For our final, live book discussion of 2020, Productivity Book Group [ https://productivitybookgroup.org ] discussed Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less [ https://amzn.to/3co5Nu9 ]. Enjoy the discussion!

About Greg McKeown (Amazon)

Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Crown Business, April 2014). He has taught at companies that include Apple, Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter and VMware. He was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.He has conducted research in the field of leadership, strategy and why people and teams thrive and why they don’t. He is a blogger for Harvard Business Review and the Influencer Network on LinkedIn.He also collaborated on the writing and research of the Wall Street Journal bestseller “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” (Harper Business, June 2010), “Bringing Out the Best in Your People” (Harvard Business Review, May 2010).Prior to this research and teaching, Greg worked for Heidrick & Struggles’ Global Leadership Practice assessing senior executives. His work included being a part of a year long project for Mark Hurd (then CEO of Hewlett Packard) assessing the top 300 executives at HP.Greg is an active social innovator. He served as a Board Member for the Washington D.C. policy group, Resolve (KONY2012), and as a mentor with 2 Seeds a non-profit incubator for agricultural projects in Africa. And he has been a guest speaker at non-profit groups that have included The Kauffman Fellows, St. Jude and the Minnesota Community Education Association.Originally from London, England, he now lives in Silicon Valley, California with his wife and their four children. Greg holds an MBA from Stanford University.

About the Book, Essentialism (Amazon)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than one million copies sold! Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done.“A timely, essential read for anyone who feels overcommitted, overloaded, or overworked.”—Adam GrantHave you ever:• found yourself stretched too thin?• simultaneously felt overworked and underutilized?• felt busy but not productive?• felt like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas?If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist.Essentialism is more than a time-management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter.By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy—instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.Essentialism is not one more thing—it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.

This a talk McKeown gave at Google about Essentialism. Enjoy!