Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School by John Medina – A description of rules with how our brain works and how we learn. Our visual senses tend to trump our sense of smell. We need sleep to restore our energy and to help us concentrate. Spaced repetition is important, but assigning meaning to new words and concepts are also important to learning. Since I’m fascinated with learning and how the brain works, I’ll add this to my reading list.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity by
David Allen – Although I never read the book, I felt like I follow a similarly described organisation system. The GTD method is almost like a cult, but requires a lot of discipline for it. Unlike keeping a single list of things to do, they have a systemised variant for keeping long-lived projects and ways of managing tasks to help you focus on getting through actions. Probably a good book if you want to focus more on breaking things done into smaller steps.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande – With lots of examples from the healthcare industry, a reminder that useful checklists can help us avoid making simple mistakes. For me, the idea of standardised work (a lean concept) already covers this. I agree with this idea in principle, but I’m not so sure the book covers the negative side effects of checklists as well (people getting lazy) or alternatives to checklist (automation and designing against error/failure demand to be begin with).

Connect: The Secret LinkedIn Playbook to Generate Leads, Build Relationships, and Dramatically Increase Your Sales by Josh Turner – Either a terrible summary or a terrible book, this blink gave advice about how to use LinkedIn to build a community. Although the advice isn’t terrible, it’s not terribly new, and I didn’t really find any insights. I definitely won’t be getting a copy of this book.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action by Simon Sinek – A nice summary of leadership styles and rather than focusing on how something should be done, and the what, is starting with the why. I liked the explanation of the Golden Circle with three concentric circles draw within each other, with the Why being the starting point that leads to the How that ends in the What. It’s a good reminder about effective delegation and how powerful the Why motivator can be. I’ve added this book to my reading list to.