Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

This is one of my favorite books on productivity. David Allen is a productivity guru who really gets it—he knows what it’s like to be buried under an avalanche of emails, meetings, and to-do lists. But more importantly, he knows the systems you can use to get from under that heap and be more productive without the feeling of constant stress.

You’ll learn the 5 steps of mastering your workflow, the 5 phases of effective project planning, the power of next-action decision, and much more. One of his best productivity strategies, in my experience, is the suggestion to set up an inbox where you can toss all your incoming “stuff.” Then make a priority to triage all those incoming messages into separate buckets where you’ll know where to do with them.

As a result you’ll have a much stronger feeling of control over your workflow, an inbox that is constantly hitting zero, and as the title of the book promises—stress-free productivity.