Management

10 Best Management Books That Will Make You a Great Leader

March 19,2023

Getting things done with 20 best productivity and time management books

Among all the goals employees thrive to reach daily, staying productive seems to be the most difficult. Many of them wish they could get more done in less time. Luckily, some experts were willing to teach the art of productivity, and we have reviewed the top 20 productivity books that’ll help you get things done faster.

Employees have always been in a battle to stay productive and work smarter. There always seems to be distractions lurking around and little motivation to fend them off, so getting so many things done on time gets tough and exhausting. Isn't that just makes you wish for more time?

Well, the brutal truth is having more time is pointless if you haven’t learned the art of self-control and time management.

The good news is, several authors with proven real-life experiences have compiled personal lessons and professional advice in books to help us out. If you’re struggling with staying productive, here are 20 books to read that can boost your productivity

Best productivity books of all time

If you're embarking on a self-development journey, here are some book recommendations to inspire and carter for your well-being:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Author: Stephen Covey

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a self-help productivity book published in 1989. Founded on the "Character Ethics" and its principles, the book helps readers see how the cultivation of their character can breed success. It also explains the effects of perception and assumption on progress. Reading this book teaches persona and professional efficiency. The seven habits highlighted in this book takes its readers on a journey to self-discovery.

Since its publication, the book has been elected the most influential Business Book of the Twentieth Century and was awarded the No. 1 best-selling hardcover book about family life.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity

Author: David Allen

Getting Things Done is a book written on the personal productivity GTD system developed by David Allen, a veteran coach and management consultant.

The book explains how the will of a strong mind make accomplishing other tasks impossible if the already-set task on your mind is still incompleted. In this book, David emphasizes the importance of relaxation in productivity and shares the breakthrough methods of a stress-free assignment.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Author: Charles Duhigg

Award-winning NY Times business reporter Charles Duhigg illustrates the science of habit in his book; Why habit exists, influences productivity, and how it can be changed. This book explores how reforming our habits can completely change our lives.

Duhigg's book has reached the bestseller list for The New York Times, Amazon, and USA Today. In 2012, it was also long-listed for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life

Author: J.D. Meier

Taking charge of your life activities and directing your energy into achieving results is key to productivity, and Meier didn't hesitate to let us know that in his book. In this book, Meier offers readers a simple system for achieving meaningful long and short-term results both personally and professionally.

This book also focuses on doing impactful things instead of checking off tasks on your to-do list.

Amazon | Kindle | Android

Eat that Frog!

Author: Brian Tracy

Are you much of a procrastinator than you thought? Then you need to Eat that Frog! Brian Tracy highlights twenty-one steps to eliminating procrastination from personal experience. The principle behind the title and content of this book is to focus on the most difficult task when faced with several tasks.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

For employees that want to drive higher results at work, here are some book recommendations:

The Power of Full Engagement

Author: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz show the power of energy management over time management. In this book, readers are taught to protect their energy to strike a balance between work and life assignments.

The book scientifically approaches the different ways to manage energy using athletes and other high-performers as a case study, explaining how this set of people conserve energy, not time. The four sources of human energy; physical, mental, emotional, and mental, are introduced as the key to performance.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get It

Author: Kelly McGonigal

Kelly teaches readers how to harness self-control in enhancing health, happiness, and productivity. This book was inspired by her students at Stanford University and how they struggled with the workload at school.

In this book, she explains how self-control takes charge of emotions and attention, allowing them to make healthier and happier steps as they strive to live a more productive life.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done

Author: David Allen

David offers readers a more extensive version of his iconic book, Getting Things Done. Ready for Anything gives readers an insight into how to stay focused, creative, and proactive. The book teaches readers how to work better and not harder because only then can you actually get things done.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Working alone, and need to motivate yourself as a one-man-army. Here are some books that'll inspire you to stay productive:

The One Thing

Author: Garry Keller with Jay Papasan

The One Thing is another book that teaches readers the power of prioritization – completing the task with the most impact. Garry also illustrates successful habits to overcome the six lies keeping our success away and beat the seven-time thieves.

The book has won a total of 12 awards and has been translated into 26 languages. It was also the Top 100 Business Books of All Time on Goodreads. The One Thing was named a best seller by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Author: Jocelyn K. Glei

If your job is fast-paced in nature, you'd need to live day-by-day. This book consists of contributions from twenty creative and successful minds. In this book, you learn to manage time, stay focused, and create time for the things that matter.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Best productivity books on time management

Want to master the art of time control? Here are a few books you should read.

Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours

Author: Robert Pozen

Teaching a full course load at Harvard while serving as the full-time chairman of a global financial-services firm, Pozen shared about how the workload of both jobs prompted him to be super productive.

In this book, he reveals his secret to productivity and high performance and the different ways to achieve both. Pozen has just the right advice for you for people overwhelmed by several deadlines and workload pressure. He also prompts his readers to measure productivity by results, not hours spent.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

Author: Laura Vanderkam

Many think getting a grip of time is impossible, but not Laura Vanderkam. After interviewing several successful and happy people, she realized that the secret to their positive emotions is their ability to prioritize. Laura teaches readers to prioritize and allocate their time effectively. This way, when they are left with little time, they only have the least important stuff to deal with.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Laura Vanderkam made an inspiring speech on Ted Talk about time management and getting the most out of life by learning how to control our free time

15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management

Author: Kevin Kruse

To find the secrets of effective time management, Kruse thoroughly researched and interviewed billionaires, straight-A students, Olympic athletes, and 239 entrepreneurs - including Kevin Harrington, Mark Cuban, James Altucher, Lewis Howes, and Grant Cardone.

This book is best for people who struggle to optimize their time. It sheds light on the ways of achieving more in less time.

Amazon | iTunes

Best productivity books for laser focus

For laser focus to enhance productivity, here are some highly-recommended reads:

Free to Focus

Author: Michael Hyatt

Free to Focus is a book about the influence of time on productivity. In this book, Michael explains how many of us spend all our lives working for time, instead of making time works for us. He also offers readers nine effective ways to succeed at work and other life aspects by defining goals, re-evaluating, and managing time.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

First Things First

Author: Stephen Covey

Here we have another self-help book from Stephen Covey, First Things First. He illustrates how we mistreat ourselves by prioritizing things that have no impact on our happiness and our bigger goals.

Stephen further advises readers to prioritize based on urgency, emphasizing reaching your destination no matter how slow.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

Author: Jake Zeratsky and John Knapp

With four simple steps, Jake and John have created a model for workers based on their experience designing iconic tech products. If you think this book is for employees in the tech department only, you're wrong. The four-step daily framework cuts across all departments at work and in life too. This book focuses on making small daily changes till you take charge of the dynamics of time.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Best productivity books of 2021

Here are some top picks for you to read in 2021;

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Author: Greg McKeown

Greg had this book specially written for people who get hit with the anxiety of not doing enough or feel overwhelmed by the pressure at work. The book doesn't illustrate any productivity or time management technique but illustrates a systematic discipline that gives readers the power of discernment.

Greg teaches readers how to set their priorities straight and stay in control of their choices.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport

In Deep Work, Newport embraces the idea of social media and the distraction it provides. His vision is to embrace these distractions as a reward for every deep work you do. His book eliminates the tedious work life many employees believe helps them stay productive. Newport divided this book into two – one part embracing little distractions and the other embracing deep work ethic in getting massive results.

Amazon | Kindle | Android | iTunes

The 4-Hour Workweek:

Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich

Author: Timothy Ferris

The 4-hour workweek is a guide for people who want to control their life instead of working all their lives. The book highlights Timothy's "lifestyle design" and discriminates against the traditional system of working.

Amazon | Kindle | iTunes

Think Like da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius

Author: Michael Gelb

Michael Gelb dives into the creative life of the historical genius da Vinci. In this book, you get to understand the ways of creative thinking using da Vinci as a model. The book helps you tap into your inner genius as you read exercises and provocative lessons inspired by the iconic genius.

Amazon | Android | iTunes

Get more done in less time

Reading productivity books is excellent to help you take charge of your life and work. While these books are self-sufficient, we recommend that you complement these books by listening to productivity podcasts and leveraging productivity apps that can ease the burden of distractions and time wastage.

For HRs and managers, visit the Grove HR resource for templates and tools that'll make managing subordinate employees more effortless, and of course – more effective.

Your time management won't work until you realize how little time you have

Let us assume, dear reader, that you are young and healthy and lucky enough to live a total of 80 years. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Break it down into days and you get 29,200, which is such a large number that our brains tend to give up trying to process what it means. But divide 80 years into weeks, and you get 4,171. Now we're getting somewhere that sounds uncomfortably small, even for the longest-lived among us. (The current record holder, age 118, has lived less than 6,200 weeks — still a blink in the cosmic eye.)

"When I first made the 4,000 weeks calculation, I felt queasy," writes psychology expert Oliver Burkeman in his arresting new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. (opens in a new tab)Soon he started pestering friends to guess, off the top of their heads, how many weeks the average person can expect to live. One named a number in the six figures. Burkeman had to tell her that 310,000 weeks is "the approximate duration of all human civilization."

That's the bad news. Here's the good: Having so few weeks is, if you follow it through to its logical conclusions, a massive weight off your shoulders. With true awareness of limited time, the unimportant stuff tends to fall away — and, paradoxically, more time becomes available for the truly fulfilling parts of life.

The productivity addict

What makes Burkeman's book so compelling is that it's an apology from a time management nerd. Burkeman has chased the highs of Inbox Zero and the Pomodoro Technique. Alongside Moleskines and felt-tip pens, books like Master Your Time, Master Your Life(opens in a new tab) crowd his desk. Like me, he is a devotee of Getting Things Done (GTD), the task system by productivity guru David Allen that swept Silicon Valley in the 2000s, and loves designing endless new productivity systems on top of it.

Also like me, Burkeman found that his to-do list kept him feeling busy, and stressed, but somehow never really got around to the long-term goals that were important to him personally. Life was always being pushed into the future, once all this other stuff was out of the way, instead of being actually, y'know, lived. (I sent friends multiple screenshots of pages in this book with the caption "too real" or "I feel personally attacked.")

"Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved 'work-life balance.'"

"Time management as we know it has failed miserably," Burkeman says. "Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved 'work-life balance.'"

So if our time management systems are filling our lives with busywork and never fulfilling our dreams, how then shall we live? Here's some of the most memorable advice I got out of Four Thousand Weeks.

1. What matters is supposed to be uncomfortable.

It may seem morbid to dwell on how many weeks you may have left in life — or on the fact that for all you know, you may not even finish out this week. But it's also bracing, clarifying, and better than the alternative. With the aid of philosophers and psychologists, Burkeman argues that we're usually dwelling on it subconsciously anyway — and it holds us back in ways we rarely understand.

Why can't you pay attention to what matters: Your art, your big personal project, the hard work needed to improve relationships? Why is wasting time on the internet so much more alluring than the things we have to do, even when it isn't fun? Because, says Burkeman (himself a recovering Twitter junkie), social media lets us feel "unconstrained" in a space outside of time. You may not be happy scrolling through curated feeds that make your friends' lives look perfect, or news feeds that make the world look doomed, but at least you're relatively comfortable.

Banning yourself from social media doesn't necessarily work either, because there are any number of ways to distract yourself, including daydreaming. Instead, you need to understand the root cause.

"Whenever we succumb to distraction, we're attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude," Burkeman writes, "an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much."

Finitude is a great word, because it's all about understanding our limitations. Your art, your projects, your relationships: They all exist in time, and they will always be imperfect because they are finite. You will never have enough time for them. You will never be able to control the outcome. They will never, ever live up to the vision in your head. Accept the imperfection, embrace the discomfort, and run headlong towards the important stuff anyway — especially if you feel like you're going to fail at it.

2. Waste time well.

Part of understanding your finitude is knowing that you can't spend all your time on the important stuff. We need breaks, and we need to stop applying the logic of the maximizer to those breaks. If you've ever over-scheduled your weekend, or found yourself racing to tick off every sight on your vacation list, you know what I'm talking about. Instead of truly enjoying moments, you're packing them for the sake of future you — some happier, more fulfilled version of yourself that can sit back and enjoy all those cool photos you took. Except we rarely if ever do that, because future you is too busy doing stuff for their future to care about what you did for them.

Psychologists have a phrase for this —"idleness aversion" — and it seems to have arrived on the scene alongside modern capitalism. Burkeman admits he was infected with it "during the years I spent attending meditation classes and retreats with the barely conscious goal that I might one day reach a condition of permanent calm." As someone who has created meditation contests, embarked on a lengthy hiking challenge, and tried to hack my dream time, I could not be more guilty.

So what's the solution? How do you enforce moments of idleness, even boredom (the state of mind when you get your most creative ideas)? Well, humans have been doing it for centuries. Most religions have rigidly defined days off, like the Shabbat or sabbath, where there's a prohibition against doing any kind of work; on the secular side, most cultures have long lists of feast days with a focus on celebrating life in the moment.

The idea of a tech Shabbat, or Screenless Sunday, seems to be gaining ground as a solution. You could also decide that the work day ends at a specific time and hold to it, rather than letting it bleed into your evening as we have a habit of doing in the always-on world. But as Burkeman points out, it's near impossible to impose these rules on yourself without a support network around you that's doing the same thing: We live best in rhythm with others. So bring your family and friends along for the ride into enforced idleness.

3. Make your to-do list tiny.

Burkeman doesn't advise throwing out your productivity tools entirely. There's nothing wrong with having a to-do list; as GTD guru David Allen says, capturing all your tasks enables you to only have a thought once (instead of having a brain that is constantly nagging you about what needs to get done next). Rather, you can use that list to be more mindful about how you're going to procrastinate — because no matter what you do, you're always procrastinating on something else.

Four Thousand Weeks offers a number of strategies for better procrastination. You could try focusing on one big project at a time (or one big work project and one big personal project), while letting everything else lie fallow. Or you could "fail on a cyclical basis" — agree ahead of time that you're going to do the bare minimum on your fitness routine during a month you're canvassing for an election, say, then get back to the gym the following month. Instead of seeking the elusive work-life balance, you are "consciously imbalanced."

But my favorite is Burkeman's idea of having two to-do lists: one open and large, one closed and tiny. The open one is everything you could be doing; the closed one is a list of just 10 things you could achieve today. The catch is you can't move items from the open list to the closed list until an item on the closed list is ticked off (or if you're waiting for someone to get back to you on it.) I put this strategy into effect in the app Todoist — every day I make sure the "Today" section has no more than 10 items — and it's already making me calmer and less in need of digital distraction.

4. Research your relationships.

It's unreasonably annoying when the people you love don't act the way you expected, am I right? How dare they act like unpredictable human beings, constantly in flux! Burkeman taps pre-school education expert Tom Hobson for the appropriate mental shift: Deliberately adopt the attitude of the researcher about this human being you've been thrown together with.

Wonder what this autonomous individual might do next; don't attach yourself to a particular hope of what that action might be, or it will eventually end badly. Cultivate curiosity instead of getting attached to an outcome. Indeed, you can apply this approach to all of life itself, no matter what crisis arises: Wondering rather than hoping is the foundation of radical acceptance.

5. Remember your cosmic insignificance.

It isn't just the 4,000 weeks thing. Burkeman goes out of his way throughout the book to remind us of just how little we matter in the grander scheme of things. We spend our lives wanting to "put a dent in the universe" by having an impact on future generations, but "even Steve Jobs, who coined that phrase, failed to leave such a dent," writes Burkeman. "Perhaps the iPhone will be remembered for more generations than anything you or I will ever accomplish, but from a truly cosmic view [say, another 310,000 weeks,] it will soon be forgotten, like everything else."

This attitude is not meant to be mean or depressing, but liberating. It takes your ego out of the equation. If the work of today's greatest novelists will be forgotten eventually, your novel matters just as much; you might as well have fun adding it to the vanishing canon. That nutritious meal you're making for your kids doesn't make you a Michelin star chef, sure, but it will make as much of a difference in their lives as a hundred-dollar dish — perhaps more.

Shorn of the nagging voice that tells us we need to do something of maximum importance, fully aware of our limitations and our inability to tackle even a tiny percentage of our list, aware that we are never really in control of our time or our outcomes we can at last relax and enjoy the ride. With the lowest possible expectations, we paradoxically find it easier to take pride in our accomplishments — for as many weeks as remain.