Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest.

A while back, I reviewed Robert Pagliarini’s The Six-Day Financial Makeover and concluded that there was some very good advice buried inside a lot of marketing gloss. The core of that advice was strong enough that I kept an eye out for future books by Mr. Pagliarini, and now The Other 8 Hours has come down the pike.

This time around, Pags has written an interesting personal productivity book that doesn’t focus on workplace productivity. Instead, it focuses on your free time. How can you channel the time each day when you’re not working and sleeping to create new wealth and purpose in life (ideally with some leisure time, too, so you don’t go insane)?

I’ll be honest, though: the idea really strikes a chord with me. After all, I launched The Simple Dollar and grew it for two years in my spare time. Does Pagliarini lay out a good game plan for that kind of application of one’s spare time? Let’s dig in.

1 | Life Begins at 5:00 PM
For most of us, the time outside of work is the important part of our life. It’s where we spend time with our families and loved ones and engage in activities that are enjoyable to us. We work so that we can enjoy these moments. Pagliarini’s central argument is that if you seek out enjoyable and personally fulfilling activities that also have a second benefit – building skills, producing income, building connections – then your other eight hours can go to productive use as well.

2 | The Living Dead and the Dead Broke
Why do this? What’s the motivation for seeking out a better way to spend our “other eight hours”? Frankly, people are working more, experiencing more stress, and have more financial problems than ever before. Adding personal growth to one’s spare time goes a long way towards solving all of those problems while still being quite fun.

3 | Getting the Other 8
The first (and biggest) problem is that many people feel that they barely have eight minutes to themselves in a given day, let alone eight hours. “How are you supposed to find the time to do anything like launch something like The Simple Dollar?” one reader once asked me.

The key is prioritizing. In order to have free time, you have to prioritize what you spend your time on and just chuck some of the lower priority stuff. You simply can’t fit it all in. And, yes, the things you do in your spare time do have different priorities. Some of them do need to remain in place while others can easily be chucked. This chapter walks through some basic time management tactics that mostly revolve around figuring out what fits and what doesn’t.

4 | Lifeleeches
From there, Pagliarini moves on to things that commonly “suck time” for people – television is an obvious one, but so are news, the internet, perfectionism, gossip, video games – even answering the phone. The more of these distractions you can eliminate from your life (or at least successfully cage into a limited time and space), the better off you are.

5 | Shift from Consumer to Cre8tor
“Cre8tor” is Pagliarini’s term for people who devote their extra “8″ hours – or at least some of that time – to creating things of value for others as opposed to just consuming. Even more challenging, you almost always win if you give it away. The Simple Dollar has 81,000 subscribers who get the content by email or RSS every day and just shy of a million visitors to the website each month. I got those by giving away almost everything I create.

6 | The Big List of FAQs
Obviously, ideas like this one almost always bring about lots of questions, so this chapter serves as a big FAQ (frequently asked questions) document. What do you do if you’re not creative, for example? Pagliarini’s solution is simple: partner with someone who is creative and put what skills you have to bear. So, for example, if you’ve got skills at marketing something someone else has created and you have a friend who makes stunningly good furniture in his woodshop, team up together so you can both make some cash.

7 | The Cre8tor Rules
Here, Pagliarini lays out several rules for being a “creator” (or “cre8tor”) in your spare time. Keep your day job. Focus on minimizing your effort to maximize results. Limit your risk. Take lots of swings – in other words, try lots of different things to see what works. Put effort into marketing what you create, simply so others are at least aware of it. Always have a plan for making money in the long run, even if you give things away for free.

8 | The Top 10 Cre8tor Channels
These are ten short “startup kits” for ten different types of businesses: blogging, invesnting, writing, starting a company, reselling things, taking advantage of fads, working for stock, freelancing, pure career advancement, or turning hobbies into income. Most of the things a person can invest their found free time into falls into one of these ten categories, but the specifics vary widely from person to person.

9 | Could’ve, Should’ve, Would’ve
Every day you sit idly by with an idea in the back of your head is a day you’ll regret later on. I’m thirty one and there are already big things that I passed on that I regret. I had a great opportunity to get some of my fiction published in 2003 and I missed the boat on it, mostly because of my own fears. That’s perhaps my greatest regret, but there are many others that litter the path to my life today. In fact, I’m only where I’m AT today because I kept chasing those side opportunities and, after a lot of failures, one of them worked (you’re reading it).

10 | Find Your Pulse
So, what makes you tick? What makes you jump out of bed in the morning and tackle things? If you can find what makes you passionate, then you’ve found a source of energy that you can channel into making your “other eight” more exciting and profitable. In short, it can be your engine for creating things, creating value, and putting money in your pocket. There are a lot of suggestions and ideas here for seeking out what you’re passionate about.

Is The Other 8 Hours Worth Reading?
The Other 8 Hours combines a lot of different elements into one package, drawing from career development, lifestyle design, and even a bit of time management. If you’re finding yourself struggling in your current career and can’t help but wonder what else there is out there, The Other 8 Hours is a great read.

I’d also say The Other 8 Hours is a much better read than Pagliarini’s first book, The Six-Day Financial Makeover, because he cut out the marketing-speak and actually focused on real topics, which is where his strengths lie.

About a year ago, I wrote an article entitled Preparing Your Information for Disaster, in which I discussed the challenges my mother (and I, in a peripheral way) had in organizing the accounts and papers of my maternal grandmother after she passed away.

The article is really thorough and I consider it to be one of the most essential things I’ve ever written for The Simple Dollar. Simply put, if you have someone you’re going to leave behind, you need to prepare a document to help them figure out the mess of your accounts.

So why am I touching on this topic again? Well, because the issue has come up again in my life.

For the last year or so, I’ve served on the investment committee of my local church. Much of the money that is donated to our church is passed on to other charities, like the local food pantry and ELCA World Hunger and such things – sometimes even directly in the pocket of people in the community who are struggling to keep food on the table for their kids. I’m extremely proud of the charitable giving that we do – in fact, the charitable giving of my church in the local community and in the broader global community is the biggest reason why I’m an active member.

Anyway, we do retain some of the money for things like helping members of the church attend seminary, pay for building repairs (and eventual building replacements), and so on. I also find these things important, again, because they support the community – weddings are hosted there, people freely congregate there, and so on.

Of course, with money in the bank, someone has to be in charge of investment decisions. Our church has a three person volunteer investment committee in place, with a chair that does most of the footwork and the other two largely contributing on the decision-making process. Given that I write The Simple Dollar, it’s probably no surprise to anyone that I’m on this committee.

The chairman of the committee for many years passed away very recently, leaving a big vacancy in terms of who would actually handle the footwork of preparing reports and so on. I chose to volunteer for this, believing that I could easily pick up the reins and run with it.

What I found was that taking over the reins was a lot harder than I had ever anticipated. I’ve spent lots of hours already piecing through the papers and the statements, attempting to clearly discern where things should be and which account is intended for which purpose.

All of the pieces are there (aside from a few small arithmetic errors), but it’s akin to popping open a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle with all of the pieces loose in the box. It takes some serious work to assemble them into a clear picture.

Which brings me to my point.

All of us are responsible for our own finances. Some of us are responsible for the finances of others, either through volunteer work (check), parenting (check), or guardianship (thankfully, no check).

What happens when you’re no longer capable of managing those finances? Usually, someone has to come in, figure out everything from whatever you’ve left behind, and still often miss some things. A lot of time and effort and energy is wasted simply trying to figure out what was in your head after you can no longer reveal it.

The solution is simple: document it.

My previous article outlined an extremely thorough document that you can prepare to make sure everything is easily accessible. Honestly, though, most people won’t put in the effort to do that, though it will make things much, much easier for those they leave behind if they do.

Instead, I propose leaving behind a single page of explanation for each relevant person you’re going to leave behind.

You’re leaving behind a spouse? Prepare a page or two explaining everything she needs to know.

You’re leaving behind kids? Prepare a page telling them everything that’s important and relevant to them.

You’re leaving behind fiduciary responsibility? Assemble a page explaining the accounts, who to contact about the accounts, and what they’re all for.

It doesn’t have to be endlessly thorough (though the more thorough and well-organized it is, the easier it will be for those you leave behind to pick up the reins). It just needs to have enough information so that the people you leave behind aren’t completely lost, aren’t missing responsibilities that might hurt them if left untended, and aren’t failing to claim the resources you’ve left behind for them.

Make it clear. It only takes a few hours and it’ll save a lot of heartache down the road.

There are quite a few things that you can do to improve your financial and personal state without spending even a single dime. One of the biggest is simply improving your attitude – the way you interpret the things around you and the way you relate to others.

Think about it for a moment. I want you to imagine the single most caustic person you’ve ever had to interact with for a long period of time (I certainly know who my person is). Did that person provide any sort of encouragement (outside of fear) to do any sort of constructive work? Did that person make you feel good and properly motivated to do exceptional work?

On the flip side of that coin, imagine the best person you’ve ever had to interact with in a professional way. Did you often go the extra mile when this person asked? Did you try harder in order to please this person? Did you simply enjoy your time in the workplace (or in everyday life) more because of this person?

What a world of difference the people around you make.

Of course, the same is true for you. To other people, you’re somewhere on that spectrum of positivity and negativity between the two people above. The more negative you are, the more others are going to react to you like you did to the negative person. The more positive you are, the more others are going to react to you like you did to the positive person.

To put it simply, the more positive you are, the greater the positive impact you have on your professional and personal life. Here are five areas where it comes through loud and clear.

Career success Positive people get promoted and get raises not just because of their own work, but because they bring out the best in others.

Stress reduction Negativity leads to stress because it convinces you that the events around you are bad. Meanwhile, looking for the positives in a situation convinces you that the events around you are better, which reduces stress. Lower stress has a strong effect on personal health and health care costs.

Teamwork improvement The more positive you are, the better your interactions will be with the people around you. Think simply of how you react in comparison to the people around you – the same general themes are true with regards to how people interact with you.

Customer relations improvement The same idea is true with your customers: the more positive you are with your customers, the better your relationship with them will be and the more business you’ll develop with them.

Motivational improvement This is perhaps the most unorthodox one, but it’s also true. If you look at your work with a positive attitude, it’s much easier to actually do the work than if you apply a negative attitude towards it, no matter what you’re doing.

That’s great, of course, but how exactly can you do that? Here are five specific tactics you can use in your day-to-day life to improve your attitude towards the people and things around you.

1. Come up with a positive response to every situation you meet. Yes, sometimes our first response is negative. I’m never happy when my daughter uses too much toilet paper and proceeds to flood the bathroom, for example. Simply stepping back for a moment and looking for a positive response to the situation, though, can make all the difference. The spilled water can be a close experience with my daughter, as I gather up some towels to mop up the water and allow her to help me as we sing songs while doing it, then I plunk her in the tub as I Lysol the floor, and then we have a fun bath time.

2. Look for the good in other people. Rather than seeking to identify the negative traits in the people around you that you interact with, look for the positive ones. Person A might not be the most skilled person, but he does put forth a lot of effort and ask a lot of good questions. Person B might have a caustic personality, but she does show tremendous efficiency in handling some incredibly complicated projects.

3. Act happy, even if it’s a painted dayglow smile. You don’t have to be happy – often, that’s an impossibly tall order. Instead, just act happy. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. Even more interesting, the more you do it, the more it becomes a part of you – you actually do feel happier.

4. Drop the sarcasm. Sarcasm can be a lot of fun, but in the end, it’s just negativity wrapped up and packaged as a joke. Drop the sarcasm – you don’t need to ridicule things you don’t like. Just expend your energy elsewhere; don’t even think of the ridicule-worthy things at all.

5. Get plenty of rest and eat a good diet. This (along with exercise) is one sure way to naturally elevate your mood. It’ll increase your energy and focus, decrease your stress, and make it easier to interact with the world.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by adding a little more positivity to your life.

Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, two years ago this week, and three years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.

One Year Ago (May 30 – June 5, 2009)
Seven Hidden Lessons from “Getting Things Done” I thought this would be a good one to look back at given that we’re in the middle of an ongoing series about “Getting Things Done.”

Some Thoughts on Scalable Careers, Your Job, and “Side Hustles” Having a scalable career is perhaps the best way for the average person to get rich. The only problem is that most people aren’t working in scalable careers.

How to Organize and Host a Frugal Block Party I’ve been considering having one of these next month when my book arrives in stores.

Building Your Career, One Brick at a Time Every action you take at work is another brick in the wall. What kind of wall do you want to build? A stable one that can carry you high? Or a wobbly one that could collapse at any time?

Is Renting a Vehicle for a Long Road Trip Worth It? Our Math Says Yes We wound up putting six people in a rental van for a very long road trip. According to our math, it was more cost-effective than driving two separate cars.

Two Years Ago (May 30 – June 5, 2008)
The Methods You Use to Deal with Ordinary Life Will Fail You As an Investor Investing is often counter-intuitive. If you treat it like everyday life (i.e., run away from danger, run towards what everyone else is doing), you’ll fail.

Ten Clever Money Savers You Might Want To Try This Weekend There are so many little things you can do to effortlessly shave a few dollars from your spending. Do enough of them and you’ll start to transform your life.

Got Credit Card Debt? Ten Tactics to Use Right Now to Get It Under Control Credit card debt is pernicious. Here are some tactics to start turning the tide.

The Total Experience of a Purchase A purchase isn’t just an exchange of money for something else. There are a lot of additional elements that increase the value exchanged on both sides.

Planning for the Long Haul: My Family’s Lifetime Financial Plan I’m constantly thinking about the long term future of my family and how I can do things differently to improve our collective future. It’s part of my “long term thinking” I try to do regularly.

Three Years Ago (May 30 – June 5, 2007)
Save Time, Effort, And Money With A Monthly Home and Auto Maintenance Checklist I attempt to follow this checklist to the best of my ability. Much of the time, I succeed.

My Kitchen Bookshelf For me, the valuable books in the kitchen aren’t collections of recipes. They’re clear explanations of techniques. I don’t need a lemon meringue pie recipe – I need to know how to make those meringue peaks.

Does Ultra-Frugality Mean That You Don’t Need A 401(k) Or A Roth IRA? Frugality is not a substitute for investing. Investing preserves the financial benefits of frugality.

Personal Finance Success Comes More From Smart Budgeting Than Smart Investing You’re better off squeezing a little more out of your family budget than agonizing about the “perfect” investment. Investing $100 more a month will almost always make more of a difference than 0.5% better return on an investment.

A Guide To Eating Well Without Spending A Fortune You don’t have to spend a mint to eat healthy and eat tasty, too. You just have to spend (and behave) wisely.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

Nine Ways to Get More out of The Simple Dollar
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are nine great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.

1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.

2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!

3. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.

4. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.

5. Follow me on Twitter – or other social networks. I post tons of interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.

I also participate on several other social networks. Feel free to check me out on del.icio.us (it’s where I collect links, from which I select the ones that appear in my weekly roundups), wakoopa (what software I use), GoodReads (what books I’m reading), Facebook, and FriendFeed (which aggregates everything). I also have an irregularly-updated personal site, TrentHamm.com.

6. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.

7. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!

8. Become a “Friend of The Simple Dollar.” If you find the stuff on The Simple Dollar valuable and are willing to spend five minutes or so a month to help me out with small things, please consider signing up to be a “Friend of The Simple Dollar”.

9. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.

I have a four year old and a two year old at home. That means, at meal times, it’s often much easier to eat finger foods than foods covered in sauce because, inevitably, the sauce gets spilled all over the place.

Thus, we’re often seeking recipes for meals that can easily be eaten by hand, are still reasonably healthy, and have a low cost. One popular one at our house is homemade chicken strips, which turn out to be quite inexpensive and very easy to prepare. The variation I’m going to show you today is honey mustard strips, but you can make infinite variations on this recipe by just changing up the spices as you see fit. This recipe is based on and similar to a recipe from the Iowa State University Extension.

Here are the ingredients we started with:

From left to right, you’ll see vinegar, skim milk, black pepper, spicy brown mustard, chicken breasts, honey, and pretzels. This is all you need to make some very good chicken strips.

Here’s a more specific ingredient list…

2 1/2 teaspoons vinegar, divided (1/2 and 2)
1/2 cup skim milk
1 lb. medium boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 1 pound)
2 1/2 tablespoons prepared mustard
1 1/2 tablespoon honey
Black pepper to taste
1 cup crushed pretzels

… and a cost breakdown:

2.5 tablespoons of vinegar costs $0.20
1/2 cup skim milk costs $0.08
1 lb. chicken breasts costs $2.49
2 tablespoons mustard costs $0.05
1 tablespoon honey costs $0.05
Black pepper to taste costs $0.01
1 cup crushed pretzels costs $0.91
Total cost: $3.79

Each batch produces 10-12 strips or 20-24 half-strips, depending on how you slice them, so the cost per strip is about a quarter. In other words, the cost of one of these delicious and healthier homemade half-strips is actually less than a Chicken McNugget ($3.29 for 10 pieces, or thirty three cents a pop), and a full strip ($0.50 or so) is way less than the comparable McDonald’s Chicken Select Strips (3 for $3.99, or $1.33 a pop).

So, what do you do? First, put half a tablespoon of vinegar into a 1/2 cup measuring cup, then fill it with skim milk. Stir it and allow it to sit for ten to fifteen minutes. This creates what one might call a healthier substitute for buttermilk – it gets a little thicker and stickier, too.

While this is sitting, slice up the chicken breasts into strips or pieces, however you like. We tend to cut ours pretty small, as you can see below:

(We’re making a double batch so we have plenty for freezing and leftovers, but you can clearly see that I basically just cut long strips, then divided them in half. This would get us about 20-24 pieces per pound of breast, or 40-48 over two pounds (what you see above).

Once that’s done, you need to start crushing the pretzels into oblivion. I used the “baggie” method, depicted below:

I just put a bunch in a baggie, get out a rolling pin or a hammer, and smash smash smash! The baggie keeps crumbs from flying everywhere. Just keep doing it until you have a cup of crumbs.

Another method would be to put them in a blender and puree the pretzels. I don’t like doing this because I usually wind up with pretzel dust in the air, causing me to sneeze. The baggie method generates a little dust, but not nearly as much.

Here’s the consistency of the pretzels when I’m finished:

You can crush them finer (it’ll make more of a breading) or less fine (it’ll make more of a crunchy surface), whichever you prefer. We do a mix, which makes a breading with some crunchy pretzel pieces hanging on.

Once you have those pretzels crushed, sit that bowl aside. Mix the remaining two tablespoons of vinegar, the mustard, and the honey together in another bowl and add any amount of black pepper you’d like. Stir it thoroughly.

My mix looks something like this:

Naturally, you can alter this mix however you’d like. Substitute the honey and mustard for ranch dressing if you’d like. Use barbecue sauce instead. Blue cheese dressing. Whatever flavor floats your boat.

Once you have this mixed together, mix in the vinegar-milk mix you made at the start. You’ll end up lightening the color of your mix.

In a larger bowl, put the chicken strips and pour the mix you’ve made on top of it. Toss the strips through the liquid to make sure that the strips are all well coated. Here’s how mine looked:

Once that’s ready, let the strips soak for twenty minutes. Go do something else. Finish crushing your pretzels. Make lemonade. Play catch with your kids.

After that period is up, preheat your oven to 400 F (about 200 C). Get out a cookie sheet, put some non-stick coating on the sheet (this is optional – I’ve done just fine not using it, but strips might stick if they’re not well-breaded) then one strip at a time, take the strips out of the liquid stuff and toss the sticky, wet strips around in the pretzel crumbs. The pretzel crumbs will stick quite well to the wet strips. When they’re coated, lay them on the sheet and repeat until you’ve coated ‘em all.

Toss the strips in the oven for about ten minutes. Here’s what mine looked like just after going in the oven:

After that ten minutes, pull out the strips and flip them over. It’s easy to do with a spatula. The reason for doing this is that if you do not, they can be a touch soggy on the bottom, so you can get away with not flipping them and they’re still just fine.

Put the strips back in for another ten to twelve minutes and then serve them. Yum.

Here’s what my dinner plate looked like:

(You can see the corner of my son’s Spider-Man plate in the upper left of that picture.)

They were quite tasty and a real hit – all four of us enjoyed the strips.

Along with the strips, we had leftovers – some leftover pea salad (mostly peas, but with some diced celery, cubed cheddar cheese, and sour cream) and leftover cantaloupe from a Memorial Day weekend barbecue that we hosted.

The nice thing about strips like this is that almost anything you have on hand works as a side dish for them. Virtually any vegetable and fruit works alongside the strips. This makes the meal less expensive because you can use leftovers (as we did) or whatever fruits and vegetables are on sale at your local grocery store.

Next time, we’ll look at the grill – and the frugal beauty of grilled vegetables.

This is the second entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

Last time, we talked about why an effective time management system is useful and also the basic ideas behind what a successful one would be. Namely, a good time management system allows you to get the things that occupy your thoughts out of your head and into a trusted system, which frees your mind to focus on the task at hand, making you more efficient and more likely to produce excellence in whatever you’re doing.

Knowing this, though, presents a new problem. If you simply toss down whatever is in your mind onto paper, it quickly dissolves into a disorganized, unmanageable mess. Trust me, I’ve done it. For a while, I really got into jotting down everything that came into my mind and I made myself feel as though if it were out of mind, it was taken care of. Of course, what happened is that I wound up with a notebook full of scraps of ideas and things to do and other stuff that was simply unmanageable and not useful in any way. I wound up in worse shape than when I started because I had to devote so much energy to piecing through all of that nonsense.

There has to be a better way. And there is.

Allen proposes a system (starting in this chapter, then expanded upon in great detail later in the book) for dealing with all of those floating ideas, appointments, tasks, projects and other things floating in your head that sneak up and devour your focus. It’s really made up of five parts.

Collect
This is really the only portion of the process that’s an ongoing thing. To put it simply, to collect means to just jot down, in some fashion, any idea that you know you’re going to have to deal with later and put it somewhere where you can very easily find it later. In Allen’s words, from page 26:

In order to eliminate “holes in the bucket,” you need to collect and gether together placeholders for or representations of all the things you consider incomplete in your world – that is, anything personal or professional, big or little, of urgent or minor importance, that you think ought to be different than it currently is and that you have any level of internal commitment to changing.

What Allen is saying (in a bit of a wordy way) is that whenever you have an idea or encounter something that you think you’ll take any sort of action on in the future (including even just thinking about it), you need to grab it and put it in some physical place outside of your head. Call it your “inbox.”

Let me give you an example of what I mean, again from my own life.

I walk outside to get the mail. On the way, the girl from two doors down yells, “I need the money for the walkathon by Friday!” Uh-oh – that’s something I need to take care of. So I pull a pocket notebook and a pen out of my pocket and jot down a note: “Get Billie her walkathon money by Fri.” This note takes up a whole sheet in my pocket notebook, just like any other such note. I go get the mail and dig through it on my way into the house, where I throw away the junk mail and keep four things worth looking at. As I go upstairs, the very beginning of an idea for an article starts to form in my head, so as soon as I get upstairs, I open a computer program and start jotting down the idea in rough form. I then save it with an appropriate name (“Jun 4 Taxes Idea”), pull out my pocket notebook again, and write down “Jun 4 Taxes Idea on computer” on a new sheet of paper. I then tear out the two sheets I’ve written on and toss those sheets and the mail into a physical inbox on my desk.

So, in this process, I collected six items: the note about the walkathon, the note about the “tax idea,” and the four pieces of mail. They’re now all laying in one specific place – the inbox on my desk – to be dealt with later. I no longer have to actively think about any of them for the moment and can settle in to focus on whatever task is at hand.

Literally, whenever any idea at all pops into my head that I need to take care of, it gets jotted down on its own little piece of paper. Then, as soon as I have a chance, I toss all of the sheets of paper into my inbox on my desk. Usually, it’s just these notes. Sometimes, it’s physical items – pieces of mail, a book I need to read, a phone message, or something like that. I also sometimes use Evernote in this fashion to jot down things I need to do – it’s just an electronic form of my physical inbox on my desk.

The key thing is that all of this stuff is in one place. I’m not worried about organizing it yet, just making sure it’s out of my mind and in a single place so that I don’t have to worry about it and can focus on the task at hand instead of having stuff routinely popping up in my mind.

This is an ongoing process, of course. I jot down notes like this all the time and save them. You can use whatever form of “inbox” works best for you, whether it’s a physical one or an electronic one (or both).

Process
Of course, without further steps, that pile of notes, mail, and other materials would quickly explode into chaos. Once a day (or a few times a day), you have to go through this pile of “stuff” and do something with it.

Allen offers a very simple plan for dealing with each individual item in your inbox.

First, ask yourself “is this item actionable?” In other words, does it directly lead to some sort of action in the very near future on your part? If it doesn’t, it’s either trash (which means throw it away immediately), it’s for reference (which means file it immediately), or it’s something that needs to “incubate” (meaning it’s something that will tie heavily to action later on, which should be stored in their own special place called a “tickler” that we’ll deal with later). Examples of the last group would be agendas for meetings that will happen in a week or the scripture you’re supposed to read aloud in church next Sunday.

So, if it does require action, ask yourself if the action can be done in the next two minutes. If it can, do it immediately. I’m often amzed how many things just disappear from my inbox simply by doing them right away.

If they take longer than two minutes, you have some choices. You can delegate it – meaning you’re making sure that someone else is going to take care of it. You can defer it – meaning you set an appointment in your calendar to take care of it at some future date (this is what you do with an appointment notice, for example). Or you can simply do it, which means add it to your list of “next actions” to take – in other words, your immediate list of things you need to do.

Let’s continue the example above.

I’ve got six items in my inbox.
1. The first one is a note about writing a check to Billie for the walkathon. I need to take action on this. Billie’s out playing in the yard and I have my checkbook right here, so I know it’ll take less than two minutes, so I just do it now. I then toss the note.
2. The second one is the note about my post idea for taxes. I add that to my small pile of “next actions” – my actual real work for the next few hours.
3. The third item is a letter from the church reminding me that I’m supposed to serve as usher on a particular future Sunday. I immediately add it to my calendar and toss that note into the trash.
4. The next item is a magazine. I look through it and identify an article I ought to read – the rest looks like rubbish. So I just tear out that article I want to read, put it in my “next action” pile, and toss the rest of the magazine.
5. The next item is from our son’s science summer camp. I open it and read it, because it might be a bill, but instead it’s a welcome packet. I defer it to my son by simply placing it on his pillow in his bedroom.
6. The last item appeared to be a bill based on the envelope, but actually turned out to be trash, so I tossed it immediately.

My inbox is processed, so now I move onto actually doing my real work – and I’m able to focus in on it knowing that there’s nothing circulating around that’s unfinished.

Organize
That takes care of a lot of the obvious stuff, but what do you do about big projects – things that require a lot of actions to complete?

Allen’s suggestion, in the end, is to maintain a folder for each project that you have going on. So, whenever something happens related to a project, you can just open that folder, look at the situation of that project, determine your next action for that project, and add that action to your pile of stuff to do today.

Allen explains it on page 38:

You don’t actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it “done.”

I’ll give you some folder examples of my own projects.

Learning the piano My end goal for this is that I can sit down with a reasonable piece of sheet music (not high-end concert pieces, but ordinary stuff), look it over, sit down at a piano with it, and play it. That’s not just one action that anyone could take. So, I have a folder for this project. Once a week, I take an action step towards it – my piano lesson for the week. I also practice regularly throughout the week. In my folder, I keep things like a practice log and some sheet music that I intend to try out when my skill level is up to it.

Writing and publishing a novel My goal with this project is to publish a novel. The way to get there is murky, but I do recognize that writing fiction in order to improve my skill is an important part, as is generating ideas for a novel. So, in this folder, I mostly just collect ideas – plot ideas, character ideas, and so on.

Building a love of literature in my children I also want to encourage a love of literature in my children. In this folder, I keep an ongoing document that describes things to do to encourage a child to read, along with tons of literature recommendations for different age ranges and reading abilities so that I can always find great books for them as they grow.

These folders serve several purposes. They keep all the documents I need for a particular project all together in one place. The existence of the folder itself is a reminder to keep going with that project (see “Review,” below). They also help me to figure out what my “next action” is going to be – for example, if I flip through the “love of literature” folder and recognize Joe’s ready for something more advanced, I have the materials in hand to help me figure out the next step, like getting him a copy of Maniac McGee.

I also keep a someday/maybe list and a few “sub-lists.” What goes on these things? They’re full of ideas of things I’d like to do someday, but I don’t have time for now because I have too much going on. The “sub-lists” are things like “Books I want to read” and “Movies I want to see” and “Places I want to travel to.” They’re usually places to record whims that show up in my inbox.

Review
The three steps above really do help me take care of everything that passes through my inbox, but it’s easy to see that if I just left it at that, I’d fail to make progress on big projects and I might also allow other things to slip through the cracks, like “next actions” left undone.

The solution to that is to do a weekly review of everything – your inbox, your remaining next actions, all of your project folders, and so on. Allen sums it up well on page 46:

Everything that might potentially require action must be reviewed on a frequent enough basis to keep your mind from taking back the job of remembering and reminding. IN order to trust the rapid and intuitive judgment calls that you make about actions from moment to moment, you must consistently retrench at some elevated level. In my experience [...] that translates into a behavior critical for success: the Weekly Review.

Once a week (I usually do it on a weekend day on whichever of the two days Sarah is on nap duty while the kids are napping), go through everything. Your inbox. Your remaining “next actions” that you haven’t finished up yet. Your project folders. Your calendar. All of it. See what you’ve been doing well and what’s been lagging.

This is the time to ask yourself big questions like whether or not you’re committed to actually following through with a volunteer project you agreed to or whether you’re putting enough effort into learning the piano or losing weight or getting your financial house straight. You can often judge this by the “next actions” left undone.

This really is the most critical part, because it’s the time you can ask yourself why you’re filling your time the way you are, why you’re doing some things and not others, and really dig into who you are and what your motivations are and what your real goals in life are. Everything else really comes from that, and reviewing it once a week can be pretty stark.

It is the single most important thing I do with regards to any of this. It’s a weekly gut check.

Do
In the end, you’re left with a pile of “next actions” to take – your actual, real work. For me, it’s a mix of professional stuff, personal stuff, big stuff, little stuff, urgent stuff, non-urgent stuff, important stuff, and not important stuff.

On page 49, Allen suggests a simple way of deciding which action to tackle first:

There are four criteria you can apply, in this order:

1 | Context
2 | Time available
3 | Energy available
4 | Priority

The first question is can I actually do this right now, given the location and the resources I have available? If you can’t, then you know that item is out.

Next, you ask yourself do I have time to do this right? If you don’t, put it aside. The worst thing you can do is shoehorn a two hour task into forty minutes and do it abysmally.

After that, ask yourself do I have the energy for this? So, for example, early in the day, I might have the mental energy for a big writing project, but later in the day, I don’t. Discard the stuff that you don’t have the energy for right now.

Finally, simply prioritize the rest. How do you do that? It really depends on your job and the demands on you. Some jobs are “urgent, urgent, urgent” and you have to constantly put out fires. Other jobs aren’t like that and you can put the “important but not urgent” tasks pretty high in the queue.

The amazing thing is that all of this just flows together almost seamlessly once you start doing it. It seems like there are a lot of parts to it, but in the end, once you start doing it, there’s really not much to it at all, especially once you’ve done it. The amount of time saved by not carrying ideas and appointments and things in your head is just tremendous and the ability to review everything you’re doing once a week is also incredibly empowering.

Next time, we’ll look at chapter three, covering the five stages of project planning. How do you take a large-scale project and incorporate it into this kind of mindset? Yep, we’ll be looking more closely at those “project folders.”

Hey, look, today I’m going to wade into something that’s bound to get hundreds of angry comments!

Yesterday, I read an article over at Get Rich Slowly where J.D. wrote the following (with my own emphasis added):

“Thanks for finding that place,” Michael told me as he took a bite of mashed potatoes and gravy. “But we’ve decided to rent someplace else. We found a place in Rock Creek for $1300 a month.”

“Wow,” I said. “That seems like a lot.”

“Not really,” he said. “That’s pretty good for similar places in Portland. Plus, it gives us space for our two dogs.”

I sighed inside. Sure, that may be a good price compared to similar houses, but I know there are tons of places to live in Portland for less than $1300 a month — if Michael and his wife are willing to make some sacrifices. I wanted to pursue this line of questioning — What about getting rid of the dogs? Why not look at the $500/month place I found? — but I let it go. You can only argue with your friends so much, right? We moved on to other topics.

This is an issue that comes up over and over again whenever pets are mentioned in a personal finance context. What do you do with a pet when you’re in a financial or personal situation that makes caring for them incredibly difficult or impossible?

It’s not an easy thing to think about for many pet owners. My experience with pets in the past has been very, very bittersweet, so I think I’ll relate my own experience with pets so you’ll have some idea where I’m coming from.

I have had two dogs in my life that I dearly loved. When I was four years old, my parents got a Lhasa Apso / poodle mix as a puppy. I immediately fell in love and insisted that we name the dog “Lolly” (short for Lollipop). Over the years, Lolly was a constant family companion – and I think my dad loved that dog more than even I did. One of her favorite things to do was to walk along the side of the gravel road by our house, past three other houses, and visit my aunt and uncle’s house, and they would often feed her, too. One of our neighbors used to complain constantly about her presence, threatening us and the dog repeatedly. One day, he left a tray of antifreeze alongside the road by his house – and Lolly drank it. She came home with antifreeze still in the fur around her mouth, became very ill, and died two days later in a very miserable way.

To replace Lolly, when I was about fourteen, my parents bought a rat terrier that we named Patch. I was incredibly attached to Patch and I spent most of a summer bonding with him and training him to do various tricks. We would stand out in the yard and play fetch together for hours. He also loved to go to the river and run into the water chasing sticks, bringing them back for me to throw again. He slept on my bed most nights. One day, while I was gone, my older brother ran over Patch with his truck, and I never got to say goodbye to him – he was buried before I returned home.

I know the feeling of bonding with a pet. I know the strong desire to protect a pet. And I know the sense of loss that people can feel when they lose one. It hurts.

So, what does a pet owner do when they find that they’re not emotionally, physically, or financially capable of properly caring for a pet?

The first step that should be taken is to ask yourself whether or not there are changes you could make in your life to allow that pet-human bond to continue. If you can’t afford dog food but you can afford cable television and a cell phone, spend some serious time thinking about your priorities. I can’t answer the question of which is more important to you, but keep in mind that pet ownership is a responsibility in which you’ve agreed to care for a living, thinking being.

This is a very personal decision. Some people simply have difficulty emotionally bonding with a pet – and that situation is difficult for both pet and owner. Some people, after going through a personal crisis or other deep change, find that their new situation makes the pet-human relationship very difficult. A job loss. A disability. A death. A new household member with an allergy. These things happen and they damage the pet-human relationship.

An example: my father is incredibly allergic to cats. Because of this, it made it impossible for him to visit us for years when we had two cats, which caused some serious strain on our relationship (as you can imagine, he did want to visit his grandchildren). Eventually, after searching, we found great alternative homes for our two cats. Our cats have safe, secure places to live and my father can visit his son and his grandchildren – it’s a win for everyone.

If you can’t make available the financial and personal resources that a pet requires, you should actively seek an appropriate home for your pet. Start by asking around your own social network, and also ask at your vet’s office. If that doesn’t work, put a Craigslist posting up about your pet (with pictures), describing the pet in as much detail as you can. Specify who you would like to own the pet. Would this be a good pet for a family? For an elderly person? For a cat lover? Explain that you really need to find a good home for this pet because of changing conditions in your life. You’ll be surprised how often this finds a good match – many potential pet owners just need the impetus of a good story in front of them to push them over the line to pet ownership. Deliver the pet yourself and make sure the home is a healthy one. Just look for obvious red flags like an abundance of caged pets (indicating the person may be a “buncher” who collects pets to sell). The Humane Society offers a great article on finding a new owner for your pet.

If this option fails, try PetFinder.com. You can list your pet there as a classified, which is perhaps the best place to start. If this doesn’t work, then you can also work with a listed animal shelter on PetFinder to help you find a good home for your pet. Try to stick with shelters that have good reviews on PetFinder – in other words, seek a very reputable shelter that takes an active role in finding good homes for their pets. Again, when you take your dog there, look for red flags. If it looks shady and smells awful, they’re probably not actively invested in finding homes for their pets.

Yes, this all takes a lot of time. But it does take a lot of time to find a good home for a pet. That’s why animal shelters often have pets for long periods of time – it’s not easy to find people that are capable of caring for a pet and want to have one, too.

If you own a pet, part of your responsibility is to make sure that the pet has a good home if you can no longer be the owner. That takes work and time, but it’s part of the responsiblity you take on when you acquire a pet. It’s not expensive, it just needs effort and patience.

As for me, I’m not emotionally ready quite yet to have a dog because of those past experiences (and cats are impossible due to allergies, as mentioned above). In the future, I’m not opposed to having one, particularly when we live in the country and the pet has a lot of outdoor freedom. When we do make that choice, we’ll be using Craigslist and PetFinder and other such resources – we won’t be involved in bringing a new pet into the world when there are so many great ones already out there who need a home.

“You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.”
- W.H. Auden, Horae Canonicae

I’m a 30 yr old professional and have saved up about $40k from living within my means sitting in my savings account (I know, I could put it to better use). I contribute about 10-15% in 401k off and on (due to job jumps and 6-12 months working period for eligibility) and have approximately $20k in it. I recently read “rich dad poor dad” and realized it would be a dream come true to no longer have to “work for money”. The book talked about buying “assets”, as in things that would generate more money for me, and use the money generated to buy more “assets”. But I don’t know what to buy. I’d like to keep $10k as emergency money and put the rest to generate money for me. I know I can always buy index funds, but are there any ideas on what I can buy that’ll immediately start making money for me?

I live in Northern Virginia (DC suburbs), so rental property is out – real estate is expensive and rent is a lot cheaper than mortgage.
- Paul

First of all, be aware that Rich Dad, Poor Dad paints an insanely optimistic picture of “making your money work for you.” Remember that it is supposed to be a parable – in his own words, Kiyosaki compared the book to Harry Potter (in the Feb. 2003 issue of SmartMoney).

The idea that you should really take home from the book is that there is a lot of merit in purchasing investments that earn you money without continued work input from you. Fully managed rentals are one type of this. Another type is a stock that has paid dividends over a very long history (and thus will likely to continue paying dividends). Treasury notes are another very stable example of this – they don’t pay as well as the others, but they’re rock solid.

The book essentially proposes that you look for bargains on such assets and keep accumulating them until they produce enough income for you to live on.

If you have about $10K to start with, one place to start might be stocks that pay a strong dividend, as you don’t have enough to really buy rental properties yet and you don’t need the rock-solid stability of treasuries, either.

It’s important to remember that such “income-paying investments” aren’t necessarily the best investments for the long-term growth of your money. They’re simply nice in that they provide a steady income for the owner.

I am very upset. Our Chevron gas card that we’ve had since 1987 is now handled by GM Money Bank. Our joint account now lists my husband as the account holder with me as an authorized user. I didn’t notice this until they start calling to verify purchases as part of their fraud prevention program. If you don’t respond, they block the card and won’t talk to me about anything. I handle the billing and payments on all our accounts, and am incensed that they won’t talk to me. They wouldn’t even let me report fraudulent purchases posted to the account. Are there no longer joint accounts available? What happens if he is incapacitated and unable to speak?
- Cindy

Many credit cards have moved to a single cardholder with additional authorized users, mostly in an effort to standardize accounts. It’s not really anything to worry about.

If you are the main cardholder’s spouse, you should have power of attorney over his affairs in the event that he is incapacitated. This will give you the right to make choices and administrative decisions about his credit card.

I really wouldn’t worry about it too much. For now, it doesn’t change anything about how you two use the cards. If he did wind up being incapable of managing the card, you would be able to do it for him.

When my wife and I got married, we took ‘control’ of a 40K full-service/managed investment account that had been set up for her in the past by her parents. I have been considering turning that into a self-directed account, as the managers of that account just about matched the stock market, and i prefer to just invest in a long term, low fee indexing strategy.

We also have 15K in liquid savings and another 45K in IRAs and CDs. Any advice?
- Brian

Honestly, your two choices are a wash in terms of long-term gains. There’s no way to tell for certain that over the long haul, you’ll be able to exceed a 6% return after taxes on a taxable investment account. I usually tend to stick with Warren Buffett’s prediction that the stock market will return 7% annually over the long term in the future, which means that after taxes, you’re pretty close to a wash (since we don’t know what capital gains taxes will look like down the road).

Given that it’s a wash, I’d probably put that money into the mortgage. This would have the advantage of ensuring that you get your 6% return and it has the potential to help you pay it off very early, which is a huge boon to your personal cash flow.

Note: I originally misread Brian’s question and thought he wrote 401K instead of 40K in the opening sentence. Here was my original answer, based on that misreading.

That seems good on paper, but there are very painful tax complications to doing that.

If you take $20,000 out of a 401(k) before retirement, not only will you have to pay income tax on whatever you pull out, you’ll also have to pay a 10% early withdrawal fee. This will quickly eliminate about 30% of your savings (depending on your exact tax bracket, of course).

You’re better off leaving the money there. The 10% penalty alone will eat up any potential “extra” return you might earn versus leaving it in the 401(k).

My boyfriend and I live together and he makes a lot more than me because I’m in graduate school. We split bills 50/50 for the house we rent right now, but we’re moving into a bigger house soon and he will pay more of the rent than me. He also has money saved for when we one day decide to get married and buy a house. Since we’re not married or even engaged at this point, I feel a bit guilty that he will be paying more of the rent than me. How do unmarried couples (or married couples, for that matter) reconcile differences in income? It really bothers me when wives expect too much from their husbands financially and I never want to turn into that.
- Kate

I think it’s completely reasonable to proportion bills in proportion to the incomes of the household members. Of course, that proportion would have to change every time there is a change in income for either household member or in household bills.

So, let’s say you have a $15K a year stipend, while your boyfriend makes $45K a year. A completely reasonable split would be that he handles 75% of household bills and you handle 25%. Then, if you get out of school and get a $30K a year job, the split on all bills would become 60/40. Or, if he lost his job and then just got a full time job working at McDonalds earning $15K a year while you were making $30K, you’d be responsible for 66% and he’d only be responsible for 33%.

This way, you’re both handling what you can each handle, but doing it in a way that does tie you together and does benefit you both if one of you achieves financial success, but also makes you both work harder whenever one of you is in a time of need.

Life’s too short to drive a used car.
- Kevin

I love comments like this.

For me, life’s too short to be kept up at night worrying about my car payments.

Life’s too short to have to skip out on a trip to Italy because I don’t have the cash because it’s all tied up in my car.

Life’s too short to get six credit card bills in the mail that you can’t pay.

Life’s too short to trade it all for a new car smell that you don’t have the cash in hand to pay for.

I realized I need sharper skills to get ahead in my industry of landscape architecture. Basically, I need to improve my plant knowledge and my drafting expertise. The problem is, I am having a tough time deciding which skill set to improve first. Plant knowledge is very important, but it’s more of a soft skill because its just all in my head, and would be hard to demonstrate beyond a line on my resume. I could earn a Master of Ornamental Plants certificate over a two year period(about as fast as possible). Drafting is a great hard skill but I would be taking classes on Lynda.com, and it would be difficult to stay diligent with my work schedule. Finally, I love carpentry, and I was thinking of building some simple furniture to sell to neighbors and friends. This would be great because I really need the money right now, and it would be a really handy skill set for life. Also, you often mention starting a side business with hobbies in your writings.

They are all great skills and would each be very helpful in my life and career, I just can’t seem to make up my mind and pull the trigger. Any thoughts?
- Ryan

It’s simple. Pick the one that seems like the most enjoyable to you when you’re sitting around twiddling your thumbs.

It’s the enjoyable things that you’ll go back to time and time again. For example, writing is something I simply enjoy doing and I would do it every day whether or not there’s income. For me, the work is the other stuff – dealing with advertisers, dealing with comments, and so on.

If you’re not happy doing something, you won’t excel at it unless you are prodigously talented.

You often suggest that people focus on doing whatever they would do if money was no object. What would you do if you had a liveable income guaranteed for life?
- Kellie

Assuming I had a nice quiet place out in the country, I’d spend a lot of my time focused on being a great dad. Aside from that, I’d have a giant garden and I’d continue to write, but likely I’d focus on fiction writing at least for a while. I’d master the piano and slowly build up my running ability until I could run a good 5k.

I’d also spend a lot of my time doing volunteer work. There are several projects in my community that I’d love to participate in, but they get squeezed out because of the raw number of obligations in my life.

I like to travel on occasion, but I’m mostly a homebody.

What personal finance gurus do you like? Which ones do you not like?
- Emma

I like most of them. For the most part, almost every “personal finance guru” says very good, sensible things: spend less than you earn, invest the difference, build your own skills.

I tend to have more positive feelings towards some than towards others only because of some of the specifics in what they say. For example, I tend to think more highly of Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (who focus on a message of using money to support what you most value in life) than I do of, say, Robert Kiyosaki, who refers to wage earners as “hamsters” in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

The differences between personal finance “gurus” lie in how they present their message and the 20% of their message that differs from the rest of them. Since 80% of their messages are identical and are simply good advice, I generally like most of them (I would say “all,” but I’m sure there’s someone out there that’s preaching something that’s not very cool).

My husband and I are having a small disagreement on how to pay for a neccesary purchase that has come up. Our HVAC (heat and air conditioning) system has reached the end of it’s useful lifespan and needs to be replaced. It is still working at this point with yearly service, but just barely (thermostat needs to be set 5 degrees cooler/warmer to maintain comfortable temp) and is costing a fortune in energy costs. I am a new stay-at-home mom so we are living off of one income. We have $17,000 in savings and are making it fine off of my husbands income, but it is tight, and our savings rate has been reduced to about $100 a month. We plan on having one more child and me returning to work in the next 5 years.

I know you are wary of credit, but what is your thought on this? Our only other debt is our mortgage. (oh, and going without is not an option- here in Carolina it’s 100 in the summer and 20 in the winter!)
- Erin

This is probably something that falls under the umbrella of an emergency, but I don’t think I would completely wipe out my emergency fund for it.

You currently have $17,000 in savings. Spending $6,000 of that would reduce you to $11,000 in savings. Looking at the average cost of living stats for North and South Carolina, that likely equates to at least a few months’ worth of living expenses for you.

Given that buying the HVAC completely out of savings would still leave you with a few months’ worth of living expenses in your emergency fund, I’d recommend that you go that way instead of putting it on credit.

I saw your summer reading list over on TrentHamm.com. Why did you pick those books? Do you really think you can read them all by the end of summer?
- Fiona

I was looking for a reason to cross-post my summer reading list here, so I’ll do that. By the end of summer (Sept. 21), I’m aiming to read the following 20 books for personal enjoyment and growth.

1. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
2. The Big Short by Michael Lewis
3. The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt
4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
5. Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
6. The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
7. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
8. Atonement by Ian McEwan
9. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
10. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
11. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
12. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
13. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
14. The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook
15. American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent
16. The Savage Detetives by Roberto Bolano
17. The First Tycoon by T. J. Stiles
18. Tinkers by Paul Harding
19. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
20. The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons

Honestly, I’ll probably not get all the way through this list, but I will wind up slipping in a few additional books along the way. I will also probably read them somewhat out of order, too, because some of the list will depend on library availability and the Franzen book (#4) isn’t available until August (unless I get lucky with a contact I have within the literary community who might be able to get me an early one).

So why this list? I usually have a “summer reading list” each summer where I challenge myself to get through a pile of books. I usually pick a few purely fun ones, but also some challenging ones that will push and stretch me. I draw this list from the ongoing “books I’d like to read” list that I keep, which is made up of books I hear about from various sources.

I’m mostly putting this here because I encourage everyone to have a summer reading list. It doesn’t have to be twenty books long – even a three-book summer reading list made up of books that will push you to grow is a great way to spend the idle hours of your summer in an intellectually productive fashion. Grow your mind. Have a summer reading list.

I keep a “what I’m reading / what I’ve read” list going over at Goodreads, if you’re interested. It’ll show my progress as I wind through these books, as well as star ratings of most of them.

Got any questions? Email them to me or leave them in the comments and I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag. However, I do receive hundreds of questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.