A review by tylercritchfield
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive by Charles Duhigg
3.0
This book read like the Malcolm Gladwell books I've read, where the author makes his point with related anecdotes and research studies. Each chapter had interesting ideas that I enjoyed learning about and that I'm interested to apply to my day-to-day life. Overall, these were great tips to do things better, but I did feel it was missing cohesion of ideas. Each chapter existed well on its own but didn't fit together that well.
For those interested, here is a brief summary of the topics he discusses:
- Gain motivation from taking charge of your decisions
- Combine stretch goals with SMART goals to achieve bigger and better things
- Improve focus from building mental models of what you expect to happen in a given situation
- Use probabilistic thinking to make better decisions
- Foster better teamwork productivity by creating an environment where everyone feels heard and free to speak up
- In management, give more authority to those closest to the problem to maximize their expertise
- Encourage innovation and creativity from your own experiences and by combining older ideas in new ways
- Absorb data and information better by making it harder to process in your mind (i.e. handwriting notes instead of recording lectures) - This ironic approach makes it easier to remember and test new theories with
For those interested, here is a brief summary of the topics he discusses:
- Gain motivation from taking charge of your decisions
- Combine stretch goals with SMART goals to achieve bigger and better things
- Improve focus from building mental models of what you expect to happen in a given situation
- Use probabilistic thinking to make better decisions
- Foster better teamwork productivity by creating an environment where everyone feels heard and free to speak up
- In management, give more authority to those closest to the problem to maximize their expertise
- Encourage innovation and creativity from your own experiences and by combining older ideas in new ways
- Absorb data and information better by making it harder to process in your mind (i.e. handwriting notes instead of recording lectures) - This ironic approach makes it easier to remember and test new theories with