The 15 Best Books on Productivity You'll Want Your Team to Read

How much time do you set aside each day to work without distractions? Perhaps not enough, especially if you’re reading this list. Newport’s “Deep Work” is a manifesto for the deep life without superficial distractions like social media and app notifications.

You are given four rules that teach you to work in long stretches of highly focused, uninterrupted working time to adjust your attention on the things that matter.

Newport gives practical advice that is simple to apply today: Being more specific in emails and messages to reduce conversation time, dividing work between “deep work” sessions and collaborative sessions, and structuring downtime.

The book offers a very practical, straightforward and detailed method for getting stuff done. Allen’s premise is that your brain is for developing ideas, not storing them. His system allows you to “ reach a mind like water ” by getting stuff out of your head and into the physical world.

The book’s strength is its detailed guide towards implementation. On the other hand, this detail and technicality can feel a bit daunting and may keep you from implementing the tips right away.

Former New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg set out to answer the age-old question, “Why are some people more productive than others?” Through masterful storytelling, Duhigg shares real world stories and habits of individuals and his key productivity concepts.

His combination of personal anecdotes with business research prove the complexity of productivity, and how it’s much more than creating a to-do list. You have to make certain choices and put yourself in the right mindset, which affects your motivation and in return, your productivity.

This authoritative book is backed by decades of scientific research and insights from fields like neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics and medicine. Kelly McGonigal noticed that misconceptions about willpower were sabotaging many of her students at Stanford University. This prompted her to set up “The Science of Willpower” course, which she then developed into a book.

Kelly McGonigal shows the relation between willpower and personal success. What’s more, she shows how this willpower can be trained like a muscle.

Like the title suggests, it’s written in an easy and take-away kind of style. It’s a practical book with a long-term focus on balancing your life. So unlike GTD, it also takes human nature into account. Furthermore, it's worth reading for its strong focus on managing relationships, instead of managing “things,” as with GTD. The person who can make others do things is more effective than the person who does everything on her own.

Charles Duhigg tackles these questions in “The Power of Habit” by examining what motivates our decisions in life and business.

This book takes a look at habit loops (cue, routine, reward) as a framework for how habits work. Duhigg then presents research and examples of powerful organizations that replaced one habit with a more desirable habit. Though some of his examples were graphic and negative at times, they still help illustrate Duhigg’s findings.

McKeown uses “Essentialism” to teach you how to be more deliberate in making choices, strip your life down to the bare essentials and learn how to just say “no.” These concepts can help establish boundaries at work and, most importantly, in life.

Some of McKeown’s references may seem stale to the average reader, such as Rosa Parks’ story and the “No school on Thursday” journalism lesson from Nora Ephron. However, this doesn’t detract from the book’s message of saying “no” to anything that is nonessential and the overarching idea of “less but better.”

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As the title suggests, this book is about how energy influences our productivity. With the main premise that it’s “energy, not time, that is the fundamental currency of high performance,” the authors base much of their research on professional athletes’ high levels of performance.

This book is unique and powerful at explaining the workings of energy and productivity, uncovering common pitfalls, and sharing very practical and original tips on how to raise/maintain your energy and thus raise productivity.

This is an interesting book that covers the path to the state-of-mind in which you are fully engaged, focused on your work and in the flow .

Based on years of psychological research, Mihaly argues how this “flow” is the key to happiness (and to productivity as well), and offers insight on how to “turn everyday experience into a moment by moment opportunity for joy and self-fulfillment.”

This is the ultimate practical book. You won’t find any chit-chat about motivation, spirituality or psychology. Just a long list of (mostly free) productivity tools for the web worker.

As one reviewer on Goodreads.com notes: “It’s a good collection, handy to have on one’s Kindle and definitely bigger than what one would want to wade through on a website.”

DeMarco and Lister tackle many accepted truths, like people working better under time pressure, introducing new technology to solve existing problems (as they will likely create new problems), fake deadlines and more.

You’ll find plenty of tips in this book that improve the quality of your office space, though don’t expect to find many citations for their claims. But if you enjoy anecdotes and need some fresh team productivity tactics, then you’ll enjoy this book.

Many productivity destroyers are very recognizable at the workplace, e.g. “ASAP is poison” and “Meetings are toxic.”

This book covers the main insights the team of 37Signals accumulated while building their businesses. It feels like a series of blog posts, which is also what it's based on. 37Signals runs the massively popular blog Signal V. Noise , where they already shared many of their insights. They collected the best and put them in this book.

This book makes a case for “freeing” employees in the workplace, propagating a company culture of freedom. The authors argue that when employees are free to act in the best interests of the company, everyone benefits.

Filled with business cases, this book actually makes a strong argument. This book is necessary for companies deploying antiquated methods for “controlling” their employees – methods that don't fit the reality of our present day working environment.

This book is an introduction to Scrum, which is an agile framework for completing complex projects. Originating from software development, Scrum works well for any complex project.

More than a guide, this book offers stories and case studies on scrum, thereby discussing its value and how it should be adapted in the 21st century. At the end, you'll find an appendix of scrum practices you can use.

Blanchard and Johnson wrote a business novel about good management: how to manage and interact with people. It brings forward the idea of the “one minute manager” who boosts team productivity by setting goals for her subordinates, praising as well as reprimanding them.