Society these days is marked by hyper productiveness. We all are bound by our schedules and time-frames, constantly choosing between the things we want to do and the things we simply cannot fit into our already jammed calendars. 100 years ago, nobody was using the term work-life balance. Today it is something we all grapple with. Luckily, we live in a society guided by science. Whereas older generations used to simply wonder at the possibilities of their theories, we now have the ability to test those theories, collect the data, and share the results. How can we become smarter, faster, better, and generally more productive? Well, the answers are in.

Want to build a company that is sure to survive the initial stages of uncertainty and make it to an IPO? Focus on company commitment, as opposed to a corporate hierarchy or hiring people with excellent resumes from top universities. You want employees who are emotionally engaged with their work, who feel as though they are a part of a collective culture of growth and support. “Not one of the commitment firms we studied failed,” said James Baron, a Stanford professor of business and one of Duhigg’s interviewees. “They were also the fastest companies to go public, had the highest profitability ratios, and tended to be leaner, with fewer middle managers, because when you choose employees slowly, you have time to find people who excel at self-direction.” This ‘psychological safety’ is also how you build the most cohesive and productive teams. Psychological safety is a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” Everyone must feel comfortable pitching ideas and contributing to the group without fear of embarrassment or rejection. The best ideas will bubble to the surface.

What is the best way to manage a large company with many departments? Empowering each individual. A management style described as ‘lean managing,’ which emphasizes “collaboration, frequent testing, rapid iteration, and pushing decision making to whoever [is] closest to a problem.” This manifests itself in car manufacturing plants, where each auto worker has the ability to stop the production line at any time. It costs the company thousands of dollars to have the line stopped, but it is important to give each and every employee the ability to stop and make sure every car is problem-free. In hospitals, the distribution of authority to nurses and others who are not physicians is referred to as ‘lean healthcare.’ It is a management philosophy and a “culture in which anyone can, and indeed must, ‘stop the line,’ or stop the care process if they feel something is not right.”

Want to get better at planning your future? Probabilistic thinking is what you will want to study and practice. This entails considering all of the possible scenarios of a future situation and determining which are most likely. It’s important to think about the future “not as what’s going to happen, but rather as a series of possibilities that might occur.” Tomorrow is an array of potential outcomes, all of which have different odds of becoming true. The trouble we often find ourselves in is when we become attached to one specific future, one that we desire strongly enough to rule out the other, still possible scenarios. “The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt.” We must hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously, updating them as we gain more information along the way.

We all love the satisfaction of crossing something off of our to-do lists. Sometimes, however, those items are simply trivial. I’m even guilty of writing something down that I’ve already done, just so I can cross it off! Of course, this is not a recipe for true productiveness. What we need for proper goal setting are both immediate goals and ‘stretch goals,’ and a proper way to plan how to get there. Immediate goals are the obvious ones: take the kids to school; schedule that extra meeting with the design team; stop at the grocery store on the way home. A stretch goal is something that is just barely within the realm of possibility. Managers at GE once instructed their airplane engine manufacturing team to reduce the number of defects on their finished products. The team announced that they could bring down their mistakes by 25%. The chief executive of the company countered with 70% and gave them three years. Such an audacious goal eventually caused the factory managers to “change nearly everything about (a) how workers were trained, (b) which workers were hired, and (c) how the factory ran.” By the time they were done, the company had gone “thirty-eight months without missing a single delivery,” which was a company-wide record. They did all of this using a system coined as the SMART system, which breaks audacious goals into actionable parts. Each goal must be broken down into a plan that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and based on a Timeline.

While I have just scratched the surface of some of the ways we can become more productive, the real juice is within the pages of Duhigg’s wondrously informative book. It was an easy read, full of fun and engaging stories as well as useful information. For anybody who wants to become more motivated, better at working in teams, more focused, faster at innovating, better at setting goals, and more productive in your work and in your personal life, this is the book for you.