Some of the web addresses included here are long. To avoid manually typing them into your browser, visit oliverburkeman.com/helplinks. htm, where they are listed as clickable links.
On the perils of perfectionism, Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor) is well worth reading, whether or not you’re interested in writing; if you are interested in writing, take special note of her chapter entitled ‘Shitty First Drafts’. Lamott’s witty yet forgiving outlook – inflected with religion, but not in a way that need distress unreligious readers – is an excellent antidote to self-help’s strenuous preoccupation with total change. A half-hour video interview with her is available online at bigthink.com/ideas/19807.
Cal Newport’s original blog post on the problems with finding your passion is at calnewport.com/blog/2009/11/24, and it’s the kind of topic that crops up frequently on his blog Study Hacks (calnewport.com/blog) and in his book How to Be a High School Superstar (Broadway) – both of which, despite their titles, contain plenty of content relevant to non-students. For a well-reasoned counterpoint, see Ken Robinson’s The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Penguin). And for more on the notion of leaving your comfort zone, explore the Japanese psychotherapy of Shoma Morita at todoinstitute.org. Morita therapy, roughly speaking, is what you get when you cross Zen Buddhism with Susan Jeffers’s book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Vermilion). In a good way.
Much of the writing against goal-setting also comes from a Buddhist or Taoist perspective – see, for example, Alan Watts’s idiosyncratic Tao: The Watercourse Way (Pantheon) – while Leo Babauta gives his own take at Zen Habits (zenhabits.net/no-goal), a compelling blog on minimalist, stress-free lifestyles. For a more scholarly take on the matter, see the Harvard Business School study ‘Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side-Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting’, downloadable at hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6114. html.
Broader critiques of self-help tend to fall into the same all-or-nothing trap as self-help itself: while too many gurus claim everything is possible with positive thinking and a ten-step checklist, too many critics dismiss the entire industry. But both Steve Salerno’s Sham: How the Gurus of the Self-Help Movement Make Us Helpless (Nicholas Brealey) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s more recent Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (Granta) are sharp and illuminating. The sceptical self-help blog Beyond Growth (beyondgrowth.net) comes closest to finding a fruitful middle way.
The definitive book on the psychology of gratitude is Thanks! How Practising Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Robert Emmons, while many research papers on the topic, by Emmons, Michael McCullough and others, are downloadable in PDF format at www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Gratitude_Page.htm. A thousand websites purport to explain ‘how to keep a gratitude journal’, but they boil down to this: list five or six things you’re grateful for. In a notebook. And repeat. (They need not be major things, either, and might include the sandwich you had for lunch.) Sonja Lyubomirsky, in The How of Happiness: A Practical Guide to Getting the Life You Want (Sphere), makes the interesting point that, according to some research, it may be more effective to keep such a journal intermittently, rather than day after day, so that the technique itself doesn’t fall victim to the ‘hedonic treadmill’.
On worry, Edward Hallowell’s book Worry (Ballantine) provides the best marriage of research to practical advice; it also contains a marvellous chapter on the chronic worrying of Samuel Johnson – who, despite being one of the biggest overachievers in English history, considered himself a ‘castle of indolence’. What better evidence that the intensity of a worry may be an unreliable indicator that there is a serious problem?
Jamie Pennebaker offers a list of practical tips on the link between writing and mental health at homepage. psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/home2000/Writingand Health. html. One intriguing elaboration of these ideas is the technique known as ‘proprioceptive writing’, described at pwriting.org and in the book Writing the Mind Alive (Ballantine), by Linda Trichter Metcalf and Simon Tobin. And on the much-debated topic of whether having children really makes you happy, you’ll read no more absorbing journalistic treatment of the research than Jennifer Senior’s New York magazine article ‘All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting’, at nymag.com/news/features/67024.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett’s funny short book on the benefits of paying attention – and much else besides – is available in full online at gutenberg.org/etext/2274. For more on the psychological benefits of nature, it’s worth going back to the source, Henry David Thoreau’s highly readable Walden (Oxford, or many other editions). Mark Coleman’s Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path to Self-Discovery (New World Library) puts a more explicitly Buddhist spin on similar ideas. But forget books; may I recommend going for a walk?
Loneliness and solitude – and the very significant differences between them – are explored in John Cacioppo’s Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (Norton), as well as in Anthony Storr’s Solitude (Flamingo) and Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto (Avalon) by Anneli Rufus. Emily White’s Lonely: A Memoir (HarperCollins) is a surprisingly gripping mixture of personal history and psychological research. Perhaps the most intriguing web resource on the joys of solitude, meanwhile, is hermitary.com, a collection of writings and links on eremitism, or life as a hermit: deeply refreshing reading, even if you have no imminent plans to relocate to a cave.
If only because of its longevity and popularity, Dale Carnegie’s original book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (Vermilion) repays reading; many smart and non-gullible people claim they’ve found much of value in it, even if I didn’t. On the ‘fundamental attribution error’ – how we blame other people’s personalities for their behaviour while finding situational excuses for our own – see Eliezer Yudkowsky’s posting at overcomingbias.com/2007/06/correspondence.html, as well as a charming personal account of the problem by the Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert entitled ‘Speeding with Ned’, in PDF form at wjh. harvard edu/~dtg/SpeedingwithNed.pdf. Andrea Donderi’s original posting on askers and guessers is at ask.metafilter.com/55153/whats-the-middle-ground-between-fu-and-welcome# 830421. (A columnist for The New Republic makes his feelings on this subject very clear at tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/ask-dont-guess.) The Psychology Today blog ‘The Science of Small Talk’, at psychologytoday.com/blog/science-small-talk, collects research on many other seemingly minor, but in fact ridiculously stress-inducing, aspects of day-to-day social interaction.
Russell Davies’s blog post on how to be interesting is at russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2006/11/how_to_be_inter. html, while Mark Edmundson’s essay on the curse of bores, especially in academia, is at theamericanscholar.org/enough-already. (Good conversation, he argues, should resemble a tennis game, whereas ‘to the bore a conversation is like a tennis game where he gathers up all the balls from the court and begins hitting them at you as hard and fast as possible’.) The most accessible collection of research on the science of romantic compatibility, meanwhile, is Tara Parker-Pope’s book For Better (For Worse): The Science of a Good Marriage (Vermilion); Po Bronson’s Why Do I Love These People (Vintage) is a moving interview-based book on marriage, children, and family life in general. The strange irrationalities of sexual attraction and romantic relationships is also one of the favourite topics of the indefatigable psychology-blogger Eric Barker, at bakadesuyo.com or on Twitter as @bakadesuyo.
The so-called Ben Franklin effect is far from Franklin’s only contribution to the topics of psychology, personal development and productivity: you can’t help feeling he’d have been entirely at home browsing a modern-day bookstore’s ‘popular psychology’ section. A good blog post on Franklin and happiness, with a link to the full text of his Autobiography, is at 43folders.com/2005/09/01/ben-franklin-keeper-of-his-own-permanent-record.
Stan James’s posting on how quasi-friends can make you feel bad, because you only hear the highlights of their lives, is called ‘Facebook Acquaintances the New TV Stars’, and is at wanderingstan.com/2010-07-22/facebook-acquaintances-the-new-tv-stars. A post by Ben Casnocha at ben.casnocha.com/2006/07/personal_blogs_.html makes a similar point, but from a more positive angle: if you’ve already decided that you’re going to blog about, or otherwise broadcast, an experience in advance, does that make you more likely consciously to make it an enjoyable one?
The management philosophy of Craiglists’s Jim Buckmaster – including his absolutist rejection of the whole idea of meetings – is summarised in a profile by the Financial Times journalist Lucy Kellaway, reprinted on Craigslist’s website at sfbay.craigslist.org/about/press/ft.lucy. (Another of his mottoes: Put speed over perfection. ‘Get something out there. Do it, even if it isn’t perfect.’) Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson’s book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (Portfolio) pushes the idea further, and will provide good ammunition if you’re planning to negotiate a work-from-home agreement with your employer. If you manage other people, though, its vision of a ‘results-only work environment’ may prove challenging reading: would you be willing to sacrifice every measure of your workers’ performance – their presence at meetings, their time of arrival at their desk in the morning – if it meant they’d do their jobs better? For a similarly radical rethinking of how work life is structured, see The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working (Simon & Schuster) by Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy, and its accompanying website theenergyproject.com.
One of the studies on interruptions at work that ignited the current new interest in the topic was carried out by researchers at Microsoft; it’s a fairly easy read and is downloadable in PDF form at research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/taskdiary. pdf. Jason Fried, a founder of the innovative software company 37 Signals, offers his thoughts on how the modern workplace is ‘optimised for interruptions’ – and what to do about it – in a video interview at bigthink.com/ideas/18522.
It’s frustratingly hard to track down copies of C. Northcote Parkinson’s original book Parkinson’s Law or The Pursuit of Progress (Penguin), which contains his law of triviality – also known as the ‘colour of the bike shed’ effect – as well as the better-known observation about work expanding to fill the time available, and many others. But it’s worth trying to find: Parkinson’s pithy analyses of the irrationalities of organisational life remain as pertinent today as ever. Another good insight: ‘The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.’
What Do I Do When I Want to Do Everything? (Rodale, also published as Refuse to Choose), Barbara Sher’s monumentally reassuring book on why it’s OK to be a generalist rather than a specialist, is one of several admirably sane works she’s written on the topic of careers. Another is I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (Bantam), while her website, barbarasher.com, includes large amounts of free material and a lively discussion forum.
Unlike Parkinson’s Law, Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull’s The Peter Principle – which sets out Peter’s satirical-yet-accurate theories on incompetence in business life – is easily available, published in editions by HarperBusiness and Souvenir Press. The Dunning–Kruger effect, whereby the most incompetent people most over-rate their competence because they’re too useless to realise how useless they are, has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity recently. One great analysis, including an interview with David Dunning, is in a post by the filmmaker Errol Morris, at opinionator. blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1. It includes the tale of the bank robber who was mystified to be caught via security camera footage, because he’d smeared lemon juice on his face. And everyone knows lemon juice makes you invisible to security cameras … right? If he was too stupid to be a bank robber, Morris writes, ‘perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber’.
Over the last few decades, so many books on productivity have been published that there’s a major risk of spending so much time exploring them that you never get around to doing anything. The huge growth of productivity blogs and ‘lifehacking’ websites over the last few years has rendered this problem many times worse. If you consider yourself addicted to such books, please read Merlin Mann’s tirade against ‘productivity tips’, at 43folders.com/2008/12/03/real-advice-hurts, then go and do some work.
If you’re still here, perhaps because you’re beset by procrastination, a crucial book to read is The Now Habit (Wiley) by Neil Fiore. His methods for short-circuiting the problem focus on building a schedule that includes plenty of high-quality leisure time. Our efforts to force ourselves to do more and more work, he argues, are counterproductive, because we rebel against them; far better to guarantee ourselves plenty of time off, then fit work into the small, unintimidating slots that remain. (Fiore’s advice is aimed at students, and harder to implement if you’re employed, but the principle is still worth grasping.) John Perry’s sardonic essay ‘Structured Procrastination’, at structuredprocrastination.com, explains how to use procrastination to your advantage, echoing Robert Benchley’s venerable advice in ‘How to Get Things Done’, online at hackvan.com/etext/how-to-get-things-done-despite-procrastination.txt. ‘Anyone can do any amount of work,’ Benchley points out, ‘provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.’
Email management is only one of many topics addressed in David Allen’s Getting Things Done (Piatkus), a work that has become the bible of a new generation of productivity obsessives. The full ‘GTD’ productivity system can get complicated, but its underlying philosophy can be adopted more simply. Much stress, Allen theorises, results from our brains being poor storage mechanisms for remembering everything on our plates, and from our failing to clarify exactly what we need to do next. By storing lists of ‘next actions’ in a single ‘trusted system’, outside our heads, he says, it’s possible to achieve a ‘mind like water’. Harvard Business School also offers detailed advice on email management at hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4438.html. Implementing Allen’s GTD system is one way to overhaul your to-do list, but there are many others, several of them on the website of Mark Forster at markforster. net. His ultra-simple Autofocus system – utilising the concept of the ‘closed list’ – is at markforster. net/blog/2009/1/6/autofocus-system-instructions.html.
The notion that creativity thrives on constraint is one of several aspects of how to have ideas addressed in Scott Berkun’s book The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly Media), and in ‘Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity’, a showcase of inventions in Wired magazine at wired.com/culture/design/magazine/17-03/dp_intro. And if you’re intent on becoming an early riser, Steve Pavlina’s perhaps overly detailed guide is in two parts at stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser and stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser-part-ii. Leo Babauta, who says he gets up at 4.30 a.m. – I’ve no reason to disbelieve him – offers his thoughts on the matter at zenhabits. net/10-benefits-of-rising-early-and-how-to-do-it. To compare your habits with history’s greatest artists and writers, see the addictive blog Daily Routines at dailyroutines.typepad.com. Structure your day, down to the minute, exactly like that of Saul Bellow or Simone de Beauvoir, and who knows what greatness might result? Or not.
The cognitive biases and other mental phenomena discussed throughout this chapter are covered by two excellent UK-based blogs, Mind Hacks (mindhacks.com) and PsyBlog (spring.org.uk), as well as in Dan Ariely’s two books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality (both published by HarperCollins).
There are countless books and websites promising to tell you how to remember things, but one of the most interesting is Piotr Wozniak’s SuperMemo (supermemo.com), which promotes a method of memorisation that exploits the principle of ‘spaced repetition’. According to this notion, the best time to embed something deeply in your brain is when you’re on the verge of forgetting it; SuperMemo is designed to present you with the material you’re trying to remember at exactly that optimum point. It’s available as a computer program, but there are instructions for how to do it with paper and pen, too. It’s particularly useful for language learners.
A good primer on the psychology of money is entitled, appropriately enough The Psychology of Money (Routledge), by Adrian Furnham and Michael Argyle, while there’s a detailed summary of the research into our irrational attitudes to cash, along with many links to studies, at spring.org.uk/2008/03/whistlestop-tour-of-research-on.php. The American economist Tyler Cowen’s book Discover Your Inner Economist (Plume) examines many money-related conundrums – why, for example, your children might be less likely to do chores around the house if you pay them – while also applying economic thinking to non-financial daily life. For much more of that latter approach, see Tim Harford’s extremely readable books The Undercover Economist and Dear Undercover Economist (both published by Abacus).
Paul Thagard’s definitive paper on whether to trust your brain or your gut is available online at cogsci. uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/how-to-decide.html, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (Penguin) is the definitive popular study of both the promise and the dangers of intuitive decision-making. Dan Ariely gives a short talk at the TED conference on related issues – and on the alarming question of whether we can truly be said to be in charge of our own decisions at all – at ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html.
Marti Laney’s book The Introvert Advantage (Workman) has been joined more recently by Laurie Helgoe’s Introvert Power (Sourcebooks) in the field of reassuring, research-based reads on the upsides of being an introvert; many introverts have also sought, and usually received, wise advice from the contributors to the website Ask Metafilter at ask.metafilter.com/tags/introvert. Sophia Dembling runs an introvert-specific blog with the arguably highly appropriate title The Introvert’s Corner at psychologytoday.com/blog/the-introverts-corner.
Robert Cialdini’s Influence (Harper Business) is an almost too fascinating manual on the dark arts of persuasion, rounding up a huge amount of research on everything from the Jonestown Massacre to the secret persuasion techniques of car salesmen, with plenty of Machiavellian humour. It feels as if it ought to come with a warning not to use its powers for evil.
The always thorny challenge of how to break bad habits – and how to inculcate new and better ones – is one of the favourite topics of personal development bloggers and speakers everywhere, but the quality of their advice varies wildly; one of the best online resources is My Bad Habits, the blog of the Canadian academic Ian Newby-Clark (my-bad-habits.blogspot.com). Although it may be a myth that it takes 28 days to develop a new habit, there’s also much to be said for the ‘30-day trial technique’, recommended by Steve Pavlina at stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success. Committing to a new behaviour for 30 days may be overkill for some habits and insufficient for others, but it works well as a motivator: it represents a sizeable chunk of time – enough to notice a real difference, if your plan is, say, to exercise more or to get enough sleep – yet remains essentially unintimidating. Deciding to stop eating junk food for the rest of your life may be a hard idea to get your head around. Deciding to do it for 30 days, knowing you’ll be free to revert to your old ways after that if you choose, is much more manageable.
The new frugality movement is centred on several popular blogs, including getrichslowly.org, thesimpledollar.com, and frugal.families.com, but owes much of its modern-day popularity to the 1992 book Your Money or Your Life (Penguin), by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (not to be confused with other books of the same title). Rather than urging strict budgeting and self-denial, Dominguez and Robin encourage you to see your spending as an expenditure of ‘life energy’ – the time and effort involved in working to amass money in the first place – and therefore to realise that spending less, and quite possibly working less, may be the path to a more enjoyable and more leisure-filled life.
The always-connected, information-overloaded society that prompts some people to recommend going on a news diet is usually seen as a modern phenomenon. But as William Powers shows in his entertaining book Hamlet’s BlackBerry (Harper), the idea that we might need to manage, consciously, the daily onrush of information is one that has concerned philosophers and scholars for centuries. Powers offers, in the words of his book’s subtitle, ‘a practical philosophy for building a good life in the digital age’.
E.M. Cioran’s unconventional views on insomnia are discussed at length in Gordon Marino’s essay ‘Counting the “Blessings” of Insomnia’, at opinionator. blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/counting-the-blessings-of-insomnia. For more practical advice, it’s worth tracking down Lawrence Epstein’s The Harvard Medical School Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep (McGraw-Hill), while Sara Mednick’s book Take a Nap! Change Your Life (Workman) makes the case for Winston Churchill-style midday sleep catchups. It comes with a moveable ‘nap wheel’ on the cover, designed to help you calculate when best to grab a few minutes’ rest on the sofa, or under your desk, for maximum effectiveness.
Doug Dyment’s website onebag.com remains the (slightly obsessive) ultimate source on travelling light, while the equally irrepressible Tim Ferriss has a video tutorial entitled ‘How to Travel the World With 10lbs or Less’ at fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/07/11. Travellers share their tips at http://www.ricksteves.com/graffiti/graffiti82.html, while a US-published book, Judith Gilford’s The Packing Book: Secrets of the Carry-On Traveler (Ten Speed) offers many more pieces of advice. If you buy it, though, be sure to digest its wisdom and then leave it at home, or you’ll make your bag heavier, not lighter.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a controversial system that claims to offer a ‘revolutionary’ approach to almost every aspect of human interaction, the world of neuro-linguistic programming has splintered into a feuding cacophony of rival organisations and experts, but there are some saner voices to be heard amid the noise. A widely respected introductory book is NLP: The New Technology of Achievement (Nicholas Brealey), edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner, while there’s plenty of level-headed material on the website of NLP School Europe at nlpschooleurope.com. George Miller’s celebrated (and funny) paper on the strange ubiquity of the number seven, entitled ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information’ is available online at psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller.
Alan Watts’s autobiography In My Own Way (New World Library), though hardly a neutral source on Watts’s own life, is excellent on the subject of gurus and fraudsters, and the perhaps unavoidably blurred line between the two. Anthony Storr’s Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus (HarperCollins) identifies intriguing commonalities among history’s high-profile gurus, from Gurdjieff, Freud and Jung to the likes of the messianic cult leader David Koresh. For a significantly more easygoing account of life among the gurus, see Mick Brown’s The Spiritual Tourist (Bloomsbury).
The surprisingly deep insight contained in the old cliché ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is explored at length in Barry Magid’s book Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide (Wisdom); it’s aimed primarily at Buddhist meditation students, but don’t let that put you off. There’s an interview with Magid at sweepingzen.com/2009/12/25/barry-magid-interview.
The idea that it’s more beneficial to focus on process rather than outcome is one of the key messages of John Eliot’s book Overachievement (Portfolio), which applies the lessons of sports science to performance in all areas of life. It’s also an implicit message throughout The Power of Full Engagement (Free Press), by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, which seeks to replace the notion of ‘time management’ with ‘energy management’. The Japanese industrial strategy of kaizen – which focuses on continual improvements in process rather than an unrelenting fixation on goals and outcomes – is relevant here, too; a book that applies its principles beyond management to daily life and personal psychology is Robert Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way (Workman).
Robert Anton Wilson’s characteristically wild-eyed but still highly thought-provoking essay on E-prime, or writing without using the verb ‘to be’, from his book Quantum Psychology (New Falcon), is available at rawilson.com/quantum.html. And on the topic of embracing imperfection, see the essay ‘The Elegance of Imperfection’, by David Sherwin, at alistapart.com/articles/the-elegance-of-imperfection – it’s explicitly about designing websites, but it’s also really about designing life. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi, in particular, is explored in ‘Wabi-Sabi: The Art of Imperfection’, at utne.com/2001-09-01/Wabi-Sabi.aspx. ‘Wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness,’ the author writes. ‘[It] reminds us that we are all transient beings on this planet – that our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust.’