Halftime Talks Episode 201 The Field
Jake Knapp Book Recommendations
How do we get the most out of our time?
Before you listen
This time we reach into the library for two books by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, Sprint and Make Time. Both can stretch the way you view how you plan and spend your time.
Sprint is a system for solving big problems and testing ideas in just five days. We tend to keep doing what we’re used to, because experimenting looks like time that could knock us off track. Sprint lets you test your assumptions in a short stretch, with less of the resources and cognitive load you’d expect. Both authors have worked at renowned technology firms and taken these systems on the speaking circuit, to companies like Slack and Google. It sits in the same new approach to productivity as The Lean Startup and Essentialism.
Listen for the skeleton key. Even if you don’t run a sprint now, you come away with its big principles for later, whether you work in a big company or by yourself.
From the talk
One of the interesting challenges that we all face is that a lot of times we rest on our laurels and we do things that we're used to doing.
Imagine if you could just test your assumption in five days.
Transcript
Read the transcriptHide the transcript387 words
When I found their first book, I also purchased another book by Jake Knapp and John I’m going to mispronounce the name again, zaratsky. I got their other book. It was called Sprint, how to solve big problems and test ideas in just five days. One of the interesting challenges that we all face is that a lot of times we rest on our laurels and we do things that we’re used to doing because to incorporate new things or to experiment, we see the cost of time as a hindrance that can get us off track on the things that we need to be doing so within this book, in an effort to test our assumptions, in an effort to continue to innovate and iterate on possibility and move towards progressive, more refined techniques, this book gives us a system of how we can approach big problems and test our assumptions in short periods of Time.
The authors both work for renowned technology firms and have been able to implement these systems, not only into the ones that they’ve worked in, but also the slacks, the Googles, the they’re they’re on the circuit of a lot of those tech companies, and giving lectures and speaking. So this book, if you have a big idea, or if you want to just test your assumptions, it’s definitely in this new age tech approach to to productivity, like you have the Lean Startup, you have essentialism, you have a lot of things that are asking us, how do We get the most out of our time. And imagine if you could just test your assumption in five days that that require as much resources or cognitive load or quantity of time than you previously expected, where you can derive some of the big principles out of that.
So if you want to implement it at a later date, you have the skeleton key for it. So these two books by Jake Knapp and John zarodsky are awesome, especially if you are in a big company, or you work by yourself, or you have a small team, these are pretty, pretty groundbreaking books that allow us to bring that level of productivity to our time, to our attention and to our our vision for moving forward so we can call.