CONCEPT: 4/5 RELEVANCE: 4.5/5 OVERALL: 4/5
I rarely pass an opportunity to read a self-help book, so when Aseem Puri’s 10X Productive came my way for review, I gladly took it up, knowing well in advance that I will get to learn a lot from it. Read on to know more about the book and my experience and learning from it.
First impressions.
‘10 secrets to getting it all done – the subtitle says it all. The cover is impressive, with its title splashed across in a bold font, and the image representing grit, courage, and determination. The iconography and the overall impression of the cover manage to solidify the same message – ‘getting it all done’.
The contents page tells us the important points that the book touches upon. The chapter names immediately catch your eye. With striking names such as ‘Eat the Frog First’, ‘Bubble TO DO Chart’, ‘Your Phone is Stealing Your Future’, and ‘How I Cancelled 180 Meetings? Let’s Kill the Meeting Monster’ gracing the content page, the reader’s curiosity piques up.
About the author
Aseem Puri is a digital performance marketing expert. He has trained over 5000 marketing professionals globally and has won many top-notch awards including the Marketing Excellence Award, CMO Council Award, Unilever’s Compass Award, and HUL Chairman’s Awards amongst many others. He conducts many workshops, motivational talks, and training sessions on his core areas of expertise which include digital marketing, personal growth, productivity, wealth generation, and finding one’s purpose.
What do we learn?
The book starts with 10 brilliant ways to start our day as how we kickstart our day can determine how happy and how productive we will be for the rest of the day. And no, these aren’t some elaborate schemes that will take you a lifetime to implement and demand multiple hours of your waking time. Instead, he tells you to choose any one or a few of them and practice them only for a few minutes every day.
In the next section, we get introduced to a unique way of making to-do lists, which lends the book a much more relaxed and fun vibe. I also like the term M.E.A.T (Most Effective Action Today) that the author uses to emphasize the most important task of the day. Eat the Frog tells us to accomplish our most vital task right in the morning, telling us that surely doing it won’t be easy but it will produce the maximum results.
As the book progresses, we learn something vital and very relatable given the time crunch that everyone faces in today’s world. These especially hold for working professionals who often get entangled in unwanted email conversations, time-wasting meetings, and multi-tasking activities that actually require single-task focus.
We learn about the admirable work ethic of Mahatma Gandhi which enabled him to achieve what he did, and we also learn about the hard work and strict regimen that most authors follow to keep spinning their best-selling works.
What did I like?
It is a beautiful book, and even though it is short, it has been created with a lot of careful thought and creativity. And by creativity, I don’t mean just the aesthetics of it, but also the effectiveness with which the message and the concepts are delivered.
The use of bold fonts, powerful images, sections and sub-sections, pointers, and lists – all of them in the right mix makes sure that the book doesn’t get tedious or monotonous at any point in time.
My major learnings
The takeaways are many but if there’s one thing that really spoke to me and which I would start implementing right away that would be single-tasking. I had been made aware of the benefits of single-tasking in a couple of books before, and I had seen the remarkable difference it can make in one’s output, but old habits die hard, and before I realized I was once again back to multi-tasking.
I guess, in that way, 10X Productive is just the right push that I needed, a message from the universe if you will, that reminded me to follow the magical way of single-tasking in a much more focused and diligent manner.
Who would I recommend it to?
I would recommend 10X Productive to people who are non-readers or beginners. With just over 37 pages, I am sure you will fly through it, learning so much about self-improvement, growth, and productivity in so little time.
Our readers can download the book for free using this safe and trusted link from the author’s website.
