Koncocoo

Best Time Management

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
The new expanded edition of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek includes: • More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point. • Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating e-mail, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than $8 a meal. • How Lifestyle Design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times. • The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either. “Timothy has packed more lives into his 29 years than Steve Jobs has in his 51.”. —Tom Foremski, Journalist and Publisher of SiliconValleyWatcher.com. —Mike Maples, Co-founder of Motive Communications (IPO to $260M market cap), Founding Executive of Tivoli (sold to IBM for $750M). I've already used his advice to go spearfishing on remote islands and ski the best hidden slopes of Argentina. Tim Ferriss is a master of getting more for less, often with the help of people he doesn't even know, and here he gives away his secrets for fulfilling your dreams.”. —Bo Burlingham, Editor-at-Large, Inc. magazine and author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big. —Michael D. Kerlin, McKinsey & Company Consultant to Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund and J. William Fulbright Scholar. Small and mid-sized firms, as well as busy professionals, can outsource their work to increase their productivity and free time for more important commitments. " The 4-Hour Workweek is an absolute necessity for those adventurous souls who want to live life to its fullest. —Laura Roden, Chairman of the Silicon Valley Association of Start-up Entrepreneurs;Lecturer in Corporate Finance, San Jose State University. “With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal work week.”. —Tim Draper, Founder, Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Financiers to innovators including Hotmail, Skype, and Overture.com. "Tim Ferriss’s book is about gaining the courage to streamline your life… But even more than that, it challenges the reader to seriously consider an essential–yet rarely asked–question: What do you really want from life?"
Reviews
"Don't get me wrong, Ferriss makes some excellent points and he's got some really great tips and tricks in here, I'm just not sure how universal they really are. I thought he was just talking about ways to spend less time working, but that "The 4-Hour" just sounded good (since he now has a whole line of books with titles that start that way). I never did understand the point of retirement, so Ferriss's plan sounds much more appealing to me. Granted, that would make my job a whole lot more portable, but I could never get away with only working four hours per week (at least not until after I sell that bestselling novel, which is such a realistic plan!). I, too, thought I could get another job within a few months, but that did not turn out to be the case. So, if I go spend all my money on a mini-retirement now, and then come back only to find that I can't get a job for another year, I'll be screwed. I love them, but they have enough to deal with right now, and the last thing I want to do is burden the people around me because I decided to go globe-trotting for a few months."
"Practicing the book context for over 2 months now."
"First edition was easier to read."
"Mostly conceptual with a few chapters of application, this book introduced me to mind blowing concepts (automated business, outsourcing and traveling inexpensive etc.)."
"With that said, the book does outline some good strategies to get through the workday quickly and enjoy more time with your family."
"Seriously, he begins by admitting he first made his fortune selling (allegedly) nutritional supplements that cost almost nothing to make and weren't based on science, but were then hyped to the point the uninformed public was paying through the nose to get it. This gave him ideas on how to further hype his message to an even larger audience, without bothering to sell anything tangible. He then gives advice about "paraphrasing and combining points from several books," borrowing from the public domain, and/or compensating some other "expert." Apparently, not knowing a damn thing is a virtue he calls "Cultivating Selective Ignorance." If having an educated and well-informed populace is fundamental to having a flourishing democracy, this is how we'll end up with a plutocracy where the stupidest few prey on the desperate and stupid masses, while outsourcing all the jobs they might create. Outsource everything -- including your brain -- to a 3rd World Country: He hires virtual assistants in various 3rd World Countries, especially India, who are then given fabulous access to all of his personal information to the point they can pretend to be him and make all of his personal and business decisions. Hey, what could possibly go wrong by hiring complete strangers and giving them all information about you in order to think for you, do your work and run your errands? Just tell him you're too busy and further kill morale by then asking those other suckers - aka, co-workers - for a quick breakdown of what happened."
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Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories -- from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air -- and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. "DEEP WORK accomplishes two considerable tasks: One is putting out a wealth of concrete practices for the ambitious, without relying on gauzy clichés. Cal Newport's exciting new book is an introduction and guide to the kind of intense concentration in a distraction-free environment that results in fast, powerful learning and performance. "DEEP WORK makes a compelling case for cultivating intense focus, and offers immediately actionable steps for infusing more of it into our lives. "Cal Newport is a clear voice in a sea of noise, bringing science and passion in equal measure. "Cal Newport offers the most well-informed and astute collection of practical advice I have seen for reclaiming one's mental powers.
Reviews
"Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion. …The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. … the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach. Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning— no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, …trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown. 13. for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours— but rarely more. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks."
"Deep Work is the execution/tactical companion to Newport's last book, So Good They Can't Ignore You and it doesn't disappoint. -However, these are usually also things that you need to trade in your career capital (rare skills and experience using them) in order to maximize. So Good They Can't Ignore You doesn't spend much time explaining how to actually implement deep work (deliberate practice) into you life. It tells you to focus deeply, stretch yourself cognitively and get constant high quality feedback on your work/output. If you have already bought into the idea, you can skim this part, but I found the examples and people he featured to be very interesting so it's worth a read. Newport lays out an interesting theory for 3 types of workers, Superstars, Owners and High Skill Workers and makes a convincing and important argument for the importance in the future of being able to work at higher levels of abstraction and work with intelligent machines. Meaning is a key part of Newport's argument because the whole book links back to the Passion vs. Rare Skills debate…which is a better strategy for finding a job you love? Newport give 3 theories on why deep work is meaningful, a psychological, neurological and a philosophical reason. Rule 1 gives you a bunch of strategies and examples of how to integrate deep work into your schedule. The Grand Gestures part of this chapter is really good, you learn about Bill Gates Think Week and same famous authors who go to secluded islands or build cabins to get a lot of deep work done when necessary. Newport gives a number of strategies for doing two important things: improving your ability to focus and eliminating your desire for distraction. This rule isn't as strategic as the other ones, it's mostly about making a side argument that these networking sites aren't as important is you think they are."
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Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER Have you ever felt the urge to declutter your work life? By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy – instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. He can’t tell you what’s essential to every life, but he can help you find the meaning in yours.”. -- Daniel H. Pink, author of TO SELL IS HUMAN and DRIVE “Entrepreneurs succeed when they say "yes" to the right project, at the right time, in the right way. Essentialism offers concise and eloquent advice on how to determine what you care about most, and how to apply your energies in ways that ultimately bring you the greatest rewards.” -- Reid Hoffman, co-founder/chairman of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 NYT bestseller “The Start-up of You”. If you want to work better, not just less , you should read it too.” - Chris Guillebeau, NYT bestselling author of The $100 Startup "Great design takes us beyond the complex, the unnecessary and confusing, to the simple, clear and meaningful. -Jeff Weiner, ‎CEO, LinkedIn "While everyone else is still leafing through Lean In or Outliers , get a competitive jump on the new year with....Essentialism... learn how to identify the right things, focus on getting them done, and forget the rest. Read Greg McKeown’s words slowly, stop and think about how to apply them to your life – you will do less, do it better, and begin to feel the insanity start to slip away.” - Robert I. Sutton, Professor at Stanford University and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and Scaling Up Excellence. Greg offers deep insights, rich context and actionable steps to living life at its fullest. "In this likeable and astute treatise on the art of doing less in order to do better...McKeown makes the content fresh and the solutions easy to implement.
Reviews
"It talks in a very clear and straightforward manner about how to simplify your life, your thinking, and your purpose to cut out all the extraneous "stuff" that continually distracts us and focus in on what's really important. I felt like it was a great use of time, it had a lot of important things to say, and it was concise in how it said it."
"The slight twist here is that rather than the material, the author ignores possessions and instead concentrates on tasks. Initially the author goes on about how busy people often don't get that much done because they are distracted by unimportant tasks impeding their work on vital tasks by being distractions. Finally, in the last maybe 30% of the book, the author branches off a bit into what an 'essentialist' is verus a 'non-essentialist' the latter is one who is still clogged up with unimportant tasks. Overall if the message is new to you, then the book is very worthwhile reading, but for most of us, we know this stuff and we're either doing it or finding some roadblock to being able to do it."
"It was because I was using every fragment of my time possible without realizing there is only more time slicing to come."
"This books is written for someone that wants to make a meaningful improvement in life choices. The book walks you through the principle of "Essentialism" - knowingly choosing a few things to focus on in life to have more impact and a better life."
"I am a business consultant and leadership development coach and I recommend this book to anyone who sees the inane folly of chasing so much and achieving so little (really) but hasn't stopped the insanity just yet. So if you have seen the insanity of the matrix in which most of us work, and you want some motivation and a simple, solid but high level construct, I recommend you read this book."
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Best Personal Time Management

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories -- from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air -- and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. "DEEP WORK accomplishes two considerable tasks: One is putting out a wealth of concrete practices for the ambitious, without relying on gauzy clichés. Cal Newport's exciting new book is an introduction and guide to the kind of intense concentration in a distraction-free environment that results in fast, powerful learning and performance. "DEEP WORK makes a compelling case for cultivating intense focus, and offers immediately actionable steps for infusing more of it into our lives. "Cal Newport is a clear voice in a sea of noise, bringing science and passion in equal measure. "Cal Newport offers the most well-informed and astute collection of practical advice I have seen for reclaiming one's mental powers.
Reviews
"Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion. …The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. … the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach. Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning— no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, …trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown. 13. for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours— but rarely more. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks."
"Deep Work is the execution/tactical companion to Newport's last book, So Good They Can't Ignore You and it doesn't disappoint. -However, these are usually also things that you need to trade in your career capital (rare skills and experience using them) in order to maximize. So Good They Can't Ignore You doesn't spend much time explaining how to actually implement deep work (deliberate practice) into you life. It tells you to focus deeply, stretch yourself cognitively and get constant high quality feedback on your work/output. If you have already bought into the idea, you can skim this part, but I found the examples and people he featured to be very interesting so it's worth a read. Newport lays out an interesting theory for 3 types of workers, Superstars, Owners and High Skill Workers and makes a convincing and important argument for the importance in the future of being able to work at higher levels of abstraction and work with intelligent machines. Meaning is a key part of Newport's argument because the whole book links back to the Passion vs. Rare Skills debate…which is a better strategy for finding a job you love? Newport give 3 theories on why deep work is meaningful, a psychological, neurological and a philosophical reason. Rule 1 gives you a bunch of strategies and examples of how to integrate deep work into your schedule. The Grand Gestures part of this chapter is really good, you learn about Bill Gates Think Week and same famous authors who go to secluded islands or build cabins to get a lot of deep work done when necessary. Newport gives a number of strategies for doing two important things: improving your ability to focus and eliminating your desire for distraction. This rule isn't as strategic as the other ones, it's mostly about making a side argument that these networking sites aren't as important is you think they are."
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Best Time Management in Business

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. "― New York Times Book Review "DEEP WORK accomplishes two considerable tasks: One is putting out a wealth of concrete practices for the ambitious, without relying on gauzy clichés. Cal Newport's exciting new book is an introduction and guide to the kind of intense concentration in a distraction-free environment that results in fast, powerful learning and performance. "DEEP WORK makes a compelling case for cultivating intense focus, and offers immediately actionable steps for infusing more of it into our lives. "Cal Newport is a clear voice in a sea of noise, bringing science and passion in equal measure. "Cal Newport offers the most well-informed and astute collection of practical advice I have seen for reclaiming one's mental powers. "Deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy: it is only by concentrating intensely that you can master a difficult discipline or solve a demanding problem. "A wonderfully entangled, intertwined, and erudite series of strategies, philosophies, disciplines, and techniques to sharpen your focus and dive deep into your work. Cal Newport, Ph.D., lives in Washington, DC, where he is a writer and an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
Reviews
"Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion. …The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. … the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach. Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning— no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, …trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown. 13. for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours— but rarely more. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand… they’re pretty much mental wrecks."
"Deep Work is the execution/tactical companion to Newport's last book, So Good They Can't Ignore You and it doesn't disappoint. -However, these are usually also things that you need to trade in your career capital (rare skills and experience using them) in order to maximize. So Good They Can't Ignore You doesn't spend much time explaining how to actually implement deep work (deliberate practice) into you life. It tells you to focus deeply, stretch yourself cognitively and get constant high quality feedback on your work/output. If you have already bought into the idea, you can skim this part, but I found the examples and people he featured to be very interesting so it's worth a read. Newport lays out an interesting theory for 3 types of workers, Superstars, Owners and High Skill Workers and makes a convincing and important argument for the importance in the future of being able to work at higher levels of abstraction and work with intelligent machines. Meaning is a key part of Newport's argument because the whole book links back to the Passion vs. Rare Skills debate…which is a better strategy for finding a job you love? Newport give 3 theories on why deep work is meaningful, a psychological, neurological and a philosophical reason. Rule 1 gives you a bunch of strategies and examples of how to integrate deep work into your schedule. The Grand Gestures part of this chapter is really good, you learn about Bill Gates Think Week and same famous authors who go to secluded islands or build cabins to get a lot of deep work done when necessary. Newport gives a number of strategies for doing two important things: improving your ability to focus and eliminating your desire for distraction. This rule isn't as strategic as the other ones, it's mostly about making a side argument that these networking sites aren't as important is you think they are."
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Best Office Management

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich
This new updated and expanded edition includes: More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled their income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point * Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating email, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than GBP5 a meal * How lifestyle design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times * The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either. His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, was one of iTunes's "Best of 2015," typically among the top 30 out of more than 300,000 podcasts.
Reviews
"Don't get me wrong, Ferriss makes some excellent points and he's got some really great tips and tricks in here, I'm just not sure how universal they really are. I thought he was just talking about ways to spend less time working, but that "The 4-Hour" just sounded good (since he now has a whole line of books with titles that start that way). I never did understand the point of retirement, so Ferriss's plan sounds much more appealing to me. Granted, that would make my job a whole lot more portable, but I could never get away with only working four hours per week (at least not until after I sell that bestselling novel, which is such a realistic plan!). I, too, thought I could get another job within a few months, but that did not turn out to be the case. So, if I go spend all my money on a mini-retirement now, and then come back only to find that I can't get a job for another year, I'll be screwed. I love them, but they have enough to deal with right now, and the last thing I want to do is burden the people around me because I decided to go globe-trotting for a few months."
"I was a fan of Tim Ferris before I read this book so my opinion may be a little biased."
"Got me thinking in ways that I wasn't thinking before."
"It's opened my mind to what's possible, and has actionable items to make things happen."
"I've known about this book since its release but have delayed reading for fear of "drinking the Koolaid", falling prey to the wiles of wishful thinking, unintentionally joining a cult, etc."
"Tim ferris shares great ideas that anyone can grab ahold of."
"Seriously, he begins by admitting he first made his fortune selling (allegedly) nutritional supplements that cost almost nothing to make and weren't based on science, but were then hyped to the point the uninformed public was paying through the nose to get it. This gave him ideas on how to further hype his message to an even larger audience, without bothering to sell anything tangible. He then gives advice about "paraphrasing and combining points from several books," borrowing from the public domain, and/or compensating some other "expert." Apparently, not knowing a damn thing is a virtue he calls "Cultivating Selective Ignorance." If having an educated and well-informed populace is fundamental to having a flourishing democracy, this is how we'll end up with a plutocracy where the stupidest few prey on the desperate and stupid masses, while outsourcing all the jobs they might create. Outsource everything -- including your brain -- to a 3rd World Country: He hires virtual assistants in various 3rd World Countries, especially India, who are then given fabulous access to all of his personal information to the point they can pretend to be him and make all of his personal and business decisions. Hey, what could possibly go wrong by hiring complete strangers and giving them all information about you in order to think for you, do your work and run your errands? Just tell him you're too busy and further kill morale by then asking those other suckers - aka, co-workers - for a quick breakdown of what happened."
"Several chapters in, Ferriss recommends that you not be hesitant to walk out of a bad movie or to put down a book you are not enjoying - - so I did."
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Best Business Project Management

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)–Fifth Edition
New Edition coming in 2017.
Reviews
"As a project management instructor and course developer at a state university, a project management keynote speaker, and someone who has been training project managers for nearly two decades, I highly recommend this book. - You will need another book since many exam concepts aren't even covered in the PMBOK. I personally like PMP Exam Prep, Seventh Edition: Rita's Course in a Book for Passing the PMP Exam or CAPM/PMP Project Management Certification All-in-One Exam Guide with CD-ROM, Second Edition. - When submitting project experience on the application, you can submit work even if your title was not Project Manager. ***Update (Sep 2013)***. New editions of the books I linked to above were released: - PMP Exam Prep, Eighth Edition: Rita's Course in a Book for Passing the PMP Exam. - CAPM/PMP Project Management Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Third Edition."
"So, go ahead and buy another book on studying for the PMP exam, but if that book covers any topic(s) that are NOT in THIS BOOK, you are learning content that is irrelevant for this exam. I bought Joseph Phillips study guide, and although it was helpful, there were many terms and content items NOT in the PMBOK guide, and therefore I did not get any questions on the real exam related to those terms/topics. Also, I took 5 practice exams from 3 different sources (one was from the Joseph Phillips CD) which turned out to give me false confidence because the real exam was a LOT harder. I recommend memorizing the 47 processes and being able to write them down in the chart before you take the exam."
"I mean - it's a boring text book, so what is there to love?"
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Best Stress Management Self-Help

Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Most people are fearful of change, both personal and professional, because they don't have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or by the individual, Dr. Spencer Johnson, the coauthor of the multimillion bestseller The One Minute Manager, uses a deceptively simple story to show that when it comes to living in a rapidly changing world, what matters most is your attitude. Called “The King of Parables” by USA Today , Dr. Johnson is often referred to as the best there is at taking complex subjects and presenting simple solutions that work. He has won the National Speakers Association’s highest honor, the “Council of Peers Award for Excellence,” and the Golden Gavel from Toastmasters International, and was inducted into the HRD Hall of Fame.
Reviews
"A good chunk of the book discusses how it's a book, and then spends several pages building up the story to make it more of a book."
"I've read this book before, but thought I'd pick it up again almost 8 years later, especially since recent circumstances in my life have caused me to 'sniff the cheese'."
"This book though a little too repetitive talks about change."
"Opens one's eyes to having to be flexible and have a broader perspective in life to move forward."
"Quick read."
"I ready the adult book previously and this is a good book to teach the same concept to kids."
"Great price and perfect reminder of life's predicaments."
"Everyone should read this book."
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Best Budgeting & Money Management

The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
Hey, if you’re tired of the lies and sick of the false promises, take a look at this—it’s the simplest, most straightforward game plan for completely making over your money habits. Design a sure-fire plan for paying off all debt—meaning cars, houses, everything Recognize the 10 most dangerous money myths (these will kill you) Secure a big, fat nest egg for emergencies and retirement! His seven-step plan includes paying off all debts except the home mortgage at an accelerated speed, creating a financial safety net that covers three to six months' expenses, investing 15 percent of income in a retirement fund, and saving for children's college expenses.
Reviews
"The baby steps are pretty straightforward: Baby Step 1 – $1,000 to start an Emergency Fund - you'll find this way easier than you expect to. Baby Step 3 – 3 to 6 months of expenses in savings. Baby Step 4 – Invest 15% of household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement. Baby Step 5 – College funding for children. Baby Step 6 – Pay off home early. Baby Step 7 – Build wealth and give. The rules are simple: 1) Live and breathe by your budget."
"In 4 months, I paid off my car loan, all credit cards and doctor bills!!!"
"* He lays out his seven Baby Steps and makes them simple to understand. * I really liked the quote, "If you worked for a company called YOU Inc. and you managed money at YOU Inc. the way you manage your own money now, would you fire you?" Dave Ramsey is rich because he is a business owner who can make money from his radio show, books, seminars, programs, etc. It would have been great to get his advice on that, but he probably didn't want to overwhelm the reader with too many topics. College loans can be very appropriate for some people, business loans can be great in the right situation, and his statement that you should put money toward paying down debt rather than getting the company 401(k) match seemed too extreme to me. goals or having an accountability partner, which have been shown to greatly help people achieve all kinds of dreams."
"This book has been adopted for the South African situation, but needs to be extended to other parts of Africa."
"This book is fantastic."
"A must read for all high school and college aged persons."
"If this book doesn’t make you want to change your financial life than you don’t like following simple easy to use steps."
"Just as described and very fast shipping, thank you!!"
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Best Motivational Management & Leadership

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
From the author: “For the last two years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. This unusual depth has helped make The Tim Ferriss Show the first business/interview podcast to pass 100 million downloads. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration. TIM FERRISS has been called “a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk” by The New York Times .
Reviews
"I have hereditary cholesterol problems and my forays into a ketogenic lifestyle dropped my particle count from ~1950 to ~1225. There are many other great things that have come as a result of my exposure to Tim's podcast, too many to list here. This is supposedly a "recipe book" (according to page xvi in the Foreword). A few guests on his podcast have amazing things to say about meditation (Sam Harris, Naval Ravikant, Kevin Rose, etc.). But there is no central place to which you can turn to find out the collected wisdom of the many guests who have delved into this topic. In fact, there's not even one central place in the book that gives a list of the commonalities between the guests. They have the discipline to turn down the good, so that they can pursue (and achieve) the great. It might teach the tactics and routines and habits of world-class performers, but there's FAR TOO MUCH here to make it valuable in showing YOU how to achieve those heights."
"This book suffers from the expectations of his previous work--Tim is honest about presenting "Tools of Titans" as sort of a glimpse of his journals/notes from his life's work, but this book loses nearly everything we've come to expect. It's WebMD with a clouded personality...it's a bit like a bound website without the hyperlinking. He's shown he's capable of completely rethinking a problem or a lifestyle or a way of doing things, and this book isn't like that at all."
"It was worth the price especially after 200+free episodes of the podcast which I enjoy every week."
"Pros- you can open up to any page and find a life lesson. - it has life lessons from over one hundred industry leaders."
"I ordered this book yesterday, and it showed up on my door step today. The book is laid out in a format that is easy to navigate should you want to go back to reference again."
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Best E-mail

Windows 10: The Missing Manual
Windows 10 (a free update to users of Windows 8 or Windows 7) fixes a number of the problems introduced by the revolution in Windows 8 and offers plenty of new features, such as the new Spartan web browser, Cortana voice-activated “personal assistant,” new universal apps (that run on tablet, phone, and computer), and more. David Pogue is the anchor columnist for Yahoo Tech, having been groomed for the position by 13 years as the tech columnist for the New York Times.
Reviews
"I worked Tech Support for years, back in the day when Windows XP was the hot operating system for all schools. Windows Vista had been released towards the end of my tech support tenure, but it was such a resource intensive, buggy mess that the school decided to hold on to XP for a spell longer. The style of writing is conversational, friendly, and funny, making the whole task a lot less intimidating for someone who's unfamiliar with the territory."
"Since my first purchase of a "Missing Manual" title many years ago, O'Reilly has come through with quality books that will help baffled users with both the everyday and arcane tasks their tools perform. Although I have not embraced the Cortana AI voice interface that is a major feature of Windows 10, the book does an excellent job of helping those so inclined how to use it (her?)."
"This book simplifies a very complex and broad subject, Windows 10."
"I have always enjoyed these "Missing Manual" books."
"I would recommend tis reference for any one at any level that's wants to get full usage out of Windows 10 and be able to customize it to their own liking."
"Unlike many of the more elementary manuals for Windows 10, this one not only provided essential guidance for getting started with it, but it filled with tips and examples on how best to customize it and to take advantage of its many new features."
"This really is the missing manual!"
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Best Automotive Insurance

Dot Grid Notebook: 110 Dot Grid pages, (8 x 10) inches (Floral)
Good Quality paper with dot pattern (dots spaced 5mm apart - 1/5 inch).
Reviews
"The paper felt good quality, but my 0.38mm colored markers bled right through."
"The pages were thinner than expected but the journal itself was the perfect size for a beginner like myself."
"Love this, gotten lots of compliments on it too."
"But I'm only giving it 3 stars because I bought it to practice hand lettering and every single brush pen I have (Tombow, Cocoiro, Marvy, Pilot) ghosts so darkly through the paper that only one side of the page is usable."
"Fantastic!"
"I absolutely love this!"
"For the price, this is a winner!"
"I ended up leaving it at home since it's the only place that I can consistently sit at a desk to write."
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Best Knowledge Capital

Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters
Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm. Using simple stories and techniques, Why Simple Wins shows that by using simplicity as an operating principle, we can eliminate the busy work that puts a chokehold on us every day, and instead spend time on the work that we value. Lisa Bodell shows that simplification can be the competitive advantage of our time, helping us to be more innovative, more adaptable, and better positioned to thrive and truly have an impact." Lisa Bodell empowers us to move toward the elegant, delivering practical tools for reducing time wasted on low-value tasks so we can free up energy for innovative thinking." But far from throwing up her hands in despair, Lisa Bodell uses compelling real world stories, eye-popping statistics and practical hands-on tools to show how work itself has become too complex, and how simplifying can help reclaim what's gotten lost: time for work that matters. Lisa Bodell shines a bright light on the single most significant leadership priority of this era. "Lisa Bodell unearths the root of complexity: the fears, need for control, and risk aversion of human beings. In Why Simple Wins Lisa Bodell shines a bright light on how too often we create and collude in the frustrating, time wasting systems we rail against. In doing so, she makes a compelling - and simple - case for making simplification a habit, and she gives us the practical tools to do just that. Lisa Bodell shows that simplification can be the competitive advantage of our time, helping us to be more innovative, more adaptable, and better positioned to thrive and truly have an impact." Lisa Bodell empowers us to move toward the elegant, delivering practical tools for reducing time wasted on low-value tasks so we can free up energy for innovative thinking." But far from throwing up her hands in despair, Lisa Bodell uses compelling real world stories, eye-popping statistics and practical hands-on tools to show how work itself has become too complex, and how simplifying can help reclaim what’s gotten lost: time for work that matters. Lisa Bodell shines a bright light on the single most significant leadership priority of this era. "Lisa Bodell unearths the root of complexity: the fears, need for control, and risk aversion of human beings. In Why Simple Wins Lisa Bodell shines a bright light on how too often we create and collude in the frustrating, time wasting systems we rail against. In doing so, she makes a compelling - and simple - case for making simplification a habit, and she gives us the practical tools to do just that.
Reviews
"Why Simple Wins is an engaging read and terrific primer on simplification by renowned futurist Lisa Bodell. If you are not already aware of the increasing complexity that bedevils every aspect of our modern lives, from work to home life, Lisa’s book will humorously and gently open your eyes to the myriad ways that we and our organizations are our own worst enemies."
"She also delivers in this book some very practical guidelines to help you simplify - A diagnostic tool to help you work out where the complexity problems lie in your organisation, key questions to help you refine your thinking, specific tools to identify and eliminate excess baggage, and even ways to strategically alter your organisation so that you can stay on top of the complexity problem."
"Simplicity is a powerful weapon in business, and as a small business owner I take Lisa's "simplicity mindset" to heart."
"We have lost focus of easy in our quest for quality/speed/cost. In general: Chapter 1-3 = Problem -- Why. Chapter 4-5 = Solution – What. Chapter 6-8 = Process & Tools -- How. A few keys: * Simplify for the SYSTEM benefit -- Sometimes an effectively run, 5-minute stand-up is better than emails / phone / blog / twitter or vica versa. Overall a great, easy read -- I picked up a few new ideas and reinforced the most important ones that get lost in the over-production of other leadership, communication, and change books."
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Best Email Administration

Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud
Examine the pitfalls that organizations fall into when adopting the new generation of infrastructure technologies Understand the capabilities and service models of dynamic infrastructure platforms Learn about tools that provide, provision, and configure core infrastructure resources Explore services and tools for managing a dynamic infrastructure Learn specific patterns and practices for provisioning servers, building server templates, and updating running servers. Kief Morris has been designing, building, and running automated IT server infrastructure for nearly twenty years, having started out with shell scripts and Perl, moving on to CFengine, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible among other technologies as they’ve emerged.
Reviews
"To give an example, the author discusses Code Reviews where he says: "All too often, code reviewing becomes a wasteful activity that doesn't lead to improvements actually being made to code. The author often states opinions like this, but does not back them up by anything but his opinion. Parts in which the author relied on personal experiences and generalizations were not as good."
"This is well-written and provides a good overview of some of the concepts (benefits and high level methods) of defining your infrastructure in text files, but honestly I didn't get anything out of this book."
"After the first few introductory chapters that lay down the basic definitions and context, the author goes on to describe patterns and best practices for building server templates, managing configuration and changes to configuration, as well as the pitfalls you might encounter when you move from a traditional system administration mentality to dynamic, automated "infrastructure as code" perspective. If you're building / managing a dynamic and flexible information system infrastructure in the cloud or on premise, regardless of your particular tool choice for automation, you'll find yourself facing the challenges described in this book, and therefore the outlined patterns will apply to your problems to a great extent."
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Best Microsoft Outlook Guides

Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook
In this new fifth edition, Michael Linenberger updates his longtime #1 bestselling Outlook book to cover Microsoft's new Outlook version 365, which includes desktop Outlook 2016 Windows and Mac (and Window Outlook 2013). Called the “Efficiency Guru” by The Detroit News, Michael Linenberger has been a management consultant and technology professional for more than 20 years.
Reviews
"Getting your tasks under control takes discipline but it's worth it to get them and really your life under control."
"This book is a gem."
"I use Todoist/Gmail/Google Calendar for my personal system, but when I went back to work after 11 years as a SAHM, I was unprepared for the volume of incoming emails & unsure how to manage it all in Outlook without missing something."
"Ideas build on the GTD concept, but this is simpler to manage long term."
"I love Michael's books."
"This book is chock-full of practical wisdom and is written so you can slowly integrate it or dive right in."
"some good information."
"Clearly, it gives you the tools you need to creatively get your work done faster and more efficiently if you follow the process."
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