Book SummaryUltraproductive, by Eric Partaker and Christian Poensgen

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Ultraproductive

Picture an ambitious executive climbing the company ladder. Or perhaps they’re a bright, young entrepreneur launching a business of her own. Their coffee-powered workday starts before dawn and continues long after their loved ones go to bed. Every hour is a whirlwind of meetings, emails, reports, and phone calls with barely a moment to catch their breath. By the typical measures, they’re the most productive person they know, and yet… Their health is shot, their relationships are in trouble, and they spend so much time putting out fires at work that they never seem to get any closer to their goals.

Does this story sound familiar? According to authors Eric Partaker and Christian Poensgen, this is the life many people lead in the modern business world—and they should know. Both of them followed the same seemingly hyperproductive path to...

Ultraproductive Summary Productivity Versus Biology

To understand the thrust of Partaker and Poensgen’s argument, we first need to look at two factors: our poor understanding of what “productivity” really means, and the unconscious evolutionary factors that lead us astray in the modern world. Fortunately, we have a built-in biological mechanism—the “ultradian rhythm”—that can help us out of the productivity trap.

First, the authors want you to understand that being busy all the time isn’t the same as being productive—and that’s the most common mistake we all make. It’s an excusable error. After all, when you’re busy, it sure feels like you’re productive. However, you’ve probably also had the experience of losing entire days to emails, interruptions, rambling meetings, and a thousand little “emergencies” that need your immediate attention. At the end of the day, you’ve gotten nothing accomplished, so you take your laptop home to write reports, answer more emails, and fine-tune presentations into the wee hours of the night.

(Shortform note: The issue behind the misalignment the authors highlight is that how we define “productivity” may be working against us. In *[Free to...

Ultraproductive Summary Recharge Your Batteries

When we’re chasing success, grinding through school, or trying to push our careers to the next level, the first thing we often sacrifice is our health. This often starts when we’re still young and feel like we’ve got health to spare. All-night study sessions lead to late-night catch-up work, early check-ins at the office, and hours of lost sleep every day. According to Partaker and Poensgen, living like this is the worst thing you can do to yourself. You cannot be productive and function without rest, so giving up on sleep is the same as giving up on anything you hope to accomplish with your waking hours.

(Shortform note: The authors identify working late at night as the chief reason their readers probably aren’t getting enough sleep, but there's another behavior that many of us may indulge in: revenge bedtime procrastination. This is when people stay awake into the night so they can finally get some time to themselves, not for any productivity reason. It’s “revenge” in that we often do it to rebel against daily work and chores that sap all joy out of life. To break yourself of this habit, it’s...

Ultraproductive Summary Hone Your Focus

Just as you can use your body’s 90-minute cycle to optimize rest for maximum energy, you can use those same cycles throughout the day to get the best use of that energy. As we stated in the previous section, you’ll ideally spend your day in productive 90-minute stretches with strategic breaks in between. That begs the question, though, of what you’ll fill those 90-minute work periods with. Spending all your work time reacting to emails, dealing with interruptions, and hopping from meeting to meeting won’t be any more productive than before, even with breaks to keep you from burning out. Partaker and Poensgen say that what’s important is to block out some of those 90-minute zones for focusing on the work that’s most meaningful.

(Shortform note: Sometimes, the most important task to work on in your focused 90-minute sessions will be obvious. If it isn’t, or if you have competing priorities, tech industry insiders Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Make Time) offer several thoughts to consider. First, if there’s an important task that’s under a time crunch, that can be a great focus for your day, since deadline pressure...

Ultraproductive Summary Stress Your System

The final productivity pillar Partaker and Poensgen discuss is stress, but they don’t talk about how to avoid it. Instead, they insist that some kinds of stress are useful and necessary—without it, you can’t learn and grow. Nevertheless, we spend most of our lives trying to dull the stress we feel, often in self-destructive ways, whether through comfort food, alcohol, avoiding exercise, or doomscrolling on our phones. Instead, we need to rethink our relationship to stress, learn to lean into it when it's helpful, and then back away and recharge in healthy ways.

But first, a clarification: The authors differentiate between acute and chronic stress; one is useful, the other is not. An acute stressor is something that’s temporary, needs to be dealt with quickly, and is done. Biologically, acute stress is indistinguishable from being excited about something you enjoy. Your body and your senses go on high alert while your thinking and problem-solving skills quicken. Then, once the stress-inducing incident has passed, you return to normal—or maybe better. Like a taxing workout for your body, dealing with and resolving acute stress fires you up and even helps heal your whole...

Ultraproductive Summary Put It All Together

While describing the three pillars of productivity—healthy rest, meaningful focus, and stress as a tool for growth—Partaker and Poensgen describe how to design an optimal day, week, and year around them. In this last section, let’s take a look at what an optimized blueprint for your work might look like.

Make a Plan

First, they suggest that every day and week should start with a plan. It shouldn’t be complicated. Rather, at the start of every day (and every week), you should decide on the top three meaningful goals you’re going to work toward. These goals might be work-related, such as designing a new project you’re going to pitch or developing a new list of clients for you to contact. Alternatively, they might be personal, such as working on your health or spending time with your family. What they aren’t is trivial—you shouldn’t include rote, time-consuming busywork among your three priorities. That sort of work, if it needs to be done at all, will fit its way into the cracks around the time you set aside for what’s important.

(Shortform note: Your daily and weekly goals will be guided by whatever longer-term goals you’ve set. But how do you know if your bigger...

Shortform Exercise: Boost Your Productivity

Partaker and Poensgen’s three keys to enhanced productivity are recharge time, meaningful focus, and healthy stress. Consider ways you could adjust your daily routine or mindset to better address each of these factors.

Consider how much sleep and free time you get in a typical 24 hours. If you were to increase your recharge time in both of those areas, what are the barriers you’d have to overcome, and how would you go about it?