Book Review, Rework
It can’t be wise to say that I went for a walk last week or last month and hence I don’t need to walk this week. Physical training is needed on an ongoing basis to maintain a healthy body . Similarly, mind needs constant reminders, nudges, bouts of inspiration and positive signals to be effective.
Why should you read this book?
Rework does for your brain, exactly what physical activity does for your body. It’s a collection of seemingly simple yet powerful ideas, drawn from experience. Some of these reminders are counter intuitive and don’t really fit with a lot of other advice available in management books. That makes this book at worthy and an exciting read.
Content Summary (271 pages)
The 12 sections in this book focus on topics like Progress, Productivity, Culture, Hiring, Promotion etc. Each section contains a 1 or 2 pager on powerful ideas and learnings drawn from authors’ experience of running a successful organization named 37signals.
Simpilicity and ease of reading, are the most delightful aspects of this book. It’s pacy and it was hard to put it down. The ideas aren’t too prescriptive but provoke thoughts. At several instances, the book highlights the importance of frugality in running business – hiring resources, building features in product, investing money in promotions and meetings at work. All these concepts are basically subjected to high pressure thinking here and the authors challenge the notion if businesses really need to do all this to succeed.
Inspiration
Personally, I related to the call out that ‘Inspiration is perishable’. That means, if you feel inspired to do something about an idea you have – do that right away till inspirations lasts. Inspiration can help you achieve a lot more in a lot less time and the chances of getting things done become bleak once the inpsiration fades. I liked this idea as it so true for me and in fact, applies a lot to my writing as well.
A few similar nuggests of wisdom which helped me reflect and act:
a) Start making something emphasis Action over ideation
b) In the section on Progress, Embrace Constraints resonated with me. Interestingly, authors cite that prisoners find innovative ways to plan escape from prison while they are constrained for resources.
c) Interruption is the enemy of productivity is a solid reminder. It made me think of pomodoro technique yet again. (read about pomodoro technique here)
d) My favorite, you can only build on top of decisions which are taken already and not on top of ‘thinking/yet to decide’.
Recommendation
I found this a very useful read. As a reminder for a few interesting concepts that were lost in my sub-conscious and for a few inspiring concepts which I didn’t think about before this. It took me a cumulative 3-4 hours of time to complete reading this book. While it inclines towards organizations however I found many key take aways for myself as a professional. If you are looking for some refreshing thoughts, this could be a good book to pick up. Happy Reading, Cheers!
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