Do you feel guilty when you take time for yourself? According to Chris Bailey in “The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy,” you probably need to slow down, not speed up or do more, to be more productive. While his self-experimentation may amuse you, his results may also surprise you. He first chronicled his journey on his personal blog, titled “A Year of Productivity,” where his research took shape. Using those experiences and the research that he has done since then, he eventually produced this book a decade later.

Readers follow the story of how Bailey turned his strange obsession with productivity since a young age into his livelihood. His big idea is that you do not need to give up your passions and hobbies to be productive; you just need to prioritize them correctly. This book poses tough questions to get you to discover your true purpose in seeking better productivity. The author insists that readers need to do the hard work of forming goals that match up with their values. He recommends tools like meditation, his “Rule of 3,” and “Biological Prime Time” prioritizing to help you identify what matters most to you.

Bailey uses visuals, like pie charts, to illustrate the difference productivity can make. Each chapter features an estimate of how long it takes to read it. For most chapters, he also provides a short takeaway blurb to sum up the topic. Clearly, he wants readers to hit the ground running on applying his strategies, and those estimates and takeaways help them to do so even while reading his book. A lot of his advice surrounds setting limits on what you accomplish and when you do so. Even if some of the suggestions may not hit home for you, this book has a lot to offer.