Part of our Books that Build Business series

For most consultants, we are our business. We live it, breathe it, eat it. Whether a soloist or leading a team, we are IT. And how we “show up” in our business has a HUGE impact on its success. The plans we make, whether we actually carry out those plans, and how effectively we carry them out determine our success.

Here are five productivity books that can help you improve how you “show up” and, if taken to heart, can make a big impact on your success. The ideas they offer just might be the “missing link” in your current productivity management system or help you build an altogether new system.

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. (AMAZON)

I read this book shortly after it came out in 2013, and it didn’t grab me. Then I reread it last year as part of a rethink of my business, and everything changed. It really hit home. I guess I was ready to hear this book’s message about focus, discipline, and habit.

The book’s core assumptions are that (1) our biggest successes come when we focus on a few important things, (2) “success is built sequentially” one thing at a time, and (3) “getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life.” Find the lead domino and work at it until it falls, which topples the next domino, and the next, and the next. Success builds toward even greater success.

The heart of the book is a focusing question: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” There are a handful of things that make a difference in any area of life, and in business, allow us to produce extraordinary results. The one thing is about picking the best one and concentrating your energies on tackling it. “Blocking” a significant amount of time (four hours minimum) and focusing your attention on completing it. The catchphrase that they suggest you adopt is, “until my one thing is done, everything else is a distraction.”

You may scoff at the idea of devoting four hours a day to anything. It may not fit the I’m-too-busy or I-gotta-multitask narratives that we all get sucked into at times. But Keller and Papasan make a convincing argument that we have wildly inaccurate notions about how many hours we work and that too much of our time and energy are dissipated on nonessential things. They argue that “[if] disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time.”

The introductory chapters outline the one thing concept and its link to success. But the bulk of the book is devoted to laying out approaches, habits, and environments that can support you in finding that “disproportionate time” to invest in pursuing the one thing that will produce those disproportionate results.

Part 1 discusses six lies that can derail us. Part 2 outlines the path to productivity (read: success). Part 3 is about living a life focused on extraordinary results. The last chapter focuses on putting the one thing approach to work across your life domains – work, family, volunteer activities, and so forth.

Keller has plenty of success credibility to back up his ideas, having built the world’s largest real estate firm. Thankfully, the book is free of the chest-thumping and self-promotion we might otherwise expect from a book in the successful-businessperson-turned-author genre.

For me, the “focusing question” was well worth the price of admission. Everything else in this book was gravy. Who wouldn’t want to live a life focused on the things that contribute to extraordinary results, and that render “easier or unnecessary” those extraneous activities that would otherwise divert your time and consume life energy?

The ONE Thing will be the subject of this month’s Books that Build Business discussion for our workshop/course alumni and Practice Accelerator members on January 26 @ 3 PM Eastern.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport (AMAZON)

If you’re wondering how to find uninterrupted blocks of time to focus on your one thing, Deep Work provides the answer, in-depth (no pun intended). Newport distinguishes between “deep” and “shallow” work. “Deep work” is cognitively demanding or creative work that benefits from time devoted to distraction-free concentration. He says, “these efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” “Shallow work” is non-cognitively demanding, often logistical style tasks that can typically be done in distracting environments. Often it’s necessary work, but work that is easily replicated or done by others.

The first part of the book describes what deep work is – why it’s rare, challenging, valuable, and meaningful. The second part details strategies for carving out and arranging time blocks for this high-value work.

Newport outlines four philosophies for scheduling deep work, encouraging you to choose the one that best fits your work life and deep work objectives. Echoing the One Thing, he talks about turning your deep work into habits.

To get started, he encourages the reader to consider making a “grand gesture” – a radical environmental change “involving a significant investment of effort or money” to reinforce the importance of your deep work and boost motivation and energy.

Unlike breathless go-go success books, Newport speaks to the importance of boredom and downtime to replenish our capacities and train ourselves to engage in the deep concentration required by deep work. He argues that social media, among other influences, has diminished our ability to concentrate. Thus, we need to train ourselves to recover this skill.

And there’s a chapter on “quitting social media,” which is more about putting social media in its appropriate place in your life. I resonated with his encouragement to use a “craftsman approach to tool selection,” adopting only those tools that make a positive impact on success and happiness.

Wanting to change my priority-setting and attention-management systems, I found Deep Work a perfect companion to the One Thing. I use the deep-shallow distinction for arranging my workday (deep mornings, shallow afternoons), setting priorities in both those areas. This replaced my good but cumbersome seven-time-block system.

True to form for a university professor, the book is based on research and well documented. Not so true to form, it’s a very readable book, free of dense academic prose.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg Mckeown (AMAZON)

Some, myself included, view this book as a companion to The One Thing. There are a lot of overlapping ideas, but not so many that the books are interchangeable.

The central idea behind Essentialism is living by design, not by default. Using “a disciplined, systemic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things [essential to achieving it] almost effortless.” Along the way, distinguishing “the vital few from the trivial many,” eliminating the nonessentials, and removing obstacles “so the essential things have a clear, smooth passage.” In short, it’s about getting the right things done.

The bulk of the book addresses how to do that – developing the mindset, approaches and habits of an essentialist. Throughout, Mckeown has included tables that contrast the essentialist mindset and behaviors from those of the non-essentialist.

I found that binary contrast helpful. Not so much for what was in the tables, but for the distinction itself. It gives me pause to ask whether the thing I’m about to do is genuinely essential, and do I have a direct line of sight between this thing and my choice about my highest point of contribution. Also, it reminds me that becoming an essentialist is an antidote to our “too-many-things-all-the-time society.”

Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals

by Michael Hyatt (AMAZON)

Hyatt takes a decidedly personal development approach with this book. (He’s a former corporate CEO turned leadership coach.) Two of his five steps delve into mindset, with three chapters devoted to the impact of beliefs and another three about making peace with the past and dealing with regrets.

These initial chapters clear the mental clutter and set the stage for the third step which is about designing your future. On it, he offers an interesting take on SMART goals, proposing that they be “SMARTER,” adding an “E” and another “R,” which stand for “exciting” and “risky.”

Hyatt argues that the “R” in SMART, usually standing for “realistic,” lulls us into setting our bar too low. He cites Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s seminal research that “there is a linear relationship between the degree of goal difficulty and performance.” Across a variety of studies, they found “the performance of participants with the highest goals was over 250% higher than those with the easiest.”

He also points out that Daniel Kahneman’s work on risk aversion says we are more strongly driven to avoid losses than to achieve gains. Thus, “the aversion to failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than a desire to achieve it.” Both are sound arguments for raising the bar above our comfort zone.

It’s not about clearing the bar. It’s about who you become in the process. Setting the bar high, even if you fail, in the attempt, you will have accomplished a lot more than if you had set the bar too low.

The fourth step is about connecting your future back to your “why,” which influences goal commitment and motivation. The fifth step is about connecting the dots from the previous steps.

I appreciated that Hyatt cites the supporting research, which we often don’t see in business books in this genre.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

by Laura Vanderkam (AMAZON)

If you’re just beginning your productivity-improvement journey or you learn best when the ideas are wrapped inside a lot of stories, this might be the book for you. I came across 168 Hours as I was looking for someone who addresses the every-so-pervasive life-balance question, and I think Vanderkam does a good job. (She has written extensively on time management and related topics.)

As the title implies, this book’s central point is a question: “what are you doing with your 168 hours?” (Which is the total number of hours in everyone’s week.)

Part 1 outlines the misconceptions about how much we work and the myth of the time crunch. Like Deep Work, 168 Hours documents that our notions about how much time we spend working and not having enough time for other things are more misconception than reality. Hence the subtitle, “you have more time than you think.”

Part 2 explores what it means to have the right job and love the job you have unless it’s a terrible mismatch. Part 3 is about rewriting the “home” work story through balancing and outsourcing. And Part 4 is about “the hard work of having it all.” For this, the tool she suggests is tracking all of your 168 hours in a week to face up to the harsh reality of how you are actually spending your time.

I liked her “100 dreams exercise” (what do you want to do more of with your time) and her exploration of core competencies. Both resonate with what we have been teaching for years inside of our Launching Your Consulting Practice course.

Conclusion & Recommendations

Over the years, I have tried just about every productivity-enhancing approach that’s come along. Through this journey I’ve concluded: (1) select only tools that fit you – fit your personality, your work, and your life outside of work. (2) Keep it simple, otherwise you might spend too much time tending your productivity system at the expense of doing productive work. And (3) to be effective, any productivity management system must be a system. Meaning that it must manage all the elements of the productivity cycle:

• Intentions – defining vision and mission and setting high-impact goals and priorities.
• Attention – managing your attention so you remain focused on the right things.
• Action – deploying your energies and other resources and concentrating your efforts on those right things.
• Reflection – assessing impact, learning from experience, recalibrating your strategies, and setting the next round of goals and priorities.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts for how to use these books to improve or build a productivity management system:

• If you’re just getting started with your exploration of productivity tools, or you’re grappling with life balance challenges, then 168 Hours is a great place to start.
• If you need help to set better, higher impact priorities and carve out the time to focus on them, then The ONE Thing is an excellent choice.
• If you want to amp up your focus on the most essential work, then Deep Work might provide the answers you seek.
• If you find yourself year after year, getting easily derailed and diverted from your goals, Your Best Year Ever may offer solutions. The in-depth treatment of mindset and the book’s personal development focus can help replace limiting beliefs with beliefs that are more supportive of success.
• If you want to de-clutter your life, sort through the trivial many to find the vital few, then Essentialism might be just the ticket.

I use a combination of approaches from The ONE Thing, Deep Work, and Essentialism. I use The ONE Thing methodology to think through my intentions and set goals and priorities. As I mentioned, I use the deep-shallow distinction from Deep Work to organize my schedule, focus my attention, and concentrate my energies on the most important things on both the deep and shallow lists. (“Shallow” refers to the depth of concentration required not to the importance of the work.) Essentialism helped me frame a work-life-decluttering of my priorities, office setup, toolkit, social media – just about everything. And daily, it provides a mental check to ensure that I’m focused on the “vital few.”

For now, this is a system that suits me and how I work and live. But your needs may be entirely different. Experiment and use the “craftsman approach to tool selection” from Deep Work to critically examine what tools and approaches are essential to your business and life.

A quick reminder, it’s not in the reading, it’s in the implementation. My suggestion is to pick one book that resonates with you – the book you think will make the biggest improvement in your productivity management system. Then pick one promising idea from that book and implement it. Try it out. Keep it if it works. Rinse and repeat.

DISCLOSURE: The Amazon links above are “affiliate links,” which means Jeff Bezos drops a few coins in our cup for each purchase, but there’s no additional cost to the purchaser.