The Productivity Project

Chris Bailey, a self-described productivity obsessive, spent the better part of a decade experimenting with productivity techniques before graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa with a business degree, a Co-op Student of the Year Award, and two full-time job offers. Rather than accept either position, he declined both in May 2013 and launched a self-funded yearlong research project called A Year of Productivity (AYOP). With roughly $10,000 Canadian in savings and $19,000 in student loans, Bailey set out to read extensively, interview experts, and conduct experiments on himself, publishing what he learned on his website. His experiments ranged from meditating 35 hours in one week to working 90-hour weeks, living in total isolation, and drinking only water for a month. The Productivity Project distills the 25 tactics he finds most impactful from the thousands he encountered over a decade.

Bailey begins by redefining productivity itself. Early in AYOP, he abandoned his daily meditation practice because he saw it as the opposite of getting things done. His output suffered almost immediately: Without the calm and clarity meditation provided, he worked on autopilot, unable to step back and identify what mattered. This experience leads him to reject the factory-era equation of productivity with efficiency, arguing instead that modern knowledge work demands the management of three interconnected ingredients: time, attention, and energy. Mismanaging any one undermines the others. Wasting time amounts to procrastination, poor attention management produces distraction, and neglecting energy leads to burnout.

Before improving how you manage those resources, Bailey argues, you must determine what to be productive on. Drawing on Brian Tracy's Eat That Frog, he recommends listing all responsibilities and identifying the three tasks through which you contribute the most value, applying the Pareto Principle (the idea that roughly 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of effort). He then introduces the "Rule of 3," adapted from J. D. Meier's Getting Results the Agile Way: At the start of each day and week, mentally fast-forward to the end and identify three things you want to have accomplished. Finally, Bailey describes tracking his energy levels hourly for three weeks while eliminating caffeine, alcohol, and sugar, discovering windows of peak energy he calls his Biological Prime Time (BPT), a term from Sam Carpenter's Work the System. Scheduling highest-impact tasks during BPT, he argues, is one of the simplest ways to work smarter.

Bailey then addresses procrastination, the main obstacle to good intentions. His own time log revealed six hours of procrastination during a week when the TED blog described him as someone who "might be the most productive man you'd ever hope to meet" (55). Citing researcher Tim Pychyl, author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, Bailey identifies six task attributes that trigger procrastination: boring, frustrating, difficult, unstructured, lacking in personal meaning, and lacking in intrinsic rewards. On a neurological level, procrastination occurs when the limbic system, the brain's older emotional center, overpowers the prefrontal cortex, the newer region responsible for logic and planning. His primary counterstrategy is to flip these triggers, making aversive tasks more appealing. He also cites UCLA researcher Hal Hershfield, whose brain-scan studies showed that people thinking about their future selves activated nearly the same neural patterns as when thinking about strangers, leading them to overburden tomorrow's self with work. To counter this disconnect, Bailey recommends visualization apps and mental exercises that create vivid images of a more productive future self.

The internet poses another major threat. During a three-month experiment using his smartphone for only one hour per day, Bailey found that disconnecting both reclaimed wasted time and removed the temptation to default to low-impact tasks like email and social media. He adopted a daily ritual of shutting off his phone between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. and switching devices to airplane mode during focused work.

Bailey challenges the primacy of time management by describing how he alternated between 90-hour and 20-hour workweeks and accomplished only slightly more during the longer weeks, because abundant time led to lower energy and focus per minute. He concludes that limiting time on a task creates urgency and forces greater investment, citing research suggesting optimal productivity at 35 to 40 hours per week. He designs his routine around BPT, blocking peak energy windows for high-impact work, and groups low-return recurring tasks into a single weekly "Maintenance Day," freeing the rest of his week for important work.

As AYOP gained momentum, Bailey's email volume jumped from 30 messages a day to hundreds. He responds by recommending that readers shrink and eliminate low-impact tasks: capping email at three scheduled checks per day, limiting meetings to four hours per week, and delegating whatever cannot be reduced. He also argues the word "no" is among the most productive in any vocabulary, citing Greg McKeown's Essentialism and its "90 percent rule": If a new opportunity does not rank 90 or above on a scale of 1 to 100, decline it.

To quiet the mind, Bailey advocates externalizing tasks through regular "brain dumps" inspired by David Allen's Getting Things Done, listing every unresolved item into an external system. He introduces J. D. Meier's concept of "hot spots," seven high-level life areas (Mind, Body, Emotions, Career, Finances, Relationships, Fun) under which all commitments are categorized and reviewed weekly. He also recommends carving out daily time for mind wandering, citing research showing the brain's unconscious processing outperforms conscious deliberation on complex decisions.

Bailey devotes significant attention to training what he calls the "attention muscle." Citing Gloria Mark's research that employees averaged only 11 minutes on a project before being interrupted and needed 25 minutes to refocus, he recommends disabling all device notifications and practicing single tasking, starting with short intervals and building up. He then reveals that single tasking is actually mindfulness by another name, and argues meditation is mindfulness in concentrated form. He cites Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar's research showing meditators have lower activity in the brain's mind-wandering region and interviews Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, who advocates integrating brief mindful pauses into everyday cues.

In the book's final practical section, Bailey addresses energy cultivation. He distills eating for productivity into two rules: eat more unprocessed foods for steady glucose, and stop when full. He finds that caffeine and alcohol both borrow energy from later, recommending strategic rather than habitual caffeine use. For exercise, he cites John Ratey's Spark, which calls exercise "the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function" (242-43). On sleep, he formulates a personal rule: Every hour of sleep missed costs at least two hours of productivity.

Bailey closes by arguing that self-compassion is essential to sustained productivity, citing Shawn Achor's research that happier people are 31 percent more productive. Three months into writing the book, he broke his ankle on a cobblestone sidewalk in Howth, Ireland, requiring reconstructive surgery and a six-month recovery. Drawing on the productivity groundwork he had built, he set small daily intentions from his hospital bed and finished the manuscript six weeks ahead of deadline. Reflecting on his most instructive experiment, ten days in total isolation, he concludes that without people, productivity is meaningless. They provide the purpose that makes accomplishment worthwhile. Writing more than a year after AYOP concluded, Bailey confirms that every change he made has stuck, attributing lasting results to genuine experimentation rather than quick fixes.