How does The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy
Different Target Market
The Productivity Project contains a series of productivity hacks which will improve the life of someone who is already productive. The target market is someone who is already doing well, but wants to be doing better. ROAR, on the other hand, is geared toward helping people who have lost their productivity in reaction to an event. When a lay off, serious disease diagnosis, or just one too many rejections comes along, ROAR gives you tools and techniques to quickly get back on track with what you want out of life.
They also have different definitions of productivity. For The Productivity Project, productivity is defined as a measurement of how much you accomplish. For ROAR, productivity is defined as a measurement of how much progress you make toward a specific goal.
Different Structure
Each chapter within The Productivity Project (after the introduction) is a stand-alone productivity hack. If you feel that you are good with how you manage your time and energy, and only want to read the chapters about improving your attention management, you can do that without losing anything. You could start with chapters on what you most want to address. Then, go backward or forward in the book to get to the next thing you want to cover. Whatever order you read the chapters in, you’ll get the same results.
In contrast, each chapter within ROAR (after the introduction) addresses a different piece of the 3-step productivity process. While you could skip some of the chapters containing examples, for the most part, you need to read all of the chapters, in order. Because the chapters detail a step-by-step process, you need to start at the beginning and go in order to get the best results.
The Productivity Project Central Concept
The central concept in The Productivity Project is that “productivity” can actually be broken down into three subsets. You can better manage your time, your attention, or your energy. Productivity occurs when you optimally manage all three. These three subsets correspond pretty well to the three steps of ROAR.
The first step of ROAR, “Reach Out”, will result in improving your attention management. Once you have allowed yourself to feel your feelings, found something good to focus on, and chosen a direction, you will naturally go from having scattered attention that is searching your environment for threats to focused attention that is optimizing your movement toward your goal.
The second step of ROAR, “Accept”, is all about improving your energy management. Stop wasting energy by fighting against what is! It’s far easier to change yourself, your actions, or your beliefs, than to change the rest of the world.
Finally, the planning stage that allows you to “Relax” aims to optimize your time management. By having a process to keep things in buckets of today, tomorrow, this week, next week, this month, and later, you can optimize what you are doing right now this very minute. You know that you are going to get to the other things, and don’t need to waste time thinking or worrying about them.
