Grow Up By Ben Brooks

A Quick Guide to Growing Up By Ben Brooks

I picked up Grow Up By Ben Brooks a while back after getting tired of the usual productivity book cycle — same five tips, same anecdotes about Steve Jobs' desk setup. Ben Brooks actually writes differently. He has a track record from his time at Fast Company and his long-running blog, so this isn't someone who just read one essay on attention and decided to publish a book. The book is structured around the idea that growing up means learning to manage your attention rather than just managing your time. That sounds like a fine distinction, but Brooks makes the case that time management as a concept is actually a trap in the digital age because it treats time as a finite resource you "spend," when really the bottleneck is your focus and whether you're allocating it intentionally or just reacting to whatever notification appeared next. Brooks organizes the material into practical areas — deep work habits, notification management, the difference between being busy and being productive, and how to actually set boundaries with technology without going full Luddite. The core framework is relatively simple: identify where your attention goes, decide where it should go, and build systems that keep the two aligned.

How I Used This Book in Practice

I don't recommend reading this cover to cover if you've been working in productivity spaces for more than a year. A lot of the early chapters repeat points Brooks has made in his blog posts and tweets. The useful part is the later sections on implementation — the specific tactics for restructuring your day and the way he handles the emotional side of changing your habits, which most books in this genre completely ignore. Here's the practical approach I followed. I spent the first chapter on identifying my attention leaks — not a generic exercise but a specific hour-by-hour log of where my focus actually went for three working days. That took me about an hour and a half and the results were annoying to look at. I was spending roughly 40 percent of my workday switching between Slack, email, and whatever browser tab I'd abandoned six hours earlier. Brooks calls this "context switching debt" and the number is usually higher than people think it is in my experience. The fix I landed on was combining two of his methods. I batched my reactive communication into two specific windows — one at 11am and one at 4pm — and I used the concept of "attention zones" where certain types of work happen in certain contexts without interruption. For deep work I use a separate device or a browser profile with no notifications, no social media, nothing. The first week was miserable. By week three I was getting actual deep work done instead of just pretending to when I thought no one was watching.

Grow Up By Ben Brooks and the Notification Problem

One section that actually stuck with me is Brooks's take on notifications. Most advice on this topic says "turn them all off." Brooks argues that's wrong because you end up missing things that matter. His alternative is the three-tier system: alerts that require immediate action (calendar reminders, urgent pings from people you actually work with), informational notifications you check periodically (news updates, social media), and everything else gets deleted or archived so you never have to decide whether to check it. I applied this to my own setup. I went through every app on my phone and laptop and categorized them. About 70 percent of what I had enabled as notifications dropped to tier two or three and got silenced. The remaining alerts are genuinely things that need attention. This took about 45 minutes to implement and the daily interruption count on my phone dropped from somewhere in the 80-120 range to maybe eight or nine.

Where the Book Falls Short

Brooks doesn't handle organizational-level change very well. Everything he writes assumes you have control over your own environment — your own calendar, your own device, your own inbox. If you work in a place where Slack is mandatory, where your manager expects instant responses, or where your job literally is to monitor multiple communication channels, most of the tactics in this book won't apply directly. He mentions this limitation briefly but doesn't offer a real alternative for people in high-connectivity roles. There's also a gap around the financial and practical side of reducing connectivity. If your income depends on being available, Brooks's framework doesn't give you the language to push back with anyone. I found myself needing a supplement here and ended up looking at more managerial approaches to boundary-setting, which is something he doesn't address at all.

A Specific Problem I Hit and How I Worked Around It

One edge case I ran into that Brooks doesn't cover: what happens when your deep work requires collaboration tools that are inherently interruptive? I was working on a project that needed real-time feedback through a shared document platform, and turning off all notifications broke the workflow entirely. My workaround was to use the platform's native notification settings at the item level — I set it to only ping me when someone commented directly on my contributions, which filtered out the noise while keeping the relevant signals. It's a minor adjustment but it makes the difference between the method working and the method failing for people in collaborative roles. Grow Up By Ben Brooks is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the usual ebook retailers. I'd recommend the ebook version unless you specifically want to annotate it, which is actually worth doing if you plan to follow through on the implementation tactics. The print version runs about 200-240 pages depending on the edition, and I'd estimate about 4-6 hours of reading time if you go slowly and do the exercises. Brooks also has a free companion resource on his website that includes some of the worksheets mentioned in the book, which is useful if you're the type who wants the printable version rather than the in-text prompts.

Who Should Read This

If you've already read Cal Newport, Adam Grant, or any of the other mainstream productivity authors and want something that connects the dots between attention management and actual daily behavior change, this is worth your time. If you're new to the topic and want a comprehensive foundational text, you might be better off starting with something broader before coming back to Brooks's more specific takes. The book works best as a second or third pass through the genre rather than your first introduction.