Resources

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

This book is one of the reasons that this site exists. After reading it and completing my first 12 Week Year in 2016, I had had such success that I felt the need to share my experience.

Filled with incredibly actionable advice and a clear plan for goal achievement, I recommend wholeheartedly this book for all readers who want to achieve more with their time.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) is a system for setting and achieving wildly important goals, particularly in the business setting. However, the principles of 4DX can be applied to personal goal achievement.

4DX is quite brilliant, and I recommend it highly.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Stephen R. Covey has been a thought-leader in the field of professional productivity and personal development for decades. This book might be his best-known and contains page after page of useful advice and wisdom.

The 7 Habits offers a framework for becoming a more effective version of yourself. One of the greatest of all books in this genre.

Atomic Habits

James Clear has become one of the leading thinkers, writers and speakers in the personal development space in recent years.

His New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits details how to create good habits and eradicate unhelpful ones.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Cal Newport’s book Deep Work has had a profound impact on how I consider the value of my contributions in my workplaces. I have adapted some of my thinking to look through the Deep Work lens, and I have been aggressively cutting back on shallow obligations as a result. This brings me closer to living in alignment with my mission.

I heartily recommend reading Deep Work at least once.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

I once worked with a Professor who gave me a copy of David Allen's 'Getting Things Done'. After reading that masterpiece of personal productivity I did what all good productivity geeks do: I wrote my own personal to-do manager, hosted it on my home server and used it for several years to manage all of my capturing, contexts and priorities.

David Allen's book is the defacto gold standard for modern productivity reading. Anyone with an interest in personal productivity needs to read this book!

A Personal Mission Statement: Your Road Map to Happiness

Developing a mission statement for your life can be a rewarding experience that offers insights into what you value in life and therefore provides guidance for the day-to-day decisions we all face.

Michal Stawicki's book is an excellent guide to help you create your own.

Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time

There are fundamental principles that apply to all productivity strategies, tools or rules. It is critical that anyone wanting to increase their personal productivity pays attention to those principles.

Rory Vaden has created a primer on personal productivity that relies on common sense. Procrastinate on Purpose could become required reading for those wishing to create success.

Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals

Authors Owain Service and Rory Gallagher explore the work of the Behavioural Insights Team ("Nudge Unit") of the UK Government in this superb book about the power of helping people make good decisions for themselves.

Their thesis is that to achieve big, you need to think small.

Evernote

It's hard for me to remember a time before I used Evernote. I store everything there, and have done for years.

Although they have faced some challenges over recent years, Evernote is still the class leader for ubiquitous note-taking and storage applications.

Freedom

Use Freedom to block distractions so you can get your work done. Block what you want, when you want, and be more productive.

RescueTime

With so many distractions and possibilities in your digital life, it's easy to get scattered. RescueTime helps you understand your daily habits so you can focus and be more productive.

TextExpander

TextExpander lets you instantly insert snippets of text from a repository of emails, boilerplate and other content, as you type – using a quick search or abbreviation.

Active Campaign - Email Newsletter

Active Campaign provides email marketing and customer relationship management software that is competitively priced but fully featured.

Their easy to use software makes learning marketing automation easy, but has the features to scale as your expertise grows.

MissingLettr - Social Media Scheduling

MissingLettr automatically imports my blog posts and creates social media campaigns with quotes and images that will be scheduled over the next year.

It has become an incredible time-saver for me as I publicise my writing.

SiteGround - Web Hosting

I moved this site to SiteGround during 2018 after hearing people rave about their speed and support. I haven't been disappointed!

Explore their incredible plans by clicking the link below.

SocialBee - All-In-One Social Media

SocialBee allows me to post to several social media profiles, with sources including RSS feeds and Pocket articles. Automated social posting allows me to spend less time & effort to build my social media accounts.

SocialBee really is Social Media on Autopilot!

Tailwind - Pinterest & Instagram Growth Tools

Tailwind provides a suite of tools to enable you to grow your Pinterest or Instagram engagement, following and traffic. I've found it easy to learn and I am starting to see excellent results from my work on Pinterest.