Self-Help Books That Actually Helped
From organization to moral philosophy, the genre contains multitudes.
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Oh, the promise of a self-help book! It’s almost as compelling as the belief that your life will finally be on track if you can just find that one perfect notebook. In the last 15 years or so, I’ve read a lot of ~lifestyle nonfiction—books on self-help, organization, business & leadership, personal growth, etc. When you read widely in these genres, you come to recognize a few core truths: 1) most of them could have been a TED talk or longread instead of a 300-page homework assignment; and 2) you’re lucky if you walk away with one or two useful nuggets.
It’s the rare self-help book that actually earns its page count and delivers on the guarantee to change your whole game. In my reading life, there have been maybe a dozen of these golden moments. Here are some of the highlights. And if you’re into this kind of thing, I hope you’ll join me over at
!Let’s get into it, and please shout out your favorites in the comments. Self-help reading is so personal, and what sticks is different for all of us, it’s fun to pass the recs around.
Getting Things Done by David Allen
This was the first business/self-help book I read in the early days of Book Riot, when there were a million pieces flying around all the time and it became painfully clear that my handwritten to-do list could not keep up. Allen’s detailed model for how to organize recurring tasks revolutionized my working life and kicked off a years-long love affair with the Omnifocus app.
As Terry Tempest Williams puts it, “Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.”
As my days have become less oriented around what we call “worky work” and more about bigger picture projects and decisions, I’ve relied less on the specifics of the model, but there are general principles—write everything down; if it will take two minutes or less, do that task that just popped up right now—I continue to draw on and expect I will for the rest of my career. The one glaring weakness of the GTD method is that it was developed when most knowledge work still happened in-person and on paper, but the 2016 edition incorporates some adaptations for digital-first work environments. Allen has a new book about team productivity coming in May, and I’ll be reading it with great interest.
Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi
You’ve heard this song before. The great thing about having a computer in your pocket is that the answer to just about any question is literally at your fingertips; and the terrible thing about having a computer in your pocket is that…the answer to just about any question is literally at your fingertips. Technology gives us incredible tools and access, and it also gives us purposefully addictive ways to avoid even a single moment of boredom.
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