Taarradhin

At the end of every year I pick 4 to 5 different books that have either been recommended to me or that I’ve read myself as nominees for our monthly book club. My team then has a few weeks to review each book and vote on the titles they are most interested in. Everyone had two votes, the winning book is chosen by either receiving the most #1 votes or I’ll assign each vote points and pick the highest total. Fairly straightforward, I think, and mostly democratic.

This year my team chose a book by Behance – 99U Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind.  This book is a collection of essays written by some of my favorite authors (Gretchen Rudin, Seth Godin, and Dan Ariely) and promises to help you tackle your day by better managing your focus and finding more time for creativity.

Typically I try to pace any book club at a chapter a month but in this case we have twenty-two chapters that are all relatively short. We’ll start off with the foreword by Scott Belsky and an exercise using an article found on 99U – Forget SMART Goals, Set CLEAR Goals Instead to get everyone focused on what their individual goals are for this year and what of those the book can help them with.

From there we’ll have two sessions on building routines, I’ll start that with a bookended exercise where we’ll capture before and after looks at a week of work each assessing balance, stress and free time. In April/May we’ll switch to building focus, using RescueTime to capture the true impact of distractions. June/July will be focused on tools and learning to let go of ‘happy’ distractions. I’m thinking of introducing something mood lifting at that point that illustrates relieving stress and mindfulness. Aug/Sept will be working on leveraging creativity, something I’m eager to learn more about myself, through exploring different methods of disengaging from the problem to find better solutions. We’ll end on reviewing our goals, discussing what we’ve learned and talking about the final chapter on next steps.

I’ll admit I wasn’t very enthusiastic about this book at first glance, more because like our last book it’ll require more preparation on my part, but now that I’ve had some time to draw up a plan and look into supporting tools, I am very excited to give this one a shot. From here on out I’ll post regular updates on our progress under the Training and Books categories.