Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. Several weeks ago, I reviewed Laura Stack’s Find More Time – and loved it. It was an excellent collection of specific tactics to apply towards maximizing time in your personal life and I have actually applied a few of the lessons successfully

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. One of the first productivity books I reviewed on The Simple Dollar was Dr. Neil Fiore’s excellent The Now Habit. It did a wonderful job of attacking the problem of procrastination from a psychological perspective, looking at the core reasons why people

This morning, in a fit of self-disgust and angst, I made a long list of all of the stuff I’ve intended to do over the last few weeks and simply failed to accomplish: I intended to finish two chapters of my book by now – only one is done. I intended to clean out the

To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” The above is a quote from the well-known investor Warren Buffett, and it’s one that’s been on my mind a lot lately, because it speaks to a value that a lot of

Most Sundays, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. A reader wrote to me a while back happily extolling the virtues of Find More Time. I get about ten book recommendations a day (about half of which seem to come straight from publishers), so naturally I was a bit ho-hum about

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. I find that time and time again, my greatest opponent when trying to make intelligent and well-reasoned personal finance and time management issues is myself. I’m my own weakness. I regularly make irrational decisions – I’ll stop in the middle of work

Now that my free time has increased exponentially (giving me the margin I so desperately needed), I came up with a list of personal projects that I’ve been neglecting recently, first among these being a reorganization of the pantry. Over the last few months, our pantry has descended into chaos. When we first moved into

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development or personal productivity book. About two months ago, I settled in to read Margin, a book recommended to me by several readers. Subtitled Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives, it seemed like a book that would match my interests – and the

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. Cut to the Chase was recommended to me by a friend of a friend, who swore up and down that it was the best book on time management he’d ever read. As a long-time believer in Getting Things Done (and having read

All of us regularly make mistakes in our lives – choices that seem like the right ones at the time, but later turn out to have been poor choices. This is true for all avenues of life: our careers, our personal lives, our finance choices, and anything else where we make decisions and have to

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development or personal productivity book. About two years ago, I went through a huge lengthy “green” streak, brought on by An Inconvenient Truth. I spent several months absorbing as much information as I could about global climate change, from the actual scientific literature to books on things

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development or personal productivity book. Every time you write anything, you’re selling something. Throughout my life, different people have given me little nuggets of advice that have proved reliable and true over and over again. The above line was told to me by my technical writing professor

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. This book drew me in by its subtitle: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don’t. I knew before I even picked it up that it was a book on leading a business – I was familiar with

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development or personal productivity book. As a rule of thumb, I’m a melancholic person, even though I often put off a positive, outgoing vibe. I have to often work very hard to convince myself that things are in fact going well, even when things are great. I

A few weeks ago, I read a fascinating book by Richard Swenson called Margin. Subtitled Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives, it was an amazing book that really made me think deeply about the fundamental choices I make about how I choose to spend my time. It left me with a

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. About a year ago, I began to really look at The Simple Dollar as the beginnings of a small business – likely one that would only ever have one employee (me), but a business nonetheless. I proceeded to dive into a big

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. An old friend of mine loaned me Never Wrestle With A Pig in the mail recently, with a little Post-It note that said “This is the best career advice I’ve ever read, even if I don’t follow all of it.” That note

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book. The premise of this book is quite intriguing to me, a person who spends much of his time engaged in creative work. The Path of Least Resistance argues that creativity functions best when you put as little resistance against it as you