Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work

by Nick Sonnenberg

Overview

Wall Street Journal Bestseller!

The practical guide to go from “drowning in work” to freeing up an extra business day per week for everyone on your team.

“There just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done!” Sound familiar? Forget the old concepts of time management and the hustle culture of working until you burn out. You and your entire team can get more done, in far fewer hours, with the right blueprint. Come Up for Air is that blueprint.

Through years of building a leading efficiency consulting business, Nick Sonnenberg has discovered the primary reason why so many teams are overwhelmed. It’s not because they don’t have enough time, managers expect too much of their employees, or there aren’t enough people. The problem is that everyone is drowning in unnecessary work and inefficiencies that prevent them from focusing on the work that drives results.

In Come Up for Air, you’ll discover the CPR® Business Efficiency Framework, a proven system for leaders, managers, and teams to maximize their performance and reduce overwhelm by using the right tools in the right way, at the right time. The end result? More output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week in productivity to use however you’d like.

You’ll learn the proven empirical strategies from someone who not only turned his company around when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, but has also helped thousands of organizations around the world become more efficient and leverage the right systems and tools for explosive growth. Come Up for Air is the employee manual you never received.

Turn to Come Up for Air to:

• Gain an extra full day per week in productivity for everyone on your team.
• Reduce stress and burnout by creating a more stable work environment.
• Eliminate the 58% of employee time per day spent on “work about work” instead of being productive.
• Improve company culture by empowering your team to spend their time on work that matters.
• Save an average of two hours per week just by optimizing email with the R.A.D. System.
• Stop wasting time on the “Scavenger Hunt” of trying to find where information is stored.
• Increase employee happiness, satisfaction, trust, and retention by making work easier.
• Stop wasting time in meetings with four proven techniques.
• Supplement your learning with free content and in-depth instructions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400236725
Publisher:	HarperCollins Leadership
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	274,860
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Nick Sonnenberg is an entrepreneur, Inc. columnist, and guest lecturer at Columbia University. He is the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement the CPR® Business Efficiency Framework outlined in Come Up for Air. This is the culmination of Nick’s unique perspective on the value of time, efficiency, and automation which stems in part from the eight years he spent working as a high- frequency trader on Wall Street. The CPR Framework consistently results in greater output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week in productivity per person—just by using the right tools in the right way, at the right time. Nick and his team have worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries, from high-growth startups to the Fortune 10.

Editorial Reviews

2023-02-24
Entrepreneur and consultant Sonnenberg offers a comprehensive plan for increasing workplace proficiency.

“Most teams are drowning in work because they’re using yesterday’s methods in today’s fast-paced environment,” writes the author at the start of this book. “Either they’re unaware of modern tools or they lack knowledge around when and how to best use them, which holds them back from streamlining the way they work.” Addressing this problem is the core concern of Sonnenberg’s book, in which he lays out the tenets of a tool kit he proposes to fix it: the CPR (“Communication, Planning, and Resources”) Business Efficiency Framework. Sonnenberg, a self-described “numbers guy,” is familiar with the importance of seemingly small factors in meeting larger goals; as a trader, he used algorithms and math to trade billions of stocks a day, which he says taught him the value of time: “Shaving even a few seconds off a process that’s done many times per day could provide huge time savings in the end,” he notes, and in these chapters, he uses eye-catching graphs, bullet points, and discussion questions, such as “What are your current business needs?” and “What problem are you trying to solve?” to break down many different strategies for improving team efficiency. Along the way, he touches on everything from team size to the finesse required in planning realistic projects, with a point of view that takes in the grand design as well as the smallest tasks—the latter of which Sonnenberg calls “the bread and butter of any work management platform.” This book is clearly aimed at corporate managers and their team members, so its initial demand of readers—that they believe the notion that such teams are “drowning in work”—won’t necessarily be a problem. Once that demand is met, Sonnenberg’s book offers many sharply written and richly insightful observations about all aspects of office life. He’s particularly engaging when it comes to broader considerations, as when he asks his readers if they’d rather bring more people into a broken system and fix it later or fix the system first. His answer: “Fix the overflowing sink, don’t mop faster!” The clarity of these and other conclusions is always bracing; readers who may feel mired in their corporate teams’ messes are sure to find some of them to be invaluable. This is also true when he advocates for better internal dialogue, in which “communicating is fun, and conversations are focused and flow just as naturally as they would in person.” His more granular and practical points are equally engaging, as when he discusses the notorious “Inbox Zero” movement in the corporate world. It’s important to note, he writes, that “Inbox Zero” is very different from “Unread Zero,” in which the emails’ tasks remain uncompleted: “Even if you’ve read every email in your inbox, they’re still occupying your attention and using your brainpower.” Sonnenberg’s skill at alternating between high-concept and granular content makes his book highly readable, and the well-designed visuals are also helpful.

A brisk and engaging series of proposals for improving corporate team performance.

Kirkus Reviews