Genres: Productivity
Never Play it Safe – Chase Jarvis
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This was read for September 2025 book club. Join to get regular posts on books. While part of my is always inspired by these types of books they also seem to be extreme examples of survivorship bias. We only hear about all the people the author has met, and sometimes coached, that succeeded by following
Meditations for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman
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This is an in progress read for book club. Scroll to the bottom to see the related posts. Oliver Burkeman asks us to spend one day on each chapter, ideally, and evaluate how hard we are on ourselves. Instead of falling into the prouductivity porn culture surrounding us, where we rush through everything so we
The Siren’s Call – Chris Hayes
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The Siren’s Call looks at how the attention economy monopolizes our attention in ways that we don’t want. We don’t really want to doom scroll, but it’s hard to fight the generated content that gets put in front of us because it’s just compelling enough and provides just the right amount of dopamine hits to
Atomic Habits – James Clear
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This is my second read through Atomic Habits (my original review) and I didn’t come into it thinking it would be all that great. I expected that all these years later I’d look at it like many productivity books I read, simplistic and missing so much context for anyone that wasn’t a white dude. I’m
Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman
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Four Thousand Weeks is a productivity book less about cranking out more tasks every week and more about making you take stock of the things you’re doing so that you don’t waste your time with meaningless tasks. As the book states, you have about four thousand weeks on the earth, so what are you going
Eat that Frog – Brian Tracy
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This book is all about doing the hardest thing in your day first so that if you don’t get to much else, at least you’ve got the hardest things done. While I felt it was a rehash of many of the ideas I’ve read about in productivity books, there are a few new ideas and
Against Creativity – Oli Mould
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In Against Creativity, Oli Mould, takes a critical look at the creativity the world wants to push on us. Your boss cuts funding and says that you need to be “creative” to provide the same level of service with half the employees. What they really mean is you should work extra hours for the same
Saving Time – Jenny Odell
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This is Jenny Odells attempt to make sense of time outside of how capitalism tells us we should view time, the relentless pursuit of productivity at the expense of inhabiting the life around us. This is much more a philosophical book than practical one. Jenny offers little advice on how to break out of working
Clear Thinking – Shane Parrish
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Shane Parrish, of Farnham Street fame, brings us a book that is intended to help us think clearly. The first half is all about defining the enemies of clear thinking and the second is about putting clear thinking into practice in our lives. While there are many good tidbits to take away from the book
Slow Productivity – Cal Newport
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Slow Productivity is Cal Newport’s 4th book looking at how to be productive and maximize your career. As such it blends portions of all the previous books, adding a few bits and rehashing many of the same principles explore in earlier books. As the title suggests it focuses on working a slower pace, on fewer
