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.

Free to Focus

"Free to Focus" by Michael Hyatt is a productivity book that helps readers identify and eliminate distractions in order to focus on meaningful work. It offers practical advice and tools for achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in both work and life.

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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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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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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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Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional 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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Additional Productivity Reading

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

Deep Work

“Deep work” was coined by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. It refers to the capacity for concentrated, high-quality cognitive activities demanding deep focus, creativity, and problem-solving.

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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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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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Atomic Habits

Atomic Habits by James Clear is a comprehensive, practical guide on how to change your habits and get 1% better every day. Using a framework called the Four Laws of Behavior Change, Atomic Habits teaches readers a simple set of rules for creating good habits and breaking bad ones.

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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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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…

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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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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I helped hundreds of colleagues to become more efficient programmers. Coding, data structures and algorithms, debugging techniques, Sitecore (MVC and JSS), infrastructure design and much more. Whether you build your own startup and need occasional advise or want to improve your job performance to get a promotion - I can …

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  • "Naz is an amazing person and a wonderful mentor. She is supportive and knowledgeable with extensive practical experience. Having been a manager at Netflix, she also knows a ton about working with teams at scale. Highly recommended."

  • "Brandon has been supporting me with a software engineering job hunt and has provided amazing value with his industry knowledge, tips unique to my situation and support as I prepared for my interviews and applications."

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