I like listening to audiobooks, especially those that talk about productivity. I have already listened to so many different books, but some have been especially interesting and useful for me, so I decided to share my experience with you. Here are my top three books about productivity:
Atomic Habits
An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Author: James Clear
James Clear is known for his popular 3-2-1 newsletter. His book Atomic Habits is the best seller of the New York Times, which has sold over 1 million copies worldwide.
This book describes how bad habits give you mental satisfaction immediately while or after doing the action, but they lead to terrible circumstances in the long run. On the other hand, sound habits can be tedious while doing the activity but mostly lead to high benefits in the long run. The author takes an example as a bad habit of snacking donuts too often. It satisfies you immediately but can lead to bad health in the long run. Contrarily, going to the gym five times a week can be a tedious task, but with high benefits in the long run.
Furthermore, he proposes to use a habit tracking technique to introduce new beneficial habits. The tracking itself should motivate to stay consistent at challenging and tedious but yet important stuff.
The Unfair Advantage
How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed
Authors: Ash Ali, Hasan Kubba
Ash Ali is an award-winning serial tech entrepreneur and investor, whether Hasan Kubba is an entrepreneur, startup strategist, and mentor. In their book, The Unfair Advantages, they talk about how everybody has some advantage over anybody else. They tell us how to discover those advantages inside ourselves and use those to succeed in anything in life. Because they both are entrepreneurs, they often take examples of people that want to found startups. Usually, rich people have the best unfair advantage over anybody else because they have a lot of power through their richness. However, not only money can be an advantage, but also, there are other circumstances.
For example, suppose you have an idea for an app, and you know programming and specific development tools necessary for building that app. In that case, the programming know-how is a significant advantage over anybody who doesn’t have that knowledge. Another example can be people with a lot of connections. Let’s say you apply for a job where the employer is a good friend of yours or is the best friend of your best friend. This relation is your unfair advantage over any other applicant for the same job.
Make Time
How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
Author: Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky
This one is one of my best books so far. Both of the authors worked for Google, where John designed the YouTube channels platform, and Jacke is the co-founder of the Google Meet. Make Time is the book that taught me how to manage my time and keep myself undistracted while doing important stuff during my day.
They suggest not only to log out from social media from your phone but also to delete apps like Facebook, Instagram, Email, and even the Internet browser from the phone. What?! Yes, even the Internet browser. The idea behind doing this is to make the friction as high as possible to access that distracting stuff from the internet, so you fade away the habit of scrolling through social media or any other less important task, which can be a big waste of time.
On the other side, they propose to reduce the friction as much as possible to start doing the things that matter. For example, if you want to build a habit of reading more books, place a book somewhere where you can see it all the time, and you can grab it quickly so that you can get into action as easy as possible.
Summary
Atomic Habits did help me a lot with understanding how habits work, and through that, I discovered a lot of patterns of mine that I even overlooked before. When I had the feeling that all my doors of success were closed, The Unfair Advantage helped me find myself in many opportunities in life. And finally, when I felt overwhelmed with life, Make Time helped me discover my “hidden” time, which I was wasting on useless things, which I even didn’t realize I was doing them.