Hello friends! As you know, I’ve been tired lately, and I even talked about how I think I’ve piled too much on my plate. This is a bit of a recurrent topic for me, so I’ve been doing some reading on what I can do about it, and today I want to share five book recommendations that I’ve found helpful in slowing down and refocusing.

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

I read Newport’s other book, Deep Work, back in 2019 and liked it enough that Slow Productivity was on my TBR list. The books are similar in that Newport is arguing for quality over quantity, and in Slow Productivity, he advocates three principles:

1. Do Fewer Things
2. Work at a Natural Pace
3. Obsess over Quality

All this may sound a bit obvious on the surface, but I think he provides quite a lot of actionable suggestions as well. Not a lot of it works for me, unfortunately, since my job is tied to manufacturing (and Newport acknowledges that this book is more for knowledge workers than other types of jobs), but there’s enough here that I felt could be applied for my hobbies. One quote that I liked:

“There is a calibrated steadiness to working on just one major initiative a day. Real progress accrues, while anxiety is subdued. The pace might seem slow in the moment, but zooming out to consider the results that eventually accrue over many months reveals the narrowness of this concern.”

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

If you need more actionable steps, I thought Designing Your Life provides a detailed blueprint. I really liked the idea of assessing the activities you do and how engaged you are and if it brings you energy or drains energy, and to what extent, and to use that to brainstorm how to craft a life that works for you. This is just the first part; after you’ve ideated, the book does bring you through how you could prototype and test ways to change your life.

A quote I liked:

“A well-designed life is a life that makes sense. It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe in, and what you do all line up together.”

Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Alyn Brewer

I read this a while back but it has stuck with me. The previous two books talk more about refocusing, in both broad and practical ways, but as someone whose mind tends to race, I also need to learn to slow down and stop ruminating. I did practice some of the three gears that Brewer talked about in the book and found it helpful but have fallen out of the habit – clearly that means it’s time for me to go back.

Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren

Speaking of slowing down, I found Liturgy of the Ordinary a book that speaks to the beauty of the mundane moments of the every day. It’s very easy for me to pass my life unthinking, just getting by day after day, but Warren suffices the whole day with faith and makes a beautiful case for why it’s important to have beauty and space in our every day routine. It was after reading this that I started the habit of making my bed and starting my day with an audio devotional, and I definitely benefitted from not scrolling on my phone first thing.

A quote I liked:

“As busy, practical, hurried, and distracted people, we develop habits of inattention and miss these tiny theophanies in our day. But if we were fully alive and whole, no pleasure would be too ordinary or commonplace to stir up adoration.’”

I managed to snag a copy of this book for Black Friday and just finished rereading this. This hard copy comes with reflection questions and suggested practices and I see myself returning to the book frequently to think through the questions and get suggestions on how to adjust my daily habits.

How to Inhabit Time by James K.A. Smith

Where Liturgy of the Ordinary zooms in on the practices of daily life, How to Inhabit Time zooms out to remind the reader that we are temporal beings and that is not a bad thing. This is the second Christian book on this list, and another book I’m planning to reread this month because it helps remind me of how much more there is to life. As someone who has always tried to preserve the past – either through blogposts or just through a lot of pictures – this book has helped remind me that everything exists for a season and that itself is beautiful.

A quote I liked:

“Letting the season take the time it demands can sometimes be gruelling and doesn’t immediately translate into rejuvenation. Sometimes what is required of us is to pass through a season of reckoning, including reclining with our own (collective) sins and failtures. To give ourselves over to such a season – to focus on what it demands – meants not to rush to resolve it or escape but to endure, undergo, let go of what needs to be taken from us.”

What Now?

I am slowly doing the practices in Designing Your Life as I reread How to Inhabit Time and Liturgy of the Ordinary, but I suspect that 2025 will be similar to 2024 in that I’ll not be around the blog as much. There is much to do at work and in my personal life, and if I have spare time, I would like to spend it practicing writing. Writing not just for regular posting, but also to create something that makes me satisfied.

Of course, knowing me, I will have blog post ideas that I end up writing (for example, I recently thought of writing about what happened when I stopped publishing and marketing my fiction completely), so I won’t be gone completely like I was at the start of this year. At the very least, I would like to share on how this journey to slow down and refocus goes, and I also hope to be visiting everyone at their blogs!