Ask HN: What are the best books for professional effectiveness?
What books have helped you be more effective at work that apply to most “knowledge work” jobs?
A core of truth, but terribly written. Zero imagination, neither wisdom nor joy. What they lack in depth they make up for with contrived examples.
While authors like Hesse, Kafka, Tolkien, Goethe, Dickens, Fry, and Wilde have given me so much more.
Sometimes it’s a sentence. Sometimes the mood of a chapter. Maybe a casual observation made by a side character or a short poem that carries the weight of many a novel.
Never directly relating to my work, but deep insights in to humanity transcend everything.
And if there’s nothing you find applicable, at least you’re left with beautiful language that is worth indulging in for its own sake.
(A euro-centric list, antiquated maybe. But timeless. Naturally, every period and culture has gifted us with comparable works.)
Grabbing a small assortment of Penguin Classics in any bookshop is always a good option. Pick three that peak your interest. They’re small, cheap, and don’t spy on you.
Revisiting books you’ve read as a child is interesting as well. You no doubt see the world very differently now – observing the difference in one’s perception is fascinating.
Don’t be afraid of the seemingly trivial. Treasure Island is the source of every single pirate trope. That realisation alone was worth it for me.
Pay attention to the language. It matters so much. I often re-read passages in LotR for the imagery alone. It is so vivid, carries so much weight. Aeons are compressed in to a sentence.
And sometimes the story doesn’t matter. It’s a means through which to have a conversation with the author.
Lastly, what might be my favourite piece if writing: Blauer Schmetterling by Herman Hesse. [0] I prefer the original German, but this translation does it justice.
0 - https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=119749&RF...
It is really unfortunate that people nowadays don't read the literature/classics (or books for the most part) unless and until they see/hear a movie (mostly bad) made from it. Nothing forces you to engage your imagination like a well written book. There are more insights and life advice buried in the "classic novels" than in shelves full of "Self Help" books most of which have only a single theme/idea fluffed up into hundreds of (useless) pages.
https://reasonabletheology.org/cs-lewis-on-reading-old-books...
How to take Smart Notes: https://takesmartnotes.com/
Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Good for helping you to recognize how your mind is working, and to work with it to improve yourself.
How To Practice by The Dalai Lama. Again, understand your mind to improve your ability to deal with life. I suggest this and the previous book because you can't build a great house without a sturdy foundation.
Dune by Frank Herbert. There's some lessons in here about managing your mind and your reactions to stimuli or adverse situations. Yes, seriously I'm suggesting a fiction novel :)
Others if I think of them!
The title may sound off-putting to some but it was a great book for me, following on from Emotional Intelligence (I second your recommendation on that one).
"I must not fear, fear is the mind killer." ... possibly the single best piece of advice for prospering in western corporate environments.
Can be seen as a rephrasing of the SAS motto "Who dares wins", but with an added insight on how fear cripples your higher thought processes.
I think there's something important here to learn, so thanks.
edit: This reading is relevant because I'm going back to school, but I'm part way through and can see this will also be useful for all the books I read about stuff I find interesting. The idea of a slip box to capture, refine, and connect information sounds fun.
• “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
Three lessons:
• Be professional. Do what you say you’re going to do. Don’t take anything personally.
• Commit to one thing at a time. Priorities always change. Decide what you need to do, do it, then decide what to do next.
• Never assume. If you’re unclear, stop and get clarity before continuing.
Hear me out -- when you're debt-free in a modest paid-off house, you have so much extra "brain space" that used to be devoted to managing bills, worrying about layoffs or the next job, etc. Whereas if you're debt-free with low overhead, you can push back on management, be bolder in your current work, pay cash for continuing education, take interesting but not top-paid work, make mistakes and not stress about them, etc.
I think this describes about 80-90% of business related books!
Take for instance the Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. We get it, make checklists because they're good for making sure you don't miss stuff. Got it. But in reading the stories and personal anecdotes, we get a felt sense for why and how we should implement a system of checklists to offload cognitive load so that we can focus on things that require more discursive thinking.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can tell someone to do something, but you may have a better shot at getting them to remember (edit: understand deeply) if you tell them a story. Humans may just be like that.
Not saying these authors aren't trying to hit publisher mandated word counts or whatever, but it may not always be that.
It’s not. It’s a matter of fact analysis and framework for understanding the problem of how to keep track of all the varied messages and projects that come at you. And the advice is simple and highly effective.
I always think it's a shame that many of the books that have impacted my life in incredibly positive ways, all look like goofy self-help books at a first glance!
Some of them contain incredible wisdom. Aside from some of the inevitable fluff/padding, GTD is one of these.
But I finished it and now implement the system across work and school (back to school in my mid 30s). It was like a level up in terms of how much I can handle at once while simultaneously lowering my levels of stress and increasing the feeling of control.
Given that URLs are the workflow improvement of the web, watch if these citations is most useful to you?
1: Heylighen, Francis, and Clément Vidal. "Getting things done: the science behind stress-free productivity." Long Range Planning 41, no. 6 (2008): 585-605.
2: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=Get...
3: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francis-Heylighen/publi...
6: https://westurner.github.io/wiki/workflow
5: https://github.com/westurner/wiki/blob/master/workflow.rest
5 is editable by the author in their - the original - fork; which may include local and remote branches that Pull Requests and ("#DevOpsSec") Continuous Integration build task automation that help collaborators collaborate on [open source] software in free public git repos.
- If a thing takes less than 2 minutes to do, just do it immediately.
- Don't try to remember the things you need to do in your head, write them down.
- A weekly(-ish) review. Things happen, and things will get disorganized, but spending some time to reorganize things again really helps to keep it from spiraling out of control.
- Inbox zero (emails). I chuck things into "Action", "Waiting", "References" or "Archive" instead of letting them pile up in the inbox making me stressed.
There are tons of rules in GTD, but really, even a single of these tips have helped me tremendously.
I’m also a fan of a “someday maybe” list
It helps me manage feelings of overwhelm.
I've found that emphasizing the next action for the receiver in emails has been hugely beneficial. And sending summary emails after meetings that simply details the next actions, and who is responsible, is s simple thing but oh so effective.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey
The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker (Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge work")
Getting Things Done - David Allen
High Output Management - Andy Grove
If you have an entrepreneurial side:
The E Myth - Michael E. Gerber
The title is cheesy but I would second the recommendation of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by one of the other commenters. As long as you don't take everything it says too literally and look for the wider principles it's teaching.
Another one in the "cheesy" category, he's old school, but I've found Brian Tracy's books and audiobooks to be incredibly motivating and useful for crafting a positive mindset around work.
* Principles: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/150...
* The Effective Engineer: https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Dispro...
* High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...
Charnas, D. https://www.workclean.com/
I actually wrote a comment recommending the same book, but might as well tuck it here.
Mise-en-place is well designed but much of it doesn't translate well to knowledge work, which is why these books aren't more popular. It's still a great addition to your toolkit and sometimes when I'm overwhelmed, I remind myself to keep things clean and just finish stuff.
Hear me out :)
It teaches you to do a lot of little things that over time make a huge impact on your well being and the people around you. I loved this book and found a huge impact on my life year after year as little habits it teaches started to add up.
In the workforce it also helped me. I am already very empathetic, but it helped me do a lot of little things for my team and the people I manage to make their lives better.
Great book.
It seems very likely that a happier person is going to be more productive/effective in all aspects of life, including work!
I guess the key is probably a balance of working on both at once; your underlying emotional health and happiness, as well as learning some higher level tricks relating to time management, managing your workload etc.
It made me pay more attention to my energy levels and early warnings signs when I am pushing too hard. Which then made me better at helping my team with those, and making sure they were healthy/happy.
(i use happy but really what they mean in these is content / fulfilled)
You are learning almost all of the time on the "knowledge" job.
A great book that provides a framework for dealing with difficult conversations is Difficult Conversations, written by a team at Harvard that spent years on practicing and refining conflict-resolution.
https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/763362.The_One_Minute_Ma...
I’ll add:
The Four Agreements
Also Peopleware by Lister and DeMarco.
Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jerry I. Porras and Jim Collins
Seeing around corners ~ ???
The former is for developing habits that can change your team / organization.
The latter is for developing a culture of innovation and synergy
This might be too "baby steps" for a lot of people here, but it genuinely has had a huge impact on my life and I would recommend it to anyone at the early stages of their productive or professional life. It's an exceptionally easy read and very well composed and helped me learn and apply concrete goals to productivity and focus.
It's a bit dated but has a lot of helpful advice - I wish I had read it when I started my career.
Mission Earth - L. Ron Hubbard