Category: Non-Fiction

Time to tackle the digital TBR! There’s not as many books in there as I thought (Or maybe I just haven’t been looking at the right place) and it’s been ages since I got these so this should be interesting. I don’t even remember when I got these ones…

Four Thousand Weeks looked like a productivity book and even started like one, but quickly devolved into a discussion on time and what the purpose of productivity is. It’s an interesting intersection of what productivity practices teach and why being productive isn’t necessarily the best thing for us as people.

As someone who has been learning an awful lot about rest the last year and trying to make life better for myself in the long run, I really resonated with some of the discussions around how the things you once did for enjoyment become things you have to do for income and the loss of enjoyment in the name of productivity in general. The idea that you can just… not for a while is strangely comforting.

Overall, I really liked it, even if it wasn’t what was expected. There are legitimate tips in the book, but if you’re looking for something that goes more into the purpose and intent of productivity and rest, this one is a great read.

Did I forget I had a digital TBR as soon as I finished off my physical one? Yes. Did I just pick the pretty cover off of my books to maybe read from the library instead of looking at the blurb to find out anything about it? Also yes. Did I even read the subtitle that is directly on the cover? You know the answer here.

Sway is a discussion about unconscious bias and how it’s an underlying part of life in general. It’s a lot of research around how there is a lot of historic and structural bias, which then leads into how people interact with one another, and some of the more subtle forms of how it shows up. It was a more difficult read than Design Justice, which covers a lot of the same subject matter, but I found myself liking it more because it didn’t feel like it was trying to offer solutions1 so much as just highlighting that the issues exist, how they appear, and how they affect people.

Also will say that the one star reviews on this one are a lot of fun.

Overall, it’s an interesting look at the pervasiveness of unconscious and implicit bias and how it affect people in their daily lives. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, check it out!

1. Which ultimately didn’t feel like actual solutions [↩]

I swear I’ll be going back to fiction soon, but a bunch of nonfiction has been coming in lately and I need to get through them all first! This one I’ve picked up pretty much directly as a result of my recent health issues, and the difficulties I’ve had about getting treatment and understanding it.

Invisible Kingdom is mostly the discussion of how the author navigated the healthcare system to find a diagnosis and treatment for a condition that she had been dealing with for years, from doctors dismissing her to misdiagnosis to the desperation of trying anything to get some kind of relief, to finally finding something that made her life bearable and the understanding that this was going to be something she would have to deal with indefinitely.

As someone who has more recently found themselves with a chronic condition1 and who has been struggling to get things like accommodations from work and a doctor who can advise me on what I can do to mitigate some of the issues, I really resonated with the ideas in the book. It’s not a plan or an outline for how to get treatment so much as a journey and discussion about the things that could be better. And on the whole, I agree with a lot of the sentiments and commiserate with the issues. It would have been nice to have solutions, but ultimately this is an issue that patients are not going to be able to resolve at this point, so familiarity is a great comfort.

Overall, I did really like this, even if it wasn’t necessarily the hopeful read or guidebook that I wanted. If you’re also dealing with some strange health conditions and struggling to figure out how to manage a life where they may never go away or trying to navigate the healthcare system, this may be a good read for you too.

1. Thanks Covid [↩]

Every once in a while, I will read books on purpose and not just because I randomly saw it in a search and figured that might be an interesting thing to read. For those who don’t know, I work in tech as a product designer and UX… everything lately, let’s be honest. So something about how to do research and design ethically is something that is very squarely something I am reading for work.

The book outlines a lot of the issues that currently exist within tech and how some of it could be addressed. The vast majority of tech products are designed very specifically by and for a majority population (White, male, cishet, able bodied, etc.) which can cause issues for people who fall outside of those groups to access things. The primary solution to this is participatory design, or getting the larger community involved in the process of designing and creating these products so that they are inclusive of all people who might find value.

The idea of participatory design is something I’ve been interested in, as has the idea of building off of what a community has already created for themselves and integrating those solutions into the larger landscape of a product or problem space. I do find it unfortunate that there was the acknowledgement that in order to get some of these opportunities and solutions prioritized, you really did need to frame them in a way that emphasized the monetary impact over the human impact, but I am also very aware of what tech in specific and business in general is like.

No one is really doing this for the good of the people using a product. It’s for the profit.

Overall, though, if you’re someone in product, design, or user experience, it’s a good read. I imagine the ideas aren’t going to be new, but the framing and context of them, along with the perspective, is interesting.

Today in books that I was recommended by mentors that seem like they are chosen very specifically to call me out, another career book of trying to try and help me figure out how to specialize in my field and instead has seemed to push me over the edge toward trying to get my side hustles all order at last.

This is one of those books for people who are a little lost in the midst of an already established career, rather than one for someone looking to just start out. The main idea is that you should look through your entire history, focusing more on the history of things that you have done arguably as work and what satisfied you there, and then using that to try and find a common thread to help you focus on what you should do for your next steps.

The book does have a significant focus in the latter half on entrepreneurship and finding a path for yourself, either to pursue as a side hustle or to take the leap and do as your main thing, which was interesting. After What Colour is your Parachute, I was so primed for hearing about how to get into that dream job more so than discussing the idea of forging your own way. Which I am mostly for, but there is an uncomfortable amount of examples of coaching in there.

Or maybe I noticed those more because I have been seeing a truly bizarre number of ads for coaching and setting up coaching services lately.

Overall, interesting read! I did like how it tied back to How to be Everything, and it was a lot more designed for someone in my current stage of career uncertainty than some of the others than I have looked into. I don’t know if I appreciate just how much it seemed to be calling me specifically out, though…

Today in books that mentorship has directed me to, the updated version of a book I read back in 2020 when I lost my job! It’s 2 years later and I’m in a very unstable and uncertain industry, and currently undergoing through a process of trying to figure out how I want to progress in it so I’m at a different and better place to check this out.

What Colour is Your Parachute is absolutely a book that you need to come to at the right time, and I think I am in a much more receptive place for it than before. It walks through the self discovery needed to uncover a job that you can find truly fulfilling by starting with uncovering what you are like as a person, your needs, and your skills, then taking all of that and turning it into an actionable path forward.

This isn’t necessarily an idea that I fully align with (The thought of my income, which is largely out of my control, being dependent on my passion sounds like the worst possible scenario for my mental health), it does give a lot of pretty interesting guidance for people who are either at the start of their careers, or who are at a juncture where they are feeling restless and need to check back in to determine what to do next. I’m actually currently trying out a few of the exercises in the book over on Medium right now!

I do like this book a lot more this time around, but I am sure that this is very much because I am in the right place in my life for it. If you’re at a junction for your career, this might be a good one to check out!

I should not read a second book by a nonfiction author, I’m realizing. First was Nir Eyer, and now Cal Newport. I end up just looking at these books through the context of their last one.

Where Deep Work was about how you should be spending your time on good, meaningful deep work and not on bad, meaningless shallow work, Digital Minimalism is about the exact opposite thing. It is about how you should not be spending your personal time on low-quality, casual technology usage and instead use it on value-generating, high quality activities.

There’s a theme here.

There is a core of this which is good, but that core isn’t enough to fill a whole book. The idea of being intentional about your technology usage and don’t let it consume your life is a good thing. The rest of the book where he moves from descriptive about the problem to prescriptive about the solution is frustrating.

I did end up looking the author up, mostly because I had such a strong feeling that he had a wife that took care of the normal housework and child care1 that I wanted validation on that2 and discovered he was a comp sci professor. As someone who has spend her career surrounded by comp sci grads, I understand why his work feels frustrating in such a strangely familiar way.

I do have one more book of his in my TBR. I am debating if I can actually read it fairly.

1. He says he watches the kids, but never mentions groceries, cooking, cleaning up after them, taking them to activities, planning things to do with them, all of which I would assume a family man would want to be involved with and would think of as valuable use of time… [↩]
2. No, it is not good practice to look something up for the purpose of validation [↩]

I have an ongoing complaint with my day job that I have far too many meetings, many of which absolutely could be an email or done in a different manner that is not a meeting. This has prompted a friend of mine to introduce me to the concept of deep work and she has also now loaned me several Cal Newport books, so expect to see a few more thoughts about these reads to show up over the next little bit.

Deep Work is the oldest of his books and it talks about how the best kind of work is deep work, which is done by taking long stretches of time being spent in deep concentration and working on something. He argues that shallow work—which requires less cognitive effort and focus—is… bad? He says there’s a place for it, but it does feel very much as if this kind of work is beneath him, as is social media and several other things.

Like most books in this genre, it’s someone who has found the one thing that has worked for him and he insists that his way is the only way. There are some good ideas in here, but there’s an element of lecturing people for habits that he doesn’t approve of and making concessions if you must but you are not going to be as successful if you aren’t following this method.

Overall, though, despite the voice of the author I did ultimately find some interesting ideas in this book. If you’re looking for something that doesn’t emphasize just completing tasks and looks more at how to cultivate your time to get a deeper understanding of something you’re interested in, this might be worth a read!

I know I’ve heard the name Malcom Gladwell before, but I do not know where or why I know it. I know he said something about not thinking people should work remotely despite him working remotely, but I feel like I’ve heard of him before. So I figured I should check out a book of his so I could try and remember. It did not remind me, but I think I understand his comments now.

The book is essentially an explanation that people who seem extraordinary or exceptional in some way, people who are outliers, are not actually that strange when you put them into their fuller context. Looking at someone’s background and upbringing can bring to light why they were able to succeed when other people failed, such as Bill Gates getting access to a computer at a young age before they were available publicly, which meant he had more experience than anyone else. Or people being born at a certain time of year make them more likely to be great hockey players because they were able to start training earlier.

I feel like in 2008 this was likely a bit more revolutionary, but in the age where I see more and more people questioning how the rich and famous got that way and nepotism is a more commonly known source of how people got into an industry, this might be one of those books that I came to far too late to get the impact that I was intended to get from it.

Not to mention it does get uncomfortable the further it goes. While there’s a sense of getting fuller context of individuals earlier on, when it moves to talking about foreign groups there’s an uncomfortable western lens put on things. Chinese kids are good at math because of language with no mention of the culture. The KIPP school is talked about as if the kids just need discipline and an opportunity without looking at the larger context of what a else a low income child might need. Korean pilots needed to be more American in their communication style.1 There’s this sense of finding one clean-enough explanation and stopping that became much more evident as the book talked about larger and larger groups that were less western.

Still, for the time and if you did not think about it much before, this might not be a bad place to start. I tend to assume we all know that people that are put up on a pedestal as exceptional (And then later transforms into an unattainable expectation) have most of their context removed, but I am often proven wrong in that regard. If you’ve never thought about it, this might be a good place to start.

1. Which was something that gave me flashbacks to the Netflix book in particular [↩]