My Top 21 Productivity Books

As an avid reader and productivity enthusiast I’ve curated a list of my favorite productivity books I’ve read so far - their rank has no underlying meaning (it’s just the date I’ve finished them).

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1. SCRUM - How to do twice the work in half the time: This book is a core piece in agile project management. Why is it relevant to personal productivity? In my opinion agile helps you to focus on the essential things you need to do to bring forward a project, or task, … Therefore, it is highly relevant for every productivity enthusiast.
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow: This is my favorite non-fiction book. There are so many valuable insights that are relevant to business, leadership, personal productivity, and many more. I’ve summarized my core learnings in this article if you are interested.
3. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: This book contains 7 simple but effective habits you can incorporate to become more productive. I recently wrote a short book summary, if you want to learn more.
4. Atomic Habits: This bestselling book shows that becoming more effective starts with small habits that accumulate. How?
5. The Lean Startup: Essentially this book is about business. However, it also shows the importance of lean and agile thinking in this process - 2 highly relevant topics in productivity. If you want to read more, check out this article.
6. Calling Bullshit: In our information-rich world, it is important to distinguish fact from fiction or fake news. If you can do that effectively, you can save time. I enjoyed this book as it combines insights from different points of view and summarizes them well. Read more …
7. The Effective Executive: Peter Drucker’s classic book on becoming an effective executive. Many more modern books on productivity draw their insights from this source. So in my opinion it is a must-read for every productivity enthusiast.
8. The subtle Art of not giving a f*ck: This one is more about your mindset and how you should approach problems.
9. Designing Your Life: I’d count this book to my top 5 books I’ve ever read. It is insightful in many areas such as career planning, and management, but also productivity. Especially the definition of Anchor Problems and Gravity Problems has stuck with me.
10. Start with Why: Simon Sinek’s bestselling book on why the “why” is more important than how or what. Why is it related to productivity? To me, this again shows how important focus is. At the core of personal productivity, you shouldn’t only focus on how to work efficiently, but also on how to work on the right things.
11. Getting Things Done: A classic book on productivity. The described GTD method is simple but very powerful. Since I’ve read the book, I implemented it into my personal productivity stack. If you are interested in the method, please check out this article.
12. The Machine that Changed the World: A famous book on lean management.
13. How to take smart notes: The human brain is great at having ideas, but it is terrible at remembering them. To tackle this issue there exist many different approaches to taking notes. Read more …
14. The Infinite Game: This is a book on the importance of a clear long-term vision - highly relevant to productivity as it enables you to focus on the important things. If you want to read more, check out this piece.
15. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: This book combines business and happiness. In my opinion, the latter is very much related to productivity as I describe here.
16. Grit: Perseverance is more important than pure talent. This book shows how you can measure your grittiness and how you can increase your grit. Read more …
17. So Good They Can’t Ignore You: A book on how to become very good at a specific skill and utilize it to become successful. Cal Newport’s book is a quick and engaging read. If you want to quickly walk through the content, check out my summary.
18. Think Again: This book is about rethinking established assumptions and thinking critically about facts and their sources. Therefore, it falls into the productivity category of “do the right things”. I summarized the book here and collected the 30 main learnings from the book here.
19. Thinking in Systems: If you use systems for your processes you can dramatically improve your productivity. This book is a primer on systems theory and how you can utilize systems yourself.
20. Feel-Good Productivity: Ali Abdal (the biggest productivity guru on YouTube) summarizes many of these techniques in this short book. It contains many insights and I condensed them further into a comprehensive book summary.
21. Essentialism: This book is about finding out what is essential (to you) and how to focus your energy on these important things instead of spreading out your energy on too many things all at once.