Books for new routines and fresh starts

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

by Jocelyn K. Glei

The title says it all: this little book is about playing to your creative strengths and natural rhythms by building daily routines. Twenty-plus luminaries from a host of people who work in creative professions—Gretchen Rubin, Steven Pressfield, Teresa Amabile, Seth Godin—weigh in on the importance of their personal habits for email, solitude, social media, multitasking, and more. This inspiring and practical guide will spur you to evaluate your schedule, create better habits, and rethink your priorities.

What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast

by Laura Vanderkam

Successful people purposefully use their mornings to focus on things that are important, but not urgent: things like nurturing your career, nurturing your relationships, and nurturing yourself. Read this guide, keep a time diary for a week as Laura suggests, and reap the benefits. (Read about my experience with making over my mornings here.) Add Audible narration for $2.49.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

This isn't a productivity book, exactly: McKeown's point is that instead of trying to get more done, we need to focus on getting only the right things done. Ironically, this book about ignoring the inessential felt a little padded to me. My favorite takeaway was the "monk mode" strategy McKeown relied on to write this book: he shut out the world from 5:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. every day to focus on his "essential" project for that season.

Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

by Gretchen Rubin

Rubin’s much anticipated follow-up to her happiness books is all about habits: how we make them, why we break them, and how we can improve them. That may not strike you as poolside fare, but the chatty writing, illuminating insights, and story-driven narrative make this guidebook anything but dry and boring. Packed with relatable tales from Rubin’s life, which are easy to apply to your own. If you put them into practice, this book will change your life. Practical, engaging, entertaining.

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

by Sherry Turkle

The title is admittedly a little dry but the content is so good! This is Turkle's wake-up call to our modern era where we're over-connected to each other when apart but under-connected—thanks to our devices—when together. As a professor at MIT Turkle collected reams of research on how our devices are serving us well, and how they're not. (The latter column is the fuller one.) It gets depressing at times, but Turkle is persistently optimistic about how we can control our technology, instead of the other way around. Resistance is not futile, but highly effective, and once we understand how our devices are really affecting us, we'll be empowered to change. Surprisingly fascinating.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

The concept couldn’t be simpler: this compendium holds the daily routines of 237 writers, composers, painters, choreographers, playwrights, poets, philosophers, sculptors, filmmakers, and scientists. We glimpse the creative processes of drinkers and drug takers, early risers and exercisers, nap takers and night owls. Some schedules are mundane, others are wildly eccentric. With their contradictory routines, you’ll be assured there’s no “right” way to work. While you could read it straight through, it’s best enjoyed dipping into again and again, slowly over time. A perfect laid-back read: you don’t even need a bookmark.

The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time

by Arianna Huffington

From the publisher: "In The Sleep Revolution, Arianna shows how our cultural dismissal of sleep as time wasted compromises our health and our decision-making and undermines our work lives, our personal lives -- and even our sex lives. She explores all the latest science on what exactly is going on while we sleep and dream."

Simplify

by Joshua Becker

I enjoyed this intro to the how and why of minimalism from the blogger behind Becoming Minimalist. From the publisher: this book's approach "will free you from the burden of clutter and provide you with the extra motivation to realign your life around your heart’s greatest passions… however you choose to define them."

Design Mom: How to Live with Kids: a Room by Room Guide

by Gabrielle Blair

Blair’s (glossy, photo-packed) book is all about how to live well with kids, and that doesn’t just mean how to look good. It’s about creating a place where every member of the family feels at home.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

by Marie Kondo

If you want to tidy up once and for all, this is the best kick in the pants you can get for ten bucks. This book is more than a little woo-woo, but her extreme approach to decluttering WORKS. Kondo is a Japanese personal tidying expert (she doesn’t like to call herself an “organizer”). She originally wrote her decluttering manifesto to help the Japanese clients languishing on her waiting list. Not all translations are good translations, but this one has been praised for preserving the quirkiness of her voice. (It's quirky, all right.) I love this book (more thoughts on that here).

The Nesting Place: It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect to Be Beautiful

by Myquillyn Smith

A decorating book that's much more than a decorating book. In Myquillyn Smith's first book, she walks the reader through all fourteen (!!!) homes she's lived in as an adult, explaining how she learned to create a beautiful home despite the many limitations. Her mantra is "it doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful," and she'll fill you with confidence that you, too can create a beautiful, welcoming home that also feels lived-in and loved-on, despite your own lovely limitations. Practical and inspiring.

Home Comforts

by Cheryl Mendelson

Our culture values domesticity more today than it did when Home Comforts was first released years ago, but Ms. Mendelson’s passion for housekeeping continues to inspire me, and I still regularly pull the book off the shelf when I’m not sure how best to tackle a household task.

Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized

by Susan Pinsky

This is a great little handbook I come back to again and again, especially when my home (or my calendar) begins to feel like it's spiraling out of control.

That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week: Helping Disorganized and Distracted Boys Succeed in School and Life

by Ana Homayoun

This book isn't just for boys (or kids, for that matter). The author is an educational consultant who works with bright, talented kids who bomb in school because they just can't get it together: her lightbulb moment came when she realized "chronic disorganization" was the biggest culprit in her students' underperformance. Homayaoun outlines the common sources of struggle, her plan for building incremental habits, and a quick guide to troubleshooting, so her students can devote less time to keeping their stuff together and more time to the things they really love.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

by Twyla Tharp

Tharp's life revolves around an arsenal of routines because, as she says, "a dancer's life is all about repetition." This conversational book is all about setting the bones—the day-to-day structure—of a creative life. (I only just found out she wrote a follow-up: The Collaborative Habit is on my to-read stack right now.)

Books for new routines and fresh starts

The MMD Summer Reading Guide

your guide to reliable readerly joy this summer

a gateway

to reliable joy this summer

Buckle Up!

summer reading starts May 16th