Smarter Faster Better May Make You All of Those Things

Not only will Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business make you more efficient if you heed its tips, it will also save you the effort of reading many productivity books dedicated to the ideas inside. You needn’t read Superforecasting—that’s covered in Smarter Faster’s Chapter 6: Decision Making—Originals (Chapter 7: Innovation), The 4-Hour Workweek (Chapter 4: Goal Setting), Work Rules! (Chapter 2: Teams), Sources of Power (Chapter 3: Focus), and probably a bunch of other books I don’t even know about. Plus a lot of Harvard Business Review case studies I think I’ve heard about on NPR. That’s, like, 30 hours saved right there.

Charles Duhigg, the author, elevates the life-hacking genre. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times business writer had a hit in 2012 with The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. His writing is smart, measured, and fun. In Smarter Faster there are even little cartoons to illustrate some of his ideas. He uses the Malcolm Gladwell model of shaping academic studies into hacks but applies a less excitable tone and a more cinematic style. He’s a reasonable man trying to figure out how we all can do a little better by adjusting our life a bit. He even starts and ends his book by showing how he struggled to use his own tips to write it without flipping out on his wife and kids.