Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing

Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor offers insights on how to make the “new way of work” work for you, providing a time management framework with actionable steps to optimize your productivity, accomplish more, prevent burnout, and cultivate a harmonious work-life balance.

Every day, tens of thousands of Google employees, from executives to interns, rely on Laura Mae Martin’s tips and best practices for how to make the most of their time. Now, with Uptime, Laura brings her unique approach to productivity and well-being to anyone who wants to be more effective and experience “calm accomplishment,” whether at work, at school, or in their own personal lives.

Laura began her Google career in sales but quickly carved out a niche for herself as a productivity expert. For more than a decade, she’s been coaching Google executives and employees on how to achieve a state of “productivity Zen”—a holistic approach to conquering everything from the avalanche of emails in their inboxes with proven email management techniques to becoming the master of their own calendars and running excellent meetings. Her strategies have been widely adopted by many, including entry-level employees looking to amplify their individual impact, middle managers, and top executives working across global teams.

As many of us have moved to a hybrid environment blending work and home, managing our time efficiently and remaining productive is more important than ever. In Uptime, Laura shows how to thrive no matter where you’re working, giving concrete steps that help you improve your focus, set priorities, and keep good systems, routines, and tactics in place.

Uptime explains how to make technology work for you and make “feeling on top of it” your new normal. It’s a blueprint for operating at the highest levels of productivity while enhancing your own personal well-being.

Uptime is a blueprint for operating at your best, with actionable strategies from inside Google to help you:

• Set Priorities and Say No: Use the “List Funnel” to identify your top three priorities and learn the simple, effective language to decline requests that fall outside them.
• Master Your Calendar: Implement Zero-Based Calendaring to design your ideal week, protecting your high-energy “Power Hours” for deep work and avoiding burnout.
• Run Your Inbox: Tame the email avalanche with the “Laundry Method,” a simple system for sorting and responding that keeps your inbox at zero.
• Make Meetings Matter: Learn the tactics Google executives use to ensure every meeting has a purpose, an agenda, and a result, saving countless hours each week.
• Thrive in a Hybrid World: Discover strategies to optimize your schedule for focus and connection, whether you work from home, the office, or a mix of both.

Laura Mae Martin is the Executive Productivity Advisor at Google. She coaches Google’s top executives on the best ways to manage their time and energy and sends out a weekly productivity newsletter that reaches over fifty thousand employees. During her thirteen-year tenure at Google, Laura has worked in sales, product operations, event planning, and now executive coaching. She holds a bachelor of science in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and three children.

More about Laura and resources from this book can be found at www.lauramaemartin.com