, , ,

8. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:  David Allen

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement

Info:  288 pages, published January 1, 2001

Format:  Book

Summary 

Getting Things Done (“GTD “) is a time-management method which rests on the idea of moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into actionable work items.  This allows one to focus attention on taking action on tasks, instead of on recalling them.

Allen instructs the reader to pick an “incomplete,” i.e.  what most annoys, distracts, or interests you?  Write down a description of the successful outcome in one sentence.  What is your definition of “done”?  Write down the next action to move toward the desired outcome.  Notice how you feel after the exercise compared to before it.

He claims stress can be reduced and productivity increased by putting reminders about everything you are not working on into a trusted system external to your mind.  In this way, you can work on the task at hand without distraction from the “incompletes.”  The system in GTD requires you have within easy reach an inbox, a trash can, a filing system for reference material, several lists (detailed below), and a calendar.

These tools can be physical or electronic.  As “stuff” enters your life, it is captured in these tools and processed with the following workflow.

 

Quotes

“If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”

“Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.”

“Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, your mind thinks you should do right now. Frankly, as soon add you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do two things at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pin-pointed.”

“Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”

Read more

/by
, , ,

7. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Angela Toppel

Author:  Stephen Covey

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement

Info:  380 pages, published August 15, 1989

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Steven Covey has devised a list of seven habits that will transform your life:

Habit 1 

Be Proactive.  This means taking responsibility for your life. You can’t keep blaming everything on your parents or grandparents. They don’t blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they choose their behavior. One of the most important things you choose is what you say.

Your language is a good indicator of how you see yourself. A proactive person uses proactive language–I can, I will, I prefer, etc. Instead of reacting to or worrying about conditions over which they have little or no control, proactive people focus their time and energy on things they can control. The problems, challenges, and opportunities we face fall into two areas–Circle of Concern and Circle of Influence.  Proactive people focus their efforts on their Circle of Influence.

They work on the things they can do something about: health, children, problems at work. Reactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern–things over which they have little or no control: the national debt, terrorism, the weather. Gaining an awareness of the areas in which we expend our energies in is a giant step in becoming proactive.

Habit 2

Begin with the End in Mind.  Habit 2 is based on imagination–the ability to envision in your mind what you cannot at present see with your eyes. It is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There is a mental (first) creation, and a physical (second) creation. The physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint.

If you don’t make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default.  Begin with the End in Mind means to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen.

One of the best ways to incorporate Habit 2 into your life is to develop a Personal Mission Statement. It focuses on what you want to be and do. It is your plan for success. It reaffirms who you are, puts your goals in focus, and moves your ideas into the real world.

Habit 3

Put First Things First.  To live a more balanced existence, you have to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There’s no need to overextend yourself.  All it takes is realizing that it’s all right to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest priorities.  Habit 3 is where Habits 1 and 2 come together.  

It deals with many of the questions addressed in the field of time management. But that’s not all it’s about. Habit 3 is about life management as well–your purpose, values, roles, and priorities.  First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth.  If you put first things first, you are organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities you established in Habit 2.

Habit 4

Think Win/Win.  Win-win sees life as a cooperative arena, not a competitive one. Win-win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial and satisfying.

A person or organization that approaches conflicts with a win-win attitude possesses three vital character traits:  Integrity: sticking with your true feelings, values, and commitments, Maturity: expressing your ideas and feelings with courage and consideration for the ideas and feelings of others and an Abundance Mentality: believing there is plenty for everyone.

Habit 5

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.  If you’re like most people, you probably seek first to be understood; you want to get your point across. And in doing so, you may ignore the other person completely, pretend that you’re listening, selectively hear only certain parts of the conversation or attentively focus on only the words being said, but miss the meaning entirely.

Habit 6

 Synergize.  Synergize is the habit of creative cooperation. It is teamwork, open-mindedness, and the adventure of finding new solutions to old problems. But it doesn’t just happen on its own. It’s a process, and through that process, people bring all their personal experience and expertise to the table.

Together, they can produce far better results that they could individually.

Habit 7  

Sharpen the Saw.  Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have–you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. Here are some examples of activities:

Beneficial eating, exercising, and resting, Social/Emotional:  Making social and meaningful connections with others, Mental:  Learning, reading, writing, and teaching, Spiritual:  Spending time in nature, expanding spiritual self through meditation, music, art, prayer, or service.  As you renew yourself in each of the four areas, you create growth and change in your life. Sharpen the Saw keeps you fresh so you can continue to practice the other six habits. You increase your capacity to produce and handle the challenges around you. Without this renewal, the body becomes weak, the mind mechanical, the emotions raw, the spirit insensitive, and the person selfish.

 

Quotes 

 “Start with the end in mind.”

“But how do you love when you don’t love?”

“If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control – myself.”

“There’s no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.”

“Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.”

“Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).”

“The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.”

“My friend , love is a verb. Love – the feeling – is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?”

“When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.”

“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”

“Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

Read more

/by
, , ,

6. Stumbling on Happiness

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:  Daniel Gilbert

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info: 336 pages, published January 1, 2006

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Gilbert’s central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy.  He argues that imagination fails in three ways:

(1)  Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.

(2) Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).

(3) Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen—most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.

Gilbert then recommends using other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it, since people are very similar in many of their experiences.

 

Quotes

“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.” 

“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”

“Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.”

“In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.”

“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”

“Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!”

“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”

“Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret “not” having done things much more than they regret things they “did”, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.”

“The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.”

“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”

Read more

/by
, , , ,

5. The Revenant

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:  Michael Punke

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Western

Info:  272 pages, published June 10, 2002

Format:   Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary 

Based on a true incident of heroism in the history of the American West, The Revenant tells the story of Hugh Glass, a Philadelphia-born adventurer and frontiersman.  Glass goes to sea at age 16 and enjoys a charmed life, including several years under the flag of the pirate Jean Lafitte and almost a year as a prisoner of the Loup Pawnee Indians on the plains between the Platte and the Arkansas rivers.

In 1822, at age 36, Glass escapes, finds his way to St. Louis and enters the employ of Capt. Andrew Henry, trapping along tributaries of the Missouri River. After surviving months of hardship and Indian attack, he falls victim to a grizzly bear.  His throat nearly ripped out, scalp hanging loose and deep slashing wounds to his back, shoulder and thigh, Glass appears to be mortally wounded.

Initially, Captain Henry refuses to abandon him and has him carried along the Grand River.  Unfortunately, the terrain soon makes transporting Glass impossible. Even though his death seems certain, Henry details two men, a fugitive mercenary, John Fitzgerald, and young Jim Bridger (who lived to become a frontier hero) to stand watch and bury him.

After several days, Fitzgerald sights hostile Indians. Taking Glass’s rifle and tossing Bridger his knife, Fitzgerald flees with Bridget, leaving Glass. Enraged at being left alone and defenseless, Glass survives against all odds and embarks on a 3,000-mile-long vengeful pursuit of his betrayers.

 

Quotes

“Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.”

“He would crawl until his body could support a crutch.  If he only made three miles a day, so be it. Better to have those three miles behind him than ahead.”

“Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.”

“Glass shot an irritated glance at Red, who had an uncanny knack for spotting problems and an utter inability for crafting solutions.”

“No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human.”

“His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.”

Read more

/by
, , ,

4. The Night Circus

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Aileen and Grace Schwab

Author:  Erin Morgenstern

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy

Info:  516 pages, published September 13, 2011

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

The Night Circus is a surrealistic fairy tale set near Victorian London in a wandering magical circus that is open only from sunset to sunrise. Le Cirque des Rêves, the Circus of Dreams, features such wonders and “ethereal enigmas” as a blooming garden made all of ice, acrobats soaring without a net, and a vertical cloud maze where patrons who get lost simply step off and float gently to the floor.

The circus has no set schedule, appearing without warning and leaving without notice; they travel in a train disguised as an ordinary coal transport. A network of devoted fans styling themselves “rêveurs” (“dreamers”) develops around the circus; they identify to each other by adding a splash of red to garb that otherwise matches the characteristic black and white of the circus tents.

 

Quotes

“Taking his time, as though he has all of it in the world, in the universe, from the days when tales meant more than they do now, but perhaps less than they will someday, he draws a breath that releases the tangled knot of words in his heart, and they fall from his lips effortlessly.”

“Celia.” he says without looking up at her, “why do we wind our watch?”

“Because everything requires energy,” she recites obediently, eyes still focused on her hand. “We must put effort and energy into anything we wish to change.”

“Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”

“Do you remember all of your audiences?” Marco asks. “Not all of them,” Celia says. “But I remember the people who look at me the way you do.”  “What way might that be?”

“As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me.”

“I am not afraid of you,” Marco says.”

“You’re not destined or chosen, I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it’s not true. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that’s enough.”

Read more

/by
, ,

3. Purity

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:  Jonathan Franzen 

Genre:   Fiction

Info:  608 pages, published September 1, 2015

Format:   Audio Book

 

Summary 

Purity is the name of the book’s title character, who is also known as Pip.  When we first meet Pip she is living in a crowded Oakland house under the burden of colossal college debt. She soon becomes involved in “The Sunlight Project,” a WikiLeaks-style group headquartered in a South American rain forest that seeks to uncover secrets and expose them on the web.  

Run by the charismatic Andreas Wolf, who grew up in socialist East Germany, the Sunlight Project becomes the jumping-off point of discovery for Pip.  In addition to the main character, the book’s title Purity refers to the desired goal of every character.

Quotes

“Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”

“There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.”

“It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”

“The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners.”

“I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter.”

“The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.”

Read more

/by
, , , ,

2. Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Gretchen Rubin

Genre:   Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info:  320 pages, published March 17, 2015

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Creating positive habits is a key to leading a happy life.   Habits “are the invisible architecture of daily life,” and “if we change our habits, we change our lives.”  In Better than Before, Gretchen Rubin help you identify your habits personality type (I’m an Upholder) and then shows you how you to create positive habits that will work for your type.

 

Quotes

“The desire to start something at the “right” time is usually just a justification for delay. In almost every case, the best time to start is now.”

“The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.”

“In the chaos of everyday life, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters, and I can use my habits to make sure that my life reflects my values.”

“I should make one healthy choice, and then stop choosing.”

“With habits, we don’t make decisions, we don’t use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don’t want to do.”

“Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.”

“The most important step is the first step. All those old sayings are really true. Well begun is half done. Don’t get it perfect, get it going. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.”

“What I do most days matters more than what I do once in a while.” That kind of self-encouragement is a greater safeguard than self-blame.”

Read more

/by
, , , ,

1. Life After Life

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Tina Hirshland

Author: Kate Atkinson

Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

Info: 560 pages, published March 14, 2013

Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

Every time Ursula Todd dies, she is born again. Each successive life is an iteration on the last, and we see how Ursula’s choices affect her, those around her, and the fate of the 20th-century world.

 

Quotes

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“He was born a politician.  No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.”

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

“Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.”

Read more

/by