A powerful and optimistic guide to clearing out the clutter and finishing your best work.
A manual advocates an array of unconventional approaches to achieving productivity.
This new book from Gilkey (The Small Business Life Cycle, 2014), founder of Productive Flourishing, delivers an assortment of thoughts and strategies for isolating doable projects and ushering them across the finish line. The author asserts that projects allowing people to do their best work are “bridges to a better world.” Gilkey opens his overview with a stern look at other productivity and personal development guides, many of which intentionally or unintentionally make people feel faulty. He stresses instead the plasticity of potential: “We’re more than the thoughts we have and actions we take and we can adopt new thoughts and take new actions that lead us to be the best versions of ourselves.” On the journey to accomplishing these projects and realizing those amazing versions, one of the main obstacles the author identifies is “thrashing.” This is the kind of “emotional flailing and metawork” people do while resisting the commitment to complete a task, the stirring of “head trash”–like fears and insecurities. Paradoxically, it’s when faced with attacking the projects that personally mean the most that many people experience “creative constipation,” an “inner toxicity” that can lead them to lash out at others and themselves. In order to relieve this stress and move things in the right direction, Gilkey proposes many tactics, including such concepts as “chunking” (breaking projects into more easily handled segments), “linking” (connecting some “chunks” with others), and “sequencing” (lining up “chunks” to fall in a smoother order). And, human nature being what it is, there are also tips on how to combat the thoughtless or obstructive actions of others. In expanding on all of this, the author’s tone is infectiously upbeat and exceptionally forgiving. The “grind hard, grind harder, eventually die” attitude on prominent display in so many productivity books is entirely absent in these pages. Gilkey’s advice includes such simple practical items as assessing your work environment (a change may unblock some key piece of congestion) and handling email more efficiently (“processing” it only when you have email-related work to do rather than “checking” it far too often for no constructive purpose). He also recommends reshaping the habits and routines that can remove “scores of daily microdecisions” but can also clog up productivity if they’re not policed and periodically reexamined. In brightly well-designed and inviting chapters, Gilkey warns his readers to beware of projects that seem easier because they involve less “thrashing”: “Thrashing is…not a sign that you can’t finish the project or that you’re doing the wrong project. It’s a sign that…you’ll need to show up powerfully to get it done.” In one crystal-clear insight after another, the author provides readers with an enormous trove of strategies designed to help them succeed, whether their key projects are business-related, creative, or personal. He gives intuitively catchy names to the mental snarls that readers experience when working alone or in groups. The author cautions readers that it’s seductively easy to spend an entire life “in the meantime,” never hunkering down to create their masterpieces. His comprehensive book is a formidable corrective to that inertia.
A powerful and optimistic guide to clearing out the clutter and finishing your best work.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68364-263-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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