Top Productivity books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Productivity books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Productivity

Understanding the concepts of Productivity starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

23 Anti-Procrastination Habits: How to Stop Being Lazy and Get Results in Your Life S. J. Scott

In the book "23 Anti-Procrastination Habits", you will discover a catalog of ideas to help you overcome procrastination on a daily basis. Whereas many books provide a simple list of tips, you'll learn why a specific strategy works, what limiting belief it eliminates and how it can be immediately applied to your life.

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Zen to Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System

Zen To Done is a simple system to get you more organized and productive, and keep your life saner and less stressed, with a set of habits. ZTD teaches you: * The key habits needed to be productive, organized, and simplified... and no more than that. * How to implement these key habits... tips on forming a habit. * How to organize these habits into a simple system that will keep everything in y…

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The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

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 a…

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Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

This latest book by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is not your normal bag of productivity tips and tricks to help you get more done in the office. It’s about “making time” for things that truly matter to you — like being fully present around your children, or writing that book you’ve always wanted to. It’s about distilling focus across all your activities so that you can live a fuller life.

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Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

Jeff Sutherland discloses to the non-tech world the elegantly simple process that programmers and web developers have been using since he invented Scrum, showing how a small, empowered, and dedicated team can deliver significantly higher quality work at a faster pace through introspection, iteration, and adaptation.”

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Eat that frog

Eating that frog means tackling your most challenging task—and it's also the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life. Productivity and time management coach Brian Tracy shows you how to organize each day so you can zero in on these critical tasks and accomplish them efficiently and effectively.

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Additional Productivity Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Productivity, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours

With Extreme Productivity, Pozen explains how individuals can maximize their time and energy by determining and focusing on their highest priorities. He also provides a toolkit of practical tips and techniques to help professionals at all stages of their careers maximize their time at work.

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Work Less, Do More: Designing the 4-Day Week Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

A must read for anyone interested in the 4-day week' - Heejung Chung, professor at the University of Kent and author of The Flexibility Paradox'This invaluable book offers a clear way we don't need to burn ourselves out, we can work less and get more done' - Rebecca Seal, author of How To Work Alone (And Not Lose Your Mind)The 4-day week is no longer just an idea. Following successful trials i…

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The 80/20 Principle

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. In other words, a small percentage of causes have an outsized effect. This concept is important to understand because it can help you identify which initiatives to prioritize so you can make the most impact.

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The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Work Week is all about how to change the way readers look at how they live and work and why they should challenge old assumptions. The author writes from a unique vantage point. He created a life and a career he chose out of consistently questioning the traditional assumptions about life and work.

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The Checklist Manifesto

What is The Checklist Manifesto about? Drawing from his experience as a general surgeon, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto (2009) reveals startling evidence on how using a simple checklist can significantly reduce human error in complex professions such as aviation, engineering and medicine.

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High output management

A topic covered in High Output Management is for managers to choose Key Performance Indicators to help their team achieve results. Managers are responsible for ensuring their teams have KPIs linked to the company OKRs. Managers can also create both team and individual KPIs to measure what gets done.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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Started my career in aerospace as a systems engineer before converting to product management at Google. Over my time at NASA, Google, Uber, and others I've built a successful toolkit of approaches to diverse and complicated product problems. I specialize in mentoring career transitions into product management and converting teams …

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Do you feel overlooked? Do you believe you could perform at a higher level if you were given the opportunity? And yet, you are surrounded by incompetent managers who have been promoted above their capabilities? Nothing frustrates me more than this situation. To think they're not seeing your potential, that …

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As a highly experienced software engineer, I have a proven track record of success in the internet industry. I am proficient in a range of technical skills, including machine learning, data mining, feature selection, big data, and programming languages such as C++, Java, and Python. I hold a Ph.D in …

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Are you ready to take your engineering leadership to the next level? As a Google engineering leader who helped shape sustainable travel features used by millions, I'm passionate about developing technical leaders who create meaningful impact. Who I Work With: * Engineering managers leading rapidly scaling teams * Senior ICs …

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Hi! My name is Svilen and I am a Senior Software Engineer at Oracle, Switzerland. I offer mentorships on a variety of topics, particularly for people aspiring to learn more about the tech world and the big tech industry. I focus on helping mentees grow their technical skills, acquire new …

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With 12+ years across Amazon, startups, and high-growth industries, I’ve built programs, scaled marketplaces, and led global teams. At Amazon, I hired and built a team of 8 members from scratch (conducting 120+ interviews), launched 20+ projects across Europe to reduce customer returns and improve brand protection, tripled SaaS revenue …

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