Welcome to Sunday Reads on Refocuser, a collection of weekly links from around the web to help you do incredible things.  These links span topics like creativity, performance, focus, exercise, nutrition, and positivity.

Join thousands of other readers by subscribing to this blog and email newsletter or by following @Refocuser on Twitter.  If you’re receiving this in your email inbox, spread the love and forward it to a friend.

Getting Creative Work Done

If you struggle to declutter your magazine pile, a technique called ABR – Always Be Reading may be for you.  As someone who spends many hours a week focused on helping people read more (with a Kindle preferably) this approach sounds interesting, and is actually pretty aligned with what I personally do.

Are you a manager?  Your late-night or very early-morning emails may be hurting your team.  Being always-on hurts team results in a big way.  I’ve been in the habit for years of delay-sending the email I write after 6:30pm on Friday or over the weekend until late Monday morning.

If you’d like to form successful habits, you need to know what motivates you.

A recent study showed that heavy cellphone users report higher anxiety levels and dissatisfaction with life than their peers who use their phones less often – and another showed a correlation between stress levels and the barrage of alerts and notifications.  This app automatically tracks how much you use your iPhone or iPad each day and helps you set limits.

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Welcome to Sunday Reads on Refocuser, a collection of weekly links from around the web to help you do incredible things.  These links span topics like creativity, performance, focus, exercise, nutrition, and positivity.

Join thousands of other readers by subscribing to this blog and email newsletter or by following @Refocuser on Twitter.  If you’re receiving this in your email inbox, spread the love and forward it to a friend.

On Creative Work

If you still think you couldn’t possibly be creative, the 5 Creativity Myths You Need to Stop Believing should help.

One of the most important thing you can do for lifelong learning & creativity is to read a lot.  According to Warren Buffett, knowledge builds up like compound interest and reading is the mechanism to enable it.  This article introduces the 10% Rule; a new system for reading more books on Amazon’s Kindle.

Omar Shahine tells us how to hit Inbox Zero every time you check your email.  I bounce at zero daily most days, but I haven’t tried this approach yet.

Children are natural born mindfulness practitioners.  So perhaps you could learn mindfulness by watching a child.

Great write-up on Farnham Street on Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset research.  If you’re a parent, you need to read this.  Everybody else should as well 😉

A short analysis of INTJ, a specific Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that I just happen to be.  “They tend to be both methodical and perfectionistic, and they have the drive to put their ideas into action and the persistence to realize their dreams.”  I’ll take that.  There are articles on other personality type indicators linked from that article as well.

Could your company have 9-5 hours, a full hour for lunch every day, 5-7 weeks of annual vacation, and zero email on nights and weekends… and still thrive?  Tony Schwartz believes so.

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Every year I work to increase my reading output by figuring out unique ways to squeeze more books into my schedule.  It isn’t always easy, but I do view reading as a priority given the clear benefits (and joy) of learning and growing as an individual.  Americans in general are reading less every year; the last stat I saw said less than 40% of the population read at least one book last year.  Yikes!  Each year it seems as if our reading behavior becomes more fleeting; more geared towards the mindset of impatience in a world filled with 140 character ramblings.

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.

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