will help you accomplish more.

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