The Best Productivity Books of All Time (2024)

Deep Work is about focusing deeply so you can thrive in your professional career. Cal Newport says reducing distractions and increasing our ability to concentrate will allow us to learn new skills faster and produce higher quality work.

Atomic Habits by James Clear is about how small 1% improvements in our daily habits can lead to remarkable results and change your life. This is a practical guide to building good habits and breaking bad habits. The Four Laws of Behaviour Change say to make good habits: obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.

Getting Things Done is a system to help us be more organized and productive. It basically turned into a popular movement during the early 2000's. David Allen says we can feel in control of our busy work lives, simply by learning to manage our daily tasks effectively.

Dopamine Nation explains how to break bad habits using the neuroscience of dopamine, the "pleasure molecule" in our brains. If you want to retrain your brain to like doing hard things, Dr. Anna Lembke shares tools that may help like dopamine fasting, self-binding, truth-telling and leaning into pain.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is about becoming more effective at reaching our goals and leading others. Stephen Covey says his teachings are based on timeless principles like personal responsibility, empathetic listening, and treating others with fairness.

"Eat That Frog!" by Brian Tracy is a guide to stop procrastinating, increase productivity, and master time management. It teaches you to tackle the hardest tasks first, helping you get more done and make each day more focused and productive.

The 4-Hour Workweek is about building a passive income business so we can escape the usual 40-hour workweek, and design our ideal lifestyle. Tim Ferris also shows how we can improve our productivity by following the 80/20 rule and a 'low information diet.'

The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg is a deep dive into the science of how habits work. If you want to change your habits but don't know where to start, this book can help you. It provides a simple 3-step formula called "The Habit Loop" to break bad habits and build better ones.

Thinking, Fast and Slow explains how people make decisions using two mental systems: "fast" thinking is instinctive and emotional, while "slow" thinking is deliberate and logical. Daniel Kahneman helps us understand our when our mind fall into common biases and irrational shortcuts, so we can make better decisions in the future.

The 5AM Club is about learning to wake up at 5 a.m. and follow a morning routine, so we can become more self-disciplined, productive, and happy. Robin Sharma wrote this self-help book as a story, with a Billionaire mentoring an Entrepreneur and Artist, who were struggling with distraction and procrastination.

The War of Art explains how you can do more creative work and overcome your procrastination, distraction, and paralysis. Steven Pressfield says inside all of us is Resistance, a tricky enemy that sabotages our dreams, and it is the source of our fears, doubts, excuses, and poor habits.

Grit says being a top achiever is less about natural talent and more about your "grit," which means working consistently and staying interested in one direction for multiple years. Angela Duckworth shares research on how we can become grittier, and help others do so too.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big is about the hilarious wisdom and many business failures of Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. He shares pragmatic strategies for increasing our odds of success—by using systems over goals, building a talent stack and repeating (mysteriously powerful) affirmations.