The hardest part about sitting down to read a book these days is that there are so many other things competing for your attention, almost tricking you into believing you’re actually reading.  As an example, on a typical day, I could read 350 Facebook status updates, 75 Twitter updates, 250 emails, and 75 blog posts.  The first two types of “reading” are completely passive – days go by before I learn anything interesting about myself (or others for that matter).  The last one, blogs, are far more useful in that many times full ideas are presented in a clear, coherent manner.  Most of the bloggers I follow have unique and interesting things to say, and I value the time I spend reading their work (and if I don’t, I don’t follow them). 

But blogging is still what I’d consider “short-form” in that most blog entries are fewer than 5,000 words.  While still far more than the 140 characters of Twitter, they aren’t (usually) long enough to form a complete “story” about a topic.  They don’t always go into any reasonable depth on the research they cite, and many times they don’t do their own research like published authors do.  You just can’t always learn as much as you can from a well-written book.  Most importantly, you can’t get lost in a blog entry.  It’s awfully hard to find any sense of flow while reading a 2,600 word blog post.  And I value flow.

So I read books.  I appreciate the depth.

In years past, I read almost exclusively non-fiction (with the exception of DC Comics) – but this year I expanded a bit back into some fiction as well.  My thinking in the past was that movies were my form of escapist entertainment, and when I’m reading I’d prefer to be learning something.  But like many things in life, I realized that it’s not always as black & white as that for me.  There are times (for instance on vacation) when sometimes it’s nice to read a little Sci-Fi or a mindless thriller.

Without further adieu…

Personal Growth Books

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.  A fascinating look into the world of the future – a world where humans live forever through the use of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics.  The purpose of the book, however, is to help people get to what the authors call the “first bridge” of life extension through nine targeted recommendations:  Talk with your doctor Relaxation Assessment Nutrition Supplementation Calorie reduction Exercise New technologies Detoxification.  While some of the advice is obvious, other areas of the book can open your eyes to how important living right today can be for your future.  I drink a lot more green tea since finishing this book.

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life.  David Allen’s follow-up to his classic Getting Things Done covers both a helpful recap of GTD as well as a new approach to gain perspective in your life through Allen’s “horizons of focus”.  These horizons include things like "areas of responsibility", "goals & objectives", "vision" and "principles & purpose".  As you can probably imagine, these kinds of things are interesting to me.  The book stayed relatively high-level (unfortunately) but was still a valuable read.

The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential… in Life and Business.  Leo Babauta’s book covers similar ground to his popular Zen Habits blog, recommending an overall simplifying approach to your life.  Limit the number of things you focus on at any given time, reduce time spent on email, create positive habits, and make small steps towards your goals.  Leo’s book is an easy – yet worthwhile – read.

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.  A research-backed book on increasing happiness, this book covers creative and insightful approaches to improve your life from the ground up.  I found myself taking reams of notes while reading this one because the recommendations made a lot of sense to me.  Things like learning how to deal with stress, committing to goals, and living in the present are all things I believe in (and write about myself).  Strongly recommended reading.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.  “We cannot always be happy, but we can almost always be focused, which is as close as we can get.” is just one of many bits of wisdom from this book.  Less about strict “how to” and more as a “just so you know, you can actually do this” type of book, I found a lot of the messages throughout to be pretty empowering.  No surprise I wrote about this book a little while ago.

Fiction Books

Daemon.  Probably the best cyber-thriller ever written.  As a techie myself, I really appreciated the attention to detail with respect to the “geekery”.  And of course, the entire time I found myself thinking “wow, this could really happen!” which kept the pages turning.  A sequel is on its way.  If you care at all about technology and how it could go wrong, this book is for you.

The Hunger Games.  A great “beach read” about a post-apocalyptic world where 24 kids, one from each district, are recruited into a sort-of Survivor game with only one emerging as the victor.  It reads like a screenplay (I wonder why?) and keeps you interested from page one with some fun twists and turns throughout.  A fun and very easy read.

Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War.  What comic events should be: a huge universe, crazy evil villains, and an amazing corps of heroes to defend us, drawing from decades of mythology (and beautifully illustrated).  Green Lantern is the DC book that has been setting the tone for the entire DC Comics line since Geoff Johns brought Hal Jordan back.  If you’re interested in a wild space war with some of the best art and writing in Sci-Fi, this is it.  I’d start with Green Lantern: Rebirth first though if you haven’t already read it.

Business Books

iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.  I realized this book is probably worth reading when Apple removed it from the Apple Store (probably based on its title) around the time it was released.  Any book about Steve Jobs is interesting to me, and this one goes into more depth than others with respect to who he really is and how he’s accomplished all he has.  It was published just before the release of the iPhone, so that alone makes it interesting knowing what’s to come.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software.  One of the “realest” books on software development ever written.  I loved the history of programming and the comparisons made to other projects despite reading this during crunch time for one of my own software projects (this combination led to some sleepless nights).  If you’re wondering how the software that makes our world go round is built, there are few books with as close an approximation.

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.  Zero to $20B in revenue in 400 weeks.  Curious how they did it?  Hint: it wasn’t all altruistic genius   I’ve read most of the books on Google, and this one felt the deepest.  Exclusive access to the executive team, partners, board members, and friends probably helped, but Ken Auletta’s in-depth analysis and writing style set this one over the top for me.  At times it did focus a little too much on the media companies surrounding Google, but when it was “on”, it was awesome.

One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making.  Based on a series of blog posts written inside Microsoft during the development of Windows 7, Steven Sinofsky and Marco Iansiti describe how to combine strategy and tactics to drive innovation in an organization.  I’ll admit – I haven’t read this entire book – because I read each and every one of the blog entries (sometimes twice) that comprise it when they were first written.  And I actually lived through it as a member of the Windows organization   If you’re interested in the handbook for management, this is it.  Speaking as an “insider”, the approach in this book works better than anything I’ve seen.

—

The majority of these books I read on my Kindle so I had the ability to highlight sections and take notes inline.  Now all of my notes and highlights are searchable on the Kindle, they appear on all my devices (phone and PC too), and best of all, they’re available online through Amazon.com.  Just by highlighting a sentence I can see if from any device connected to the Internet.  The other night I took the text file of all my notes on the Kindle and added them to my Evernote notebook so they’re now centralized with everything else and searchable from a single place.  Love it.

Hope this reading list was helpful!  Please do let me know if you’ve read – or plan to read – any of these books.

Related posts:

1. How to Read 3 or More Books a Month
2. Refocuser in 2009: Year in Review

This year, Refocuser’s first in existence, has been a great one.  After an entire decade of thinking about starting a site like this, I up and decided to just do it one day in early 2009.  A few weeks later, the site soft-launched – and thanks to all the great tools out there like Twitter search, people started to find it within a few minutes!

Writing here really has been a lot more rewarding than I thought it would be.  To get emails, comments, and – in the case of family and friends – phone calls to discuss some of the topics on this blog is the primary reason I wanted to start it to begin with, so that’s been a lot of fun.  The site has also given me an outlet to crystallize my thoughts and processes into something (hopefully somewhat) understandable, and to connect with new people who are interested in similar topics.  And then there’s the added benefit of writing practice.  What a blast!

Looking forward to 2010, I have a few goals related to Refocuser.  First, I’ll be exploring new topic areas & relevant research and will continue to grow the content on the site.  Secondly, I’m going to create a small site dedicated to the 12 Goals program now that the skeleton of the program is finished.  This sub-domain on Refocuser will have the entire program, links to research, a PDF eBook, and other online tools.  Once complete, I’d also like to have discussion forums on Refocuser (provided the traffic justifies it) and even clothing, mugs, mouse pads, and other 12 Goals merchandise to remind you of your ongoing progress.  It’ll be a fun project.

We’re also due with a baby boy in April – so the total time I’ll be able to dedicate to Refocuser will likely decrease for a bit in favor of keeping my head above water with the rest of life.  But hey, there’s no better way to test some of these strategies than to use them under tough conditions like sleep deprivation   Having another little person join our family is such a gift; I can’t wait to meet him!

Stats & Stuff

Refocuser had a busy first year.  A quick look at the Archives page shows that March, the blog’s first month, was also its most active with 11 posts.  Throughout the year, I averaged 5 posts/month.  While I’d love to be able to post more often (ideally 2x/week) the time investment and rhythm has felt right this past year, so it’s unlikely to change much.  One thing I’m considering for 2010 is accepting some guest posts.  So if you’re interested in doing a little writing, please let me know.

In terms of content, the most frequent tags on the site have been habits, goals, happiness, self-talk, visualization, and attention.  And of course, the 12 Goals tag thanks to the burst of posts related to the 12 Goals program recently.  When looking at the category counts, there were 19 posts related to Productivity, 11 related to Goal Setting, and 4 each related to Fear Management and Exercise.  If you’d like to see more of the site’s archives to see what else has been covered, head over to the Archives page.

The most popular post (by far, thanks to Leo at Zen Habits) has been 15 Ways to Get a New Habit to Stick Forever.  It has had tens of thousands of page views since it was posted in the Spring, easily eclipsing all other posts on the site.  The second most popular post, found primarily through search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and Twitter is 9 Ways to Stop Overthinking Everything.  People found this post by searching for just about every combination of ‘overthinking’ with another word!  And finally, the third most popular post, also found through search engines, was a post I wrote in a Starbucks while on vacation in Kauai when I probably should have been at the beach.  That post is Neuroplasticity: Your Brain’s Amazing Ability to Form New Habits.

Refocuser has had almost 20,000 non-repeat/unique visitors from all over the world (primarily from the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the U.K.), about 300 RSS and email subscribers, and over 400 Twitter followers without resorting to any tricks to artificially increase subscriber count like so many people do.  Naturally I’d love for these numbers to be higher, but I also know that it’ll come in time provided I put effort into the writing and stay consistent.  I’m not doing this to have a top 100 blog again, but the more people that can benefit from Refocuser, the happier I am about the work!

(One thing you can do to help get the word out: send a link to this post to your friends and family for the new year!  Or hand pick an entry from the list below that you think someone might like and send it out.  This stuff is only useful if people find and read it.)

Posts from 2009

1st Quarter:

• Welcome to Refocuser
• 7 Tips to Make Exercise a Habit (and Keep It That Way)
• How to Read 3 or More Books a Month
• 4 Steps to Learn Any Physical Activity
• Writing in Microsoft Word Without Any Distractions
• How to Read 200+ Blogs And Other Sites Everyday
• Increase Focus With Greek Yogurt, Almonds, and Green Tea
• Introduction to the Flow State (part 1 of 2)
• Introduction to the Flow State (part 2 of 2)
• Project Management: Starting a Blog (part 1 of 2)
• Project Management: Starting a Blog (part 2 of 2)

2nd Quarter:

• 5 Keys to Overcome Your Fear
• Pick Your Top 3 Focus Areas… and Drop Everything Else
• Finding Time to Write (Or to Get Into Creative Mode)
• Increase Focus With Low-fat String Cheese and an Apple
• Strength Training 101
• Be a Thermostat, Not a Thermometer
• Keep the Plates Spinning
• Bouncing at Zero – “ZBB” in Life
• Trick Yourself Into Saving More Money
• Does Goal Setting Hold Us Back?
• Efficiency is Anything That Scores
• Take Micro-vacations to Boost Focus
• Staying Focused With Microsoft Outlook: Email
• Make Your Training Harder Than The Real Thing
• Neuroplasticity: Your Brain’s Amazing Ability to Form New Habits
• 15 Ways to Get a New Habit to Stick Forever
• Use Controlled Bursts of Focus to Leap Ahead And Find Balance
• 26 Things I’ve Learned Through Intense Exercise
• It’s Hard to Focus If You Can’t Find Anything
• How the Psychology of Time Can Help You Focus

3rd Quarter:

• Precommitment: Commit in Advance to Keep Yourself On Track
• Your Master Habit: Get One Thing Clicking, Watch Others Follow
• Spontaneity: Enabled Through Order and Organization
• 5 Steps to Use Lucid Dreaming To Improve Any Skill
• Guarantee Success By Tracking your Habits with Joe’s Goals
• 11 Reasons Why Perfection is Overrated!
• 9 Ways to Stop Overthinking Everything
• 12 Ways to Make Your Goals Smarter
• Form Positive New Habits Through Active Association

4th Quarter:

• Focus: How Rapt Attention Changes Who We Are
• 12 Steps to Simplify Your PC (with Windows 7)
• Going Paperless at Home in 6 Easy Steps
• My Happiness Interview: Bookstores, Hugs, and Making Movies
• 12 Goals Program
  • One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)
  • Create Your Vision (Step 1)
  • Set Your Monthly Goals (Step 2)
  • Define and Track Your Habits & Tasks (Step 3)
  • Tools You Can Use

Enjoy.  Happy New Year… On to 2010!

Related posts:

1. Great Books I Read In 2009
2. The “3S” Approach: The Lost Art of the GTD Weekly Review
3. 12 Goals: One Goal, Each Month, All Year (Introduction)

About 15 years ago I become fascinated with the area of focus, specifically what I call self-directed focus or the ability to apply your focus at will to whatever requires your attention.  I’ve been itching to start a blog on the topic for some time and just recently decided to just "go for it".  This is that blog.

Refocuser is about focus.  And about me at times.

This is not a pure productivity or "life hacks" blog.  There are already enough Getting Things Done (GTD) blogs on the interwebs and many of them are fantastic and well-written.  But just checking things off of a to-do list can feel meaningless without seeing the bigger picture.  This blog is more about realizing your potential as a human being through self-directed focus; and you can never learn enough about that.

Read more about Refocuser on the About page »

Related posts:

1. Refocuser in 2009: Year in Review