RESOURCES — BOOKS WE LOVE
Mandatory Reads.
Willingly.
The books that confirmed what we already knew.
Every morning for years, Todd would grab a yellow notepad and a pen and write it all down. The business things. The family things. The spiritual things. Everything fighting for the same page, trying to figure out what mattered most that day — and how it connected to everything he was building toward.
He tried every tool. None of them fit. So he built TepinTasks — not because he saw a market opportunity, but because he needed it. Badly. For years.
The books came later. And when they did, they didn’t inspire TepinTasks — they just showed up and said yes, exactly that. The smartest thinkers in productivity had been circling the same idea for decades. Todd had just been living it every morning with a pen and a yellow notepad.
“When I read The ONE Thing and sat down for my first real planning session, I put a vacation on the calendar first. And I cried. Not because I had never taken a vacation before. I had. But because for the first time I wasn’t planning work and fitting life around it. I was planning life and fitting work around it.
Then I read Four Thousand Weeks and accepted the realization that you can’t do it all or have it all. I am over halfway through my four thousand weeks. It’s a lot to think about.”
— Jamie, TepinTasks
These are the books on our shelf. Read them. Then come back and use TepinTasks — because it works for people who take all of this seriously.
01 — MANAGEMENT
High Output Management
Andy Grove
This book is so good it’s almost unfair. Andy Grove built the foundation for modern management thinking while running Intel — and practically everything that came after it owes him a debt. OKRs, management by objectives, the whole idea of measuring what matters — it starts here.
Grove’s central idea is simple and devastating: a manager’s output is the output of their team. Not their effort. Not their intentions. Their team’s results. Everything in this book flows from that one idea, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.
John Doerr learned directly from Grove at Intel. Which means this book is the grandfather of at least two other books on this list. That lineage is worth knowing.
Why it lives in TepinTasks
The idea that every task should trace back to measurable output — not just activity — is baked into how TepinTasks structures priorities, routines, and accountability.
02 — STRATEGY
Traction
Gino Wickman
If you’ve ever been in a room with a business owner who has a vision that no one else seems to share, Traction is the book you hand them. Wickman built the Entrepreneurial Operating System around a single premise: most businesses fail not because the idea was bad but because they couldn’t execute it consistently.
The Six Components — Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, Traction — aren’t complicated. They’re just disciplined. Rocks, Scorecards, Level 10 Meetings. It’s the operating system your business never came with but absolutely needs.
Why it lives in TepinTasks
EOS coaches use TepinTasks to build client workspaces that speak fluent Traction — Rocks become priority groups, L10 agendas become routines, and the whole system stays alive between sessions.
03 — STRATEGY
Measure What Matters
John Doerr
John Doerr sat in a room with Andy Grove at Intel and came out with OKRs. Then he brought them to Google when it was just a couple of guys in a garage. The rest is history — and this book tells it beautifully.
Objectives and Key Results sounds simple because it is. Inspiring goal, measurable outcome, quarterly rhythm. What makes this book indispensable is Doerr’s insistence that the goal isn’t to hit 100% — it’s to aim high enough that 70% represents something extraordinary. That mindset shift changes everything about how you plan.
Why it lives in TepinTasks
TepinTasks structures OKR workspaces so every task traces back to a Key Result, and every Key Result rolls up to an Objective. The hierarchy isn’t optional — it’s the whole point.
The best productivity books don’t contradict each other.
They’re all saying the same thing.
Focus. Delegate. Measure. Design systems, not just to-do lists. TepinTasks is where all of it comes together.
04 — EXECUTION
The ONE Thing
Gary Keller & Jay Papasan
What’s the ONE thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary? That question lives rent-free in our heads. Gary Keller and Jay Papasan wrote a whole book around it and somehow made it feel more urgent with every chapter.
The domino effect. Goal setting to the now. Time blocking that starts with vacation, not work. This book is a direct confrontation with the myth that busy equals productive — and it wins the argument every time. Extraordinary results don’t come from doing more things. They come from doing fewer things better.
Why it lives in TepinTasks
The ONE Thing’s time blocking philosophy — protect the most important work first — is exactly why TepinTasks builds schedules the way it does. Your ONE thing gets the best slot, not whatever’s left over.
05 — TIME
Buy Back Your Time
Dan Martell
Dan Martell built and sold multiple companies and somewhere along the way figured out that the thing holding most entrepreneurs back isn’t strategy or capital — it’s themselves. Specifically, their inability to get out of their own way.
The Buyback Rate is the idea that changed everything for us. Calculate what your time is actually worth. Then delegate anything that costs less than that rate. It sounds obvious until you realize most founders are doing $15/hour work while billing at $500. The DRIP Matrix, the Replacement Ladder, the Playbook Method — every tool in this book is designed to solve one problem: the founder as bottleneck.
Why it lives in TepinTasks
TepinTasks’ delegation features were built for exactly this philosophy. The task isn’t just assigned — it’s documented, tracked, and structured so the work gets done right without requiring your time every time.
06 — EXECUTION
Clockwork
Mike Michalowicz
Clockwork is basically the book version of what TepinTasks does. Michalowicz’s whole premise is building a business that runs without you — not because you’re checked out, but because you built it well enough that it doesn’t need you in every room at every moment.
The four roles — Do, Decide, Delegate, Design — give every business owner a framework for understanding where their time actually goes and where it needs to go instead. The goal is to spend more time designing and less time doing. Most owners have it completely backwards. This book fixes that.
Why it lives in TepinTasks
A business that runs like clockwork needs systems, routines, and accountability built into the daily workflow — not just in a playbook on a shelf. That’s the gap TepinTasks fills.
07 — TIME
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
Four thousand weeks. That’s roughly how long a human life lasts. Oliver Burkeman opens with that number and then spends the rest of the book dismantling every productivity myth you’ve ever believed — and somehow it’s the most useful productivity book we’ve ever read.
Where most productivity books promise you can do it all if you just optimize hard enough, Burkeman argues the opposite. You can’t do it all. You were never going to do it all. And the sooner you make peace with that — and start choosing deliberately instead of frantically — the better your work and your life will be. It’s the antidote to hustle culture and it’s beautifully written.
Why it lives in TepinTasks
TepinTasks isn’t built to help you do more. It’s built to help you do the right things. Four Thousand Weeks is the philosophical case for why that distinction matters more than any productivity hack ever will.
The Books Are the Blueprint.
TepinTasks Is the Build.
Every idea on this shelf shaped how we think about work, time, and what it means to actually get things done. TepinTasks is our attempt to turn those ideas into a system anyone can use every day.
