Read a book!
Older post. I wrote this in 2019. Products, versions and my own views may have moved on since, so treat the details with care.
At the start of this year I set myself a number of goals. One of them was to read at least 1 book a month. I tried to accomplish a number of things with that.
Why
The first was to get the amount of screen time down. This also means reading books on paper, which I actually prefer over reading on a screen. I may try an E-reader at some point, when I run out of physical books to read. The second was to finally read all of these books I bought, but never touched and all the books that were recommended to me and I never did anything with. Finally I wanted to increase my concentration span again, as I feel that with all distraction we are facing, this is going down a lot. I experienced this as well, that I’m easily distracted when reading articles online.
Now 7 months after I started, I feel really good about lowering the screen time hours, slightly increasing my concentration span and learning a lot! Besides that, I also achieved my goal already as I just finished the twelfth book.
The list
The books I read are a mix of productivity/professional and pleasure/fiction. I try to mix reading one work or professional life related book and one book I read for pleasure.
These are the books I read so far in 2019 in order that I read them:
- GRIP - Rick Pastoor
- Built to Sell - John Warrillow
- The Automatic Customer - John Warrillow
- Enders Game - Orson Scott Card
- The new emperor - Ties Dams
- 4 hour workweek - Timothy Ferriss
- The Mastermind - Evan Ratliff
- The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
- 100 years KLM Flying Dutchman - Ron Wunderink
- Moneyland - Oliver Bullough
- Artemis - Andy Weir
- 7 habits of highly effective people - Stephen Covey
My favourite so far is GRIP (unfortunately only available in Dutch right now), which has changed my way of structuring my work tremendously. Second is The Mastermind, which is an unbelievable true story, you can also listen to Reply All Episode 136 to get a first sense of how insane this story is.
More!
I really appreciate reading again and I’m definitely going forward with this and hope to read and learn a lot for the remainder of the year. Do you have any good recommendations? I’m interested in both professional and fun/fiction books to read!