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Get Productive!: Boosting Your Productivity And Getting Things Done
Rewire your brain and overcome the 20 key time drains that diminish productivityFor anyone who's felt valuable time frittered away in checking emails or answering wrong phone numbers, or listening to a coworker giving you a minute-by-minute account of their previous night's date, help is finally here. Your time is, indeed, your own. And this handy guide, written by a leading executive coach, shows you how to retool your brain, reclaim your schedule, become a master of each minute, and make yourself more productive.
Using a method that is intuitive, easy to remember, and simple to use, this book will help you transform how you think, what you focus on, and what you do so that you can begin to create tangible results.Includes exercises that help you learn important thinking skills--essential to tackling important projects and attaining all those once elusive goalsFeatures highly visual exercises that are quick to complete, allowing you to change your habits and see improvements right awayIdentifies the 20 key time drains that interfere with productivity and happiness
Full of creative, fun, and proven solutions to the common bugaboos of procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, and a general dissatisfaction with results, "Get Productive!" offers concrete steps toward rethinking how you work and reworking how you think.
Using a method that is intuitive, easy to remember, and simple to use, this book will help you transform how you think, what you focus on, and what you do so that you can begin to create tangible results.Includes exercises that help you learn important thinking skills--essential to tackling important projects and attaining all those once elusive goalsFeatures highly visual exercises that are quick to complete, allowing you to change your habits and see improvements right awayIdentifies the 20 key time drains that interfere with productivity and happiness
Full of creative, fun, and proven solutions to the common bugaboos of procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, and a general dissatisfaction with results, "Get Productive!" offers concrete steps toward rethinking how you work and reworking how you think.
- GenresBusiness
240 pages, Paperback
First published July 3, 2012
12 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
About the author
Magdalena Bak-Maier
6 books1 followerMagdalena Bak-Maier helps people connect heart and mind and live it. Magdalena is a talent developer, educator, researcher, author and the founder of Make Time Count, a company and eco-system devoted to empowering individuals and organisations to succeed and thrive. Her incisive models and tools have enabled a variety of teams (among them senior NASA engineers, CEOs and NHS Doctors) to challenge conventional thinking, tackle turbulence and complexity and deliver outstanding results, while learning how to nurture themselves and others. Her Get Productive Grid is a simple and proven holistic system to help people balance life and work and to excel. Grid is Magdalena's contribution to help transform the well-being agenda from government policy into personal practice. In the Grid, Magdalena Bak-Maier merges her extensive science training (PhD, Caltech) with many years of helping people get more out of their lives. She lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 3, 2018
Lots of exercises to go through to consider opportunities and stresses in life so we are better informed and then can take action. Pretty good motivational book.
December 28, 2014
Anyone organised enough to do all the exercises in this book probably doesn't need it. Its simplistic tone is epitomised by the use of hideous clip-art-style illustrations on every page, which makes it look like an amateur PowerPoint presentation. Is there any quicker way to destroy your credibility and look unprofessional?
As with all such books, the author is careful not to give away the good stuff, since she makes a living from coaching. The dust jacket is crammed with glowing references from other snake-oil salesmen, who have a vested interest in selling to the lazy, feckless or plain disorganised the belief that they can change their minds and become focused and effective. When this advice comes from someone focused and effective enough to get a degree in neuroscience, set up her own business and get a book published, one wonders whether she has the empathy to help.
For example, her advice on procrastination is to write a list of the things you haven't got round to doing and then do one of them. This is like Usain Bolt telling you that the way to be a six-time Olympic champion is to move your feet quicker than anyone else. Simplistic? Don't forget, this book is illustrated with clip-art.
This low-brow and breathlessly enthusiastic tone pervades the whole book, which is overrun with a stampede of excited exclamation marks. It announces, "Our brains are marvellous at affecting our thoughts and our behaviour." Who knew? I thought it was the pancreas, though in my case you might think it's the spleen. Or how about the advice that, if you've had a problem before, solve it the same way again. "This is key!" Wow, thanks, Sherlock.
There's lots of advice about how to categorise mental states, usually in some infantile way through silly exercises such as "Time Travel", but little in the way of practical advice. Effectively, you're being told to assess your subconscious and then choose to do the right thing, which isn't very helpful at all. Some of the advice is contradictory: on page 95 you're told to use the right emotion, then on page 96 you're told that ignoring your emotions will cause you suffering, so how can you choose which emotion to use?
Sometimes I wonder whether Bak-Maier has thought this through. She tells us that WANTS (her capitals) come from within while "MUSTS tend to come from the outside world". But her only examples of MUSTS are eating and breathing, which are hardly duties that are imposed from outside.
The basic advice is to stop doing things you don't like and start doing things you do. My problem is that I like drinking red wine and writing spiteful reviews on Goodreads when I should be furthering my career or feeding my kids. I should be doing less of that, not more.
Still, I've learnt one valuable lesson from Get Productive!. I'm going to stop reading junk-science self-help books and use my time more productively.
As with all such books, the author is careful not to give away the good stuff, since she makes a living from coaching. The dust jacket is crammed with glowing references from other snake-oil salesmen, who have a vested interest in selling to the lazy, feckless or plain disorganised the belief that they can change their minds and become focused and effective. When this advice comes from someone focused and effective enough to get a degree in neuroscience, set up her own business and get a book published, one wonders whether she has the empathy to help.
For example, her advice on procrastination is to write a list of the things you haven't got round to doing and then do one of them. This is like Usain Bolt telling you that the way to be a six-time Olympic champion is to move your feet quicker than anyone else. Simplistic? Don't forget, this book is illustrated with clip-art.
This low-brow and breathlessly enthusiastic tone pervades the whole book, which is overrun with a stampede of excited exclamation marks. It announces, "Our brains are marvellous at affecting our thoughts and our behaviour." Who knew? I thought it was the pancreas, though in my case you might think it's the spleen. Or how about the advice that, if you've had a problem before, solve it the same way again. "This is key!" Wow, thanks, Sherlock.
There's lots of advice about how to categorise mental states, usually in some infantile way through silly exercises such as "Time Travel", but little in the way of practical advice. Effectively, you're being told to assess your subconscious and then choose to do the right thing, which isn't very helpful at all. Some of the advice is contradictory: on page 95 you're told to use the right emotion, then on page 96 you're told that ignoring your emotions will cause you suffering, so how can you choose which emotion to use?
Sometimes I wonder whether Bak-Maier has thought this through. She tells us that WANTS (her capitals) come from within while "MUSTS tend to come from the outside world". But her only examples of MUSTS are eating and breathing, which are hardly duties that are imposed from outside.
The basic advice is to stop doing things you don't like and start doing things you do. My problem is that I like drinking red wine and writing spiteful reviews on Goodreads when I should be furthering my career or feeding my kids. I should be doing less of that, not more.
Still, I've learnt one valuable lesson from Get Productive!. I'm going to stop reading junk-science self-help books and use my time more productively.
June 17, 2013
Not worth the paper it's written on.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews