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Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

Charles Duhigg · ★★★★☆ · 401 pages · 2016

I like Duhigg's writing style of putting stories to explain concepts. It makes for an interesting if a little longer of a read. In this book he covers how to be productive in the modern world with all the things that are happening around us. I will attempt to summarize each chapter.

  1. Motivation. Instead of thinking of tasks as chores make a choice on them. By making it your own the treshhold of motivation increases.

  2. Teams. For teams to be effective there needs to be a pschological safety zone where everyone has an equal chance to speak and no one person is out talking the other.

  3. Focus. Create mental models of how things should be otherwise when incidents happen you focus on the wrong things instead of the overall state. When you create mental models you have an idea of what the system should be like and during incidents you can move your focus to return things back to a normal state instead of pidgenholing into the thing that is in front of you when an incident happens.

  4. Goal Setting. Have a SMART goal of actionable things but also have a Stretch goal of why you are doing this. The Stretch goal leads to the creation of actionable Smart goals. Or in other terms have a reason for doing a project and you can add smaller tasks to them.

  5. Managing Others. Instead of managing from the top by giving orders a better method is to have an overall vision and push down decision making giving people the ability to decide on solutions by working together.

  6. Decision Making. When making decisions make various alternate projections so you have a clear idea based on all the alternatives that might happen. This allows you create several different outcomes and the pros and cons of each.

  7. Innovation. You need a little bit of chaos to create innovation. Not all the time and not too little but enough to jolt some creativity. Further, combining two different ideas from two different field is just as effective for coming up with new ideas.

  8. Absorbing Data. There is too much data in the world. The best way to make it useful instead of sensory overload is to make it actionable to you. Have to manipulate the data yourself to figure out what is going on.

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