Principles of Extreme Productivity

When it comes to productivity books, I cannot think of a better resource than Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours by Robert C. Pozen. I recently read an old article that the author wrote for the Harvard Business Review where he discusses six principles for productivity. Below are snippets from the article:

• Principle 1: Know Your Comparative Advantage – Don’t focus just on what you do best. You’re more likely to succeed if you look around and gauge how you can be most useful.
• Principle 2: It’s Not the Time You Spend but the Results You Produce – Your success should be measured by the results you produce, not the number of hours you log. Focusing on results rather than hours has the added benefit of allowing a better balance between family and work.
• Principle 3: Think First, Read or Write Second – The key to faster and more effective reading and writing is more-rigorous thinking in advance. When it comes to writing something longer than an e-mail, the key is to first figure out your argument.
• Principle 4: Prepare Your Plan, but Be Ready to Change It – If you fill every hour of a daily calendar with meetings or phone calls, you leave little room for dealing with unanticipated developments. Try to keep at least one hour open each day so that I can respond quickly to new events or issues.
• Principle 5: Let Others Own Their Space – Under this principle, everyone in a large company is viewed as the owner of a small business. The boss’s role is to provide reports with resources, give them guidance, and help them do battle with other people in the broader organization.
• Principle 6: Keep Things Short and Simple – Try to keep the material aspects of life as simple as possible.

More detailed information can be found in the Harvard Business Review article written by the author (Managing Yourself: Extreme Productivity) or in his book.