A review by whiteknight247
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

4.0

Smarter Faster Better dive's into understanding of how humans make decisions and applies that knowledge to give insights for how individuals can take more control over our lives through reframing our problems and applying a series of processes. Duhigg uses a biographical approach with specific people and organizations and reviews how they transformed their own lives/companies. Duhigg determined that one could generate motivation by discovering your 'why' for a particular action; and creating both stretch and smart goals that fit within the overall ambition but set achievable milestones. By building mental models about expectations for our day/week/meeting/conversation that can help identify the plan and makes it easier to maintain focus and the priority. To make better decisions come up with possible outcomes and assign probabilities to each outcome, understanding the probabilities of an outcome can mitigate anxiety over an outcome and provide perspective for likelihood of any particular one. When encountering new information, force yourself to write about how it's important or how it connects to your life/work/ideas. Productivity doesn't mean every action is efficient or produces returns, it means understanding where the actions and lessons learned fit within the context of the broader goal. I appreciated that the goal wasn't to turn humans into these idealistic efficiency machines focused on production, but to provide tools that each of us could use to make life a bit for focused on the things that matter to us.