I would have avoided a lot of pain and suffering if I had read this book two months ago! The central conceit of "The Power of Full Engagement" is that "Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance" - basically the number of hours you work is less important than your energy levels during those hours.

I picked up this book because I was pretty burnt out. For months, I had been working around the clock on a big project for my startup. I used to look forward to each day, but work just wasn't fun any more. Reading this book, I found myself saying "that sounds a lot like how I feel right now" with many of the cases they discussed. It was a wake up call.

All through college, I considered myself a personal efficiency GTD ninja. But as I read this book, I realized that although my time was nominally managed quite well, I had lost the balance in my life and the quality of both my work and my personal life and fitness were suffering as a result.

Loehr and Schwartz do an excellent job laying out their philosophy on how to be fully engaged. Much of what they says stems from research on how professional athletes sustain extremely high levels of performance. Some of the most important insights:

* Physical energy is the fundamental source of fuel in life

* We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints—fully engaging for periods of time, and then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confront us.

* Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement. [NOTE: the authors use the word "ritual" with no religious overtones, it's more like strong habits that you really commit to - like setting aside an hour each night to play with your kids and never letting anything else encroach on that time. Another example they use a lot is the warm-up ritual a tennis player does before each serve.]

* Far from precluding spontaneity, rituals provide a level of comfort, continuity and security that frees us to improvise and to take risks.

* The sustaining power of rituals comes from the fact that they conserve energy. “We should not cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,” wrote philosopher A. N. Whitehead, back in 1911. “The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” In contrast to will and discipline, which imply pushing ourselves to action, a well-defined ritual pulls us. We feel somehow worse if we don’t do it.

* Expanding capacity requires a willingness to endure short-term discomfort in the service of long-term reward

* Sustained high performance is best served by assuming the mentality of a sprinter not a marathoner. Over the span of a thirty-to forty-year career, performance is optimized by scheduling work into 90-to 120-minute periods of intensive effort followed by shorter periods of recovery and renewal.

* After interviewing a large sample of managers and their employees, the Gallup Organization found that no single factor more clearly predicts the productivity of an employee than his relationship with his direct superior. More specifically, Gallup found that the key drivers of productivity for employees include whether they feel cared for by a supervisor or someone at work; whether they have received recognition or praise during the past seven days; and whether someone at work regularly encourages their development.

I've already made significant changes in my daily life as a result of reading this book - largely in the form of some new "rituals" like:
* Running 3 miles at 8AM 6 days a week
* Going home for an hour at lunch and reading in a park by my house
* Taking a 30 minute nap at 4:30PM each day
* Only checking personal email at noon, 5PM, and 10PM
* Writing in a daily log for 5 minutes each day
* Reading in bed from 11 to midnight each night

Even though I'm actually working fewer hours, I've already been far more productive than I've been all summer. I actually find myself pretty excited to get back to work and I'm certainly in a much more positive place emotionally now too! Now, to be fair, I've only been doing this for a week so it's too early to tell if this is a long-term winning plan. But it certainly feels like it is.

Five stars not because it's even particularly well written (in fact, it sometimes sounds a bit like a sales pitch for their consulting firm... but so did GTD in certain parts) - but because the problems this book addresses are real and the solutions work. It has already made a huge difference in my quality of life.

The Power of Full Engagement - Likewise Book Reviews

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