Style: Non-fiction
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…
To Write As If Already Dead – Kate Zabreno
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While this book is supposed to be a look at the life of Hervé Guibert, I have no idea who that is or his significance to the literary world, which is notable according to the book. What stuck out to me in this book is the critique of motherhood and the failings of the US…
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…
The Outrun – Amy Liptrot
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The Outrun follows the author as she deals with recovery from alcoholism. Part of her journey is heading back to the quiet island she grew up on, Orkney, and then going to an even quieter island to live in a seasonal cabin that is vacant for the winter “off” season. I enjoyed Amy’s reflections on…
Kill it with Fire – Marianne Bellotti
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Kill it with Fire is all about how to manage legacy software projects. How do you determine if you need to rewrite it? How do you keep a team motivated while working on a legacy project? How do you stop a current project from becoming legacy full of dead code ready to die? I found…
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…
Smart Brevity – Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz
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Smart Brevity is here to teach you how to cater your communication to the over-stimulated worker, and community, of today. There are 4 Core ideas for the writing system presented. The authors really like their bullet points and figure that’s the correct way to do your communication. Their strongest point is that you probably write…
