Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours

A road-tested formula for improving your professional performance, from one of the business world's most successful and productive executives – with practical suggestions and takeaways in every chapter. 

Discover the secrets to professional productivity and high performance. Extreme Productivity is for anyone feeling overwhelmed by their existing workload—facing myriad competing demands and multiple time-sensitive projects. Offering antidotes to a calendar full of boring meetings and a backlog of e-mails, Robert Pozen explains how to determine your highest priorities and match them with how you actually spend your time.

Pozen demonstrates that in order to be truly productive, professionals must make a critical shift in their mind-set: from hours worked to results produced. In a knowledge-based economy, what’s important is what you’ve accomplished, not how many hours you’ve logged at your desk. 

Pozen teaches you how to efficiently complete your large projects and quickly move through the small stuff. He shows you how to delegate functions and manage your boss. He helps people at all stages of their careers read, write, and make presentations more effectively. He provides professionals with practical tips on how to efficiently use their time—while leading full and productive personal lives as well.

This practical guide provides a complete framework for professional development:

• Results-Oriented Mindset: Learn to make the critical shift from counting hours at your desk to focusing only on the quality of results produced.
• Actionable Strategies: Discover proven antidotes to a calendar full of boring meetings and an overflowing email inbox, letting you focus on what truly matters.
• Efficiency Methods: Master techniques to efficiently complete your large projects while quickly moving through the small stuff that drains your energy.
• Managing Up and Down: A road-tested formula for navigating your organization, from learning how to effectively manage your boss to delegating functions to your team.

Robert C. Pozen teaches at MIT Sloan School of Management. He was President of Fidelity Investments and Executive Chair of MFS Investment Management, and served as a senior official in both the federal and state government. He is also the author of six books, including Extreme Productivity, one of the top rated business books of 2012. He offers MIT courses for executives on personal productivity, and has been teaching online since the spring of 2020. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.