PRODUCTIVITY IS POWER 2

Systematic guidelines to achieving and maintaining productivity.

The problem is procrastination, writes Rettig at the outset of her book. “Many people think they procrastinate because they’re lazy or undisciplined, but that’s wrong,” she contends. “We procrastinate because we haven’t been taught the attitudes and habits of productive work.” In these pages, Rettig, an expert on time management and productivity, outlines those attitudes and habits for readers at all stages of the work-flow process. She focuses both on procrastination and on perfectionism, elaborating on each in chapters filled with stories, numbered and bulleted points, and plenty of highlighted main points. Procrastination, she explains, is both a habit and a form of self-protection (the procrastinator fears facing either unpleasant tasks or negative reactions from others). Its opposite is what she refers to as sitzfleisch, the German word for the ability to sit still and stay focused on a task. She details her Timed Work Intervals method of building sitzfleisch, in which a person prepares a bit of work, eliminates all visible clocks, sets a kitchen timer for some discreet short interval, completes that bit of work, then takes a break and repeats the process until the whole task is finished. And in discussing perfectionism’s valuing of outcomes over process, she urges her readers to become “nonperfectionists” who avoid both the “noisy habits” of procrastination and perfectionism in favor of the pragmatic, holistic approaches she so appealingly describes. On every page, Rettig provides not only lucid, forceful prose, but also copious research into all aspects of productivity. Procrastinators who habitually beat themselves up for their own failings will find this book revelatory.

A compassionate, very practical blueprint for getting things done.