December 9, 2025

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Many of us with professions that center on writing once toiled in a book shop to make ends meet, including me. When I worked at Barnes & Noble in college, I was dumbfounded by how many books there were on productivity and self-betterment. Surely, they couldn’t all contain nuggets of wisdom. Certainly, they must be money-grabs aiming to profit off people’s self-doubt. In many cases, that’s true; but, I learned, some of them do have serious value to share. The catch is that if you spend all your time reading about some author’s productivity, you won’t have much time for enhancing your own. Smartly choosing which to read is a major first step toward productivity and better time management, but I went ahead and did a little of the legwork for you. Here are the best tidbits on productivity and the books they come from.

The best productivity tips from books

Getting Things Done (GTD)

GTD is a method that comes from David Allen’s infamous 2001 book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, which was updated in 2015. GTD has been popular for a long time and is all about organizing your to-do lists, priorities, and schedule in a way that keeps it all manageable. You use five pillars—capture everything in a notebook, app, or planner; clarify what you need to do by breaking it all down into actionable steps; organize the steps by category and priority; reflect on the to-do list; and get to work—to streamline your planning, thinking, and action. It’s stuck around this long because it’s effective, but that means it’s now also recognizable. This is a solid entry-level productivity plan that has been written about a lot, has plenty of adherents, and makes sense in the real world.

The action method

The action method comes from Scott Belsky’s 2010 book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality. Like GTD, it aims to organize your ideas and priorities, giving you a path to more action than deliberation. You write down your to-dos, then organize them into action steps (the specific tasks you need to get done and the ones with actions behind them), references (extra info you need to accomplish those tasks), and back-burners (more nebulous goals that don’t need to be accomplished right now). Use a planner or spreadsheet to create the three columns, bearing in mind that references and back-burners are typically things that supplement the action steps, so you should always be checking those while you tackle the action steps. And never forget that, if left unattended, a back-burner can escalate into an actionable item quickly, so take this one on if you need guidance but are serious about sticking with it.

Zen to Done

At the heart of Zen to Done is the idea that your sense of wellbeing is integral to your overall productivity. It comes from Leo Babauta, who has written books like Essential Zen Habits: Mastering the Art of Change, Briefly* *and The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential... in Business and in Life. Reading his work, you start to see the value of changing your habits and building new ones incrementally and peacefully. Because you’re changing your habits over time and in a chill way, you can focus on the actual work you need to get done. ZTD contains 10 habits total, but Babauta says you can focus on the first four to get started: "Collect" by always taking notes about what you need to do and ideas you have, "process" by making quick decisions on tasks that are in front of you at the moment, "plan" by setting goals every Monday, and "do" by selecting a task and focusing on it and only it.

Deep work

I talk about deep work a lot because it’s an important concept that impacts a lot of other productivity techniques. Deep work is the ability to focus completely on a demanding task without allowing any distraction get in your way, according to Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. His work focuses on drawing the distinction between deep work and shallow work, or the kind of work that you can still get done while distracted, then building time into your schedule to take care of the deeper tasks. Mastering the art of slipping into a flow state and getting into deep work is foundational to basically any other productivity approach, so this full book might be worth the read.

Eat the frog

This approach to productivity calls for you to tackle your biggest, most demanding task first during the course of your day, so everything after that feels easier by comparison. The evocative phrase, "eat the frog," comes from a quote that’s usually attributed to Mark Twain, but it was Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog book series that made it catch on. Per Tracy, your "frog" is whatever task "you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it." In workbooks and quick-tip books, he helps you figure out your frogs, then come up with strategies to get the motivation to tackle them. Committing to eating the frog is a big part of other productivity approaches and scheduling techniques, like the 1-3-5 list and the pickle jar theory, so the more familiar you are with the idea, the better off you’ll be.

Power Hour

Power Hour is a productivity technique that aims to empower you to reclaim part of your daily time and devote it to something intentional, whether that’s a passion project or a major task that needs completing. It comes from Adrienne Herbert’s book, Power Hour: How to Focus on Your Goals and Create a Life You Love, and is complementary to Newport’s deep work concept. Herbert suggests you find an hour in each day that you can use for a completely focused, intentional project. During that hour you’ll use deep work, but Herbert’s strategy focuses more on finding and defining that critical hour in your schedule more than training yourself to sink into the zone and avoid distractions.

What do you think so far?

The 168-hour method

You may not think that having 24 hours in a day is enough, but what about 168 hours in a week? Laura Vanderkam wrote 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think to encourage people to stop thinking about your time in terms of days and start thinking about how much you can accomplish in a week. Spend a week tracking your time using time-tracking software or a spreadsheet, keeping your entries as detailed as possible. At the end of the week, look at your data and figure out when you wasted time, spent too long on something, or could have been doing something else. Using Vanderkam’s method, you can make more time for the things you want to do by getting a solid grasp of how you allot your existing time over seven days.

Flow theory

You’ve probably heard of flow theory, the brainchild of psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who came up with it in 1970 and then wrote a number of books on it. According to him, a flow state is similar to when someone is floating along, being carried by water. The person is working so efficiently that they’re just gliding ahead with no problems and the state is practically propelling them. (It’s quite similar to deep work, mentioned above, so this would be a good one to read along with Newport’s book.) There are eight characteristics of being in flow, ranging from complete concentration on the task to finding intrinsic rewards in the work and feeling confident in possessing the necessary skills to complete it, and these offer almost a step-by-step guide for getting into deep work, the method mentioned above.

The best book combo for busy folks

Having a hard time narrowing down which books to grab? I’d suggest one of Csíkszentmihályi’s books on flow theory, Newport’s book on deep work, and Herbert’s book on power hours, as these all describe similar practices, but offer complementary, supplemental advice that all adds up to help you pick a specific time of day to get work done easily and efficiently. It’s important to remember that motivation can—and does—come from a variety of sources, including break time, having a purpose, and actually getting things done. The combination of these three authors’ approaches makes plenty of space for all of that, which will leave you actually wanting to get to work.

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