Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 58s.
When I think back to high school English class, it definitely wasn’t the best of times.
To this day, I remember Googling phrases like “Fahrenheit 451 Plot Summary” and “A Tale of Two Cities Sparknotes” so I could read as little as possible when writing up assignments and book reports. I also vividly remember how much I dreaded deconstructing Shakespearean literature and writing about whatever “symbolism” existed in the century-old books we were assigned to read. Bleh.
Man, how things have changed since then.
Thanks in part to the constant incremental improvements I’ve made to my writing over the last decade, and in part to the fact that I had the freedom to write about my biggest passion—productivity—for an entire year over the course of my Year of Productivity project, over the last year and a bit I’ve had the chance to crank out more than 200,000 words that were read by countless people just like yourself.
All of that hard work—and productivity—has lead to this very moment.
I am incredibly excited to announce that I will be publishing a book about my unique (and to be honest, kind of weird) journey into productivity; a collection of often bizarre experiments I’ve conducted to become as productive as possible over the course of one year. The book will be published by Penguin Random House; under their Crown Business imprint in the United States, and under their Knopf Canada imprint in, well, Canada. It will be available wherever books (and e-books) are sold.
What the book will be about
The Productivity Playbook (a tentative title that may change if we think of something we like even better) pulls the absolute best productivity tactics I’ve encountered over the course of my year-long project—about half of which I haven’t written articles about before—and interweaves these tactics with the story of my project, my productivity experiments, the extensive research I have conducted, and interviews with some of the most renowned productivity experts from around the world.
There’s no way I’m going to simply recycle a bunch of blog posts to write this book :-) Over the last decade (and year, full-time), I’ve experimented with countless productivity tips, hacks, and techniques—and while a lot of them have worked wonders, many of them haven’t. My goal is to share the golden nuggets I’ve uncovered during my journey to help the countless people who are dying to get more done every day, but don’t have the time or patience to find out how they should.
What you can expect
We plan to publish the book in 2016. While that might sound like a ways away—and it is—writing and publishing a book that’s cohesive, helpful, and entertaining takes more time than you’d think.
Before then, I’m going to continue cranking out as much awesome content on this blog as I possibly can. In fact, the content on this blog may even get better.
Over the next year and a bit, I’ll be interviewing countless fascinating people for the book, conducting brand new productivity experiments on myself, and of course learning productivity lessons myself all while writing 80,000 words to construct the book itself. You can count on me sharing the most helpful and valuable lessons I learn along the way—while saving some for when you read the book, of course.
A few quick thank-you’s
If you’ve made it this far down in the article, chances are you’ve read some of my work in the past, too. First and foremost, this book exists for, and because, of you. When I made the decision to decline two full-time jobs after graduating business school to start AYOP, I had no idea how it would turn out—especially when hardly anyone visited my site during the first few months. But sure enough, as more and more people like you began to read about my experiments, interviews, and productivity lessons learned, my project took off. If people like yourself didn’t dig my weird approach to experimenting with productivity, this book wouldn’t exist in the first place. Thank you—truly.
Of course, a project like this also doesn’t materialize out of thin air, and like most great projects, it wouldn’t exist without the hard work of several incredible people. That includes Lucinda, my literary agent extraordinaire; Ardyn, my amazing girlfriend who has listened to me ramble on wax poetic about this book for hours on end and provided feedback on everything along the way; and my new friends at Penguin Random House, who will be editing and publishing this book. There’s still a long road ahead, but it will be a blast because of these people.
And if a 16 year-old high-school student (not unlike my former self) ever finds himself Googling for the main takeaways from my book so he can get out of reading it, these people will be the reason for that, too.
Needless to say, this is going to be a blast.
