Previously, previously, previously, etc.

This year I read less than my 52 book goal, reading 45. The best book I read this year is a hard decision, so I'll say top 3 were all by authors that I will likely read more from in 2026 - Claire Keegan, Philip Roth, John McPhee. I'd like to read everything the first and last have written, not so with Roth. I will not elaborate.

• Foster
• The Human Stain
• Oranges

I would also like to point out that I finally finished two books that I bought physical copies of over 10 years ago (!):

• Beautiful Code
• The Artist's Way

All books read in 2025:

• Understanding Distributed Systems
• Gringos
• Advanced Porfolio Management
• Department of Speculation(reread)
• Weather(reread)
• Happy Go Lucky
• The Stench of Honolulu (reread)
• James
• Screwjack
• Laozi's Dao De Jing
• Water, Water
• So Late in the Day
• On the Shortness of Life
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy
• The Unlikely Thru-Hiker: An Appalachian Trail Journey
• ERRORS: bugs, boo-boos, blunders
• Beautiful Code
• A Walk in the Woods
• The Stranger
• The World's Fastest Man
• Meditations for Mortals
• The Artist's Way
• The 12 Hour Walk
• The Human Stain
• The Book of Blam
• I Remember
• Mr Prenumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore
• Will You Be Quiet, Please?: Stories
• Unknown Market Wizards
• Run for the Hills
• I Robot
• Let Them
• The Staff Engineer's Path
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track
• Here
• Tabula Rasa
• Engineering Managment for the Rest of Us
• Kill It With Fire
• Small Things Like These
• Oranges
• Comedy Sex God
• Lullaby
• The White Book
• Will There Ever Be Another You
• Foster

I wrote 25 posts on Bad Software Advice in 2024.

Personal Writing

I wrote in a morning pages style journal 171 days, with varied consistency. For example, I wrote nothing in August of 2024. I wrote a total of 60,331 words in 2024, from a total of 728,977 total since I started this practice in 2010. I've had uneven participation in this practice, but find it helpful when I keep it up.

Project Writing

I wrote the equivalent of 10 pages of The 10x Debugger. Most of my work towards this project was researching and outlining. Much of the year was spent writing fixing actual bugs in software.

Social Media

I wrote 0 social media posts.

Graffiti

I wrote 0 words on public spaces, keeping my 40+ year streak going.

It seems the only thing going on with this blog this year is this post, my annual reading list.

Here are the books I read this year. Not included:

• the 10 books I started and never finished
• any reading I needed to do for school, which seemed to always be chapters in books, without ever finishing a book
• many technical books, which I read only as needed, online, and never finish
• a flurry of books I read to figure out a health issue in my family, which per my Privacy Policy, is none of your business.

The best book I read this year was Lincoln in the Bardo.

All books read

• Same As Ever
• How to Meditate
• The Vanishing Son
• The Aspirational Investor
• REDACTED
• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
• In Persuasion Nation
• Tao Teh Ching
• The Miracle of Mindfulness
• Lincoln in the Bardo
• Tenth of December
• Liberation Day
• Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
• Candy House
• What is ChatGPT and what is it doing?
• Not with a Bug, But with a Sticker
• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
• The Braindead Megaphone
• Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
• Machine Learning
• AI Ethics
• Coming into the Country
• All Fours
• 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
• The Prophet
• REDACTED
• Two Nurses, Smoking
• Train Dreams
• REDACTED
• Earth vs. Everybody
• What Hedge Funds Really Do: An Introduction to Portfolio Management
• Glory Days
• Superintelligence
• REDACTED
• In This Economy?

Almost every year I post what books I have read that year. This serves as a replacement for Goodreads, somehow.

Interestingly I didn't blog here at all last year. Most of my writing was in other places, like a newsletter Bad Software Advice, which is growing in a scary way and honestly is a lot of fun to write.

Anyway, I read some books last year. Ones that I loved have an * next to them are bolded. New authors that I "discovered" in 2023 and will likely read more of:

• George Saunders - have known of him for years but hated the only short story I had read by him, but A Swim in the Pond in the Rain was so good, so lovely, that I'm now working through his short stories from the beginning.
• Kevin Wilson - I think I read his entire catalog in 2023. Holy crap. I wish there was a feature where you can just put an "auto-buy" on any book by a particular author.
• Rich Bragg - starting with an autobiography then reading people's articles is a good way to do things, if you are a robot. Which I guess I am a bit.

Overall, a good year in terms of quality. I have not included the ~12 books that I started but have not finished, or technical material that I should be reading for work that is 20% done.

The books:

• Reboot *
• There is No Antimemetics Division *
• Finding Ultra
• On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous
• Tunneling to the center of the earth
• Baby, You're gonna be mine
• The Abridged History of Rainfall
• War of the Worldviews
• Four Thousand Weeks *
• The Year of Magical Thinking *
• Breakfast of Champions
• Nothing to See Here *
• The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa *
• Midnight Library
• All over but the shoutin
• You could make this place beautiful
• Less is Lost
• The Family Fang
• Perfect Little World
• The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
• We have always lived in the castle *
• Chess Story
• Now is not the time to panic
• Death in Her Hands
• Seven Steeples - this book seems like it was generated from a dare - can you write a book with no plot, that is still somehow quite interesting and makes the reader keep turning the page?
• After the Funeral and other stories *: a side effect of reading The New Yorker occasionally is that the short stories are so good, you will have to buy 2-3 books a year
• Government Cheese
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being
• Dark Pools
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street
• I Am Code
• The Bozo Loop
• Still Life
• A Swim in a Pond in The Rain *
• Technology Strategy Patterns
• City Primeval
• Discipline is Destiny
• Congratulations, by the way
• Accidental Saints
• Put your Ass where Your Heart Wants to Be
• The Art of Thinking Clearly

I try to read 52 books a year, but don't worry too much if I go over or under. Some years I post end of year lists:

• 2020
• 2019
• 2015
• 2014

This isn’t really planned but is a rough goal which I sometimes go over. This year I went under; I’m not sure why. All the normal I’m busy reasons apply, but I think it was more of a year of learning other ways. And I did more writing than reading which I accept.

More background information on how I read:

• The Dangerous Effects of Reading
• Reading Multiple Books at Once

Ok, the list, * next to a book I really enjoyed.

• The Every
• Alien vs. Predator (book not screenplay...)
• LaserWriter II
• The Dog of the South
• The Moon is Down*
• Several People are Typing*
• Norwood
• Carnival of Snackery
• No One is Talking about This*
• Black Box Thinking
• Dinner Party: Stories
• Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
• The Psychology of Money*
• Happy Go Lucky
• Several Short Sentences about Writing*
• The Index Card
• The River at Night
• A Visit from The Goon Squad
• A Hummock in the Malookas
• PriestDaddy*
• North
• Big Time
• The Overstory*
• Pastoralia
• Talking to Strangers
• Paper Menagerie*: This contains the best short story I’ve read in years: Mono no aware

I can't let my team work from home, they might not work hard.

Sounds like you hire clowns. Maybe you should improve your hiring process. How do you track what they are getting done now?

I don't know. Now I walk around and ask them, and we have meetings where we talk about it; if I'm not around how would I know if they were slacking off?

Maybe you should work to improve what you measure and how you encourage feedback. It is normally a good idea to have ways to tell if people are doing a good job for what you are paying them to do.

But if I can’t see them to make sure they are working, then I can’t manage them.

Sounds like you need to level up as a manager. There are other skills to improve how you manage different types of teams and working styles. Your job as a leader is to have a productive team; take ownership of this and adjust to running a productive team in a new way.

But we can’t let our people not see each other, they won’t communicate well.

People coordinate large projects all the time without being in the same place. You might want to think about improving your processes. Some simple changes could improve your communication.

I can't imagine another day of long Zoom meetings.

The last year isn't typical remote work; most companies were rushing to move away from the office, but were not embracing remote work. Remote work, if done well, is not a day full of Zoom meetings. GitLab, a $6B company, has a guide that might be an interesting read. In it, they say that the company is in the Skeumorph phase when they just do everything the same way, but not in the same place. You can mature past this into later phases where you don't spend so much on video calls.

I'm a manager, if I spend less time in meetings, what am I going to be doing all day?

I appreciate the honesty; that sounds like a great problem to have. Thinking strategically, helping to grow your people, writing documents that would have been meetings. You will be plenty busy, just in a different way.

If we let people work from home they might leave the company.

Sounds like if they want to and you don’t let them, they will leave to one of the many companies that let them. I hope none of them are your competitors.

But we are paying all this money for office space, I don't want to waste that.

That is ultimately your call. Depending on your business, losing a few key employees might be worse that eating a year of a lease. Depending on your business, reducing in-person meetings, being able to hire talented people a few hours away, and having happier more loyal employees might be less important than a big lease cost. Also, you might be experiencing the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

I don't want to change the way I work, I just want people to join me in the office. My kids are driving me crazy. Is it weird to say I'm lonely; I miss my office friends.

The office has some great things going for it. Have you ever sat down and listed them and thought about how more established companies make sure those things happen without an office? You might be surprised. Also, some of the things you get out of the office are things you can get elsewhere. You can choose your friends independently of your work, and there are ways to figure out how to work around your kids.

Your people might also need to get better at remote work.

You might also want to learn how to handle your kids while working from home.

In this case, check out Navigating Remote Work

People think that remote work is some advanced digital revolution. It is and it isn't.

The tools we use are advanced, as bandwidth had to get better to allow for video conferencing and its next generation. The type of work best suited for remote work, the kind you can do with just a computer and a phone, is technologically complex. Advanced tools allow us to return to something simpler, older, stronger: working near your family.

Before the invention of cars, everyone worked near their families. Your kids were put to work earlier and they saw you work. They learned from you, and your work and home life had to integrate and were not split between one suburb and another.

How you act when working affects what your children think about work, how they choose their vocation, and how well it integrates into their life. If you treat work as completely separate from your life, barring your children from your office and yelling at them whenever you are on the phone, then work will be seen as very-grown-up and terribly-serious, and they might feel like a second priority. If you show them how you work, letting them help you edit an Excel file, then they may run as fast as they can away from your vocation. All of these are fine reactions, and you now have the power to influence them directly. No take-your-daughter-or-son-to-work day; every day has those same chances.

Remote work now means closer work, like it used to be.

For tips on how to manage your family while working from home, check out Navigating Remote Work.

Great basketball players never admit that a defender has slowed them down. They instead say things like the shots just weren’t falling. This isn’t true, but that’s the game. You don’t say the thing that is really going on, because if you do it gives away some of your power. If a great offensive player were to actually say that a particular defender is the hardest person to score on, they have drawn attention to a weakness and opened up the door for the tape of that game to be a way for opponents to study their weaknesses. They can’t have that happen.

The above video is a rare event, and he only admitted it decades after. If you aren't a fan of basketball, one of the people he mentions is sitting at the desk with him. It shouldn't be a surprise that this happens in sports, which is defined primarily by cut-throat competition. If I admit a weakness, I could lose out on millions of dollars.

In business there are games to play as well. For example, when an executive acts dedicated to the mission of the company and works 85 hours a week, this is accepted. Everyone knows the truth is more complex than this, they are dedicated to providing for their family and they enjoy the respect and challenge of work and want more money or respect. They are dedicated to the mission of the company because it is a proxy for these other things. The mission of the company is to survive, the goal of the executive is to survive. The executive will not necessarily work for the same company forever. Pointing any of this out, that’s against the rules of the game. You don't draw attention to the game.

Any workplaces that is defined by internal competition will have an increase in the game. Competition for publications leads academics leads to operate with strange team dynamics, stack-ranking leads to inter-team competition. Its all game.

There are places that don’t play the game. These places are defined by strong teamwork. If the primary cause of the game is fierce competition, and the antidote is healthy teamwork.

Individuals believe that the team winning will be enough for them to win as well, so they share information easily and work together. It's hard to find these places, as the game gets passed on like a dominant gene. If a single person at a small company starts playing the game it spreads, because that person does not give away information or focus on anything other than their own survival. That's the game.

If you are looking for true advice from someone who understands the struggle of remote work and has actual useful advice, check out  Navigating Remote Work.

How do you interview a developer? How can you tell if they are skilled at their craft without hiring them and working with them?

Traditional methods are:

• The technical screen: Leetcode, whiteboard coding, etc. These are biased, some people don't like them, they don't fully match the real world.
• The resume / reference check: you don't do a technical screen, but use references as proxies for ability. I know that X is at great developer, so her friend Y must be great too. They worked at A, which seems like a hard place to work, so if they were good enough for there, maybe they will work out here.
• Trial period / trial project: the company gives the candidate real work, or a toy take-home project to work on. They are paid for it. Eliminates people that just aren't interested in this, requires some upfront work, and puts the company in an expert position of a teacher that has to grade assignments.

I'd like to suggest a third option, which is a strange informal version all. I refer to it in my own mind as shop talk.

Shop Talk

After a phone screen, you have the candidate walk through a project that they have worked on. They get some time (20 minutes at least) to show the project's code and walk you through its structure and anything they want to highlight. The project could be what they are working on now at their current job, it could be an open source project they worked on, it could be something they wrote on their own time. For people that don't have time, or for people earlier in their career, the project could be something they did in a bootcamp or university.

Ideally, the candidate can show source code on their machine within their IDE, tools, etc. In a lesser version of this, they draw out how the system works on a whiteboard and provide pseudocode for a key part of the application.

Because you don't give them much structure and let them talk for a while, it is up to them to guide how they show and tell. This has some advantages for them: they get to highlight the parts they want to, they can prepare, and because they are talking for a bit it reduces interview anxiety. It has some advantages for the company as well: because they are forced to explain the system, it tests their technical acumen while also showing their communication skills.

After they are done showing, and/or throughout, the team gets to ask them questions about the project. The team should be coached on how to do this well. The point of this exercise is not a code review in the traditional sense, but more of a conversation. Shop talk.

• Can you show us the database design for this?
• Do you know of any other approaches or frameworks for MVVM you could use if you didn't use this one?
• What would you do next on this project if you had more time?
• What was the hardest part for you when you were working on this?

The discussion has to reach a point at which the candidate has explained the project well enough that the team understands it to ask good questions. If that hasn't happened, then there is a problem.

Disadvantages

• Some people simply don't have any code they are allowed to show, or want to show.
• If the team asks bad questions, the exercise can turn into having a few of the same disadvantages of whiteboard interviews - can be an exercise in ego, can focus on arbitrary technical details that aren't core to the job role, etc.

Advantages

• It puts the candidate in a more comfortable, real-world setting.
• This is a very efficient method if you are hiring for a specific skillset. If you are hiring a Swift programmer and see them flying around XCode using keyboard shortcuts as they describe the project, this is a competence signal that means something more than "yeah, I know Swift" or "yeah I can answer some esoteric language question".
• Engineering is an exercise in tradeoffs, and tradeoffs need context. Without a real project that the candidate understands it is hard to create a valid scenario out of thin air to provide this context. But with this approach, the candidate knows the problem well already, and it puts pressure on the team to think up smart questions. Since there are typically more than 1 interviewer and only 1 candidate, it puts the pressure in the better place to absorb it. They can ask about different decisions and tradeoffs once they understand the project.

There is another advantage that is harder to express, and it is the reason I call this approach Shop Talk rather than Show & Tell or Project Review or something more corporate. It puts developers, on both sides of the table, back into their normal mode. An interview is an atypical situation in which you try to talk about technical challenges away from a real world scenario. Even a toy project presentation puts everyone in a more natural setting. It's just a group of people, talking about some code. After it's over, both sides have an idea what it would be like to do that full-time, and isn't that the point of an interview?

In summary:

Shop Talk

• Candidate brings project they have worked on.
• Candidate walks team through it, highlighting what they want to, on a screenshare.
• Team asks the candidate about the project, seeking first to understand it.
• Team asks the candidate about the project and ways it could grow or change, seeking first to understand the engineering tradeoffs in play.

Try it out and adjust; it has worked well for me in the past.

If you are looking for true advice from someone who understands the struggle of remote work and has helpful advice, check out  Navigating Remote Work.

A few friends have asked me how the book is doing, and in various polite ways, why I spent time writing it given that:

• I used to have a publisher I was working with, so they think I did it for money only
• the general state of book-writing in 2021
• the general state of the world

These are great questions, because writing a book is a ton of work and not nearly as profitable as other pursuits.

I did it for a few reasons:

I felt compelled to help

I hear all the time about people having issues working from home. I was talking to a professional contact the other day, and they mentioned that they have heard that one of the main drivers of employees and employers wanting to return to the office is driven by married men who are having trouble working around their wife and kids. That makes me incredibly sad, and makes me want to help those people to figure out how to balance it all, because it will be better for them if they can.

In the book, I have an entire chapter on how to balance family life and work life when do both in the same house. In it is this paragraph:

You hear it so often it is a cliché, but your time with your children goes by fast. The Halloween years, roughly ages 2 - 12, when they want to dress up but before they think it is lame, are powerful in a child's life, and you cannot repeat them. For most of us, these same years are when we are most focused on earning income. The overlap of so many hours away from your children just when you can influence is brutal and challenging. ​Working from home is one of the most powerful tools to gain time during those years.

I think figuring out how to work remotely is a potential big deal, a life-changing chapter in your life story, like it has been in mine. I want to help more people try it.

I wanted to know what it felt like to bake from scratch

I've worked as an employee, a contractor, a consultant. Plenty of 1099s, W2s, but I've never felt like I created something from whole cloth. I've never baked from scratch.

For this project I came up with everything, wrote everything, figured out landing pages, email lists, ghost blogging software, twitter engagement (a little), and how to write marketing copy. I designed the cover of the book, and figured out how to generate pretty PDF, kindle, and ePub formats and sell those directly to readers on the Internet.

This is the first time in my life I felt like I made money on the Internet in full-creator manner. I wanted to know what that felt like. I learned a ton, and it felt great.

Why Not

I published a stupid comedy book a few years ago. I published it because I had written some things for McSweeney's Internet Tendency over the years (In 2020 year I broke my 6 year streak of having 1 post per year) and some other pieces I didn't think were good enough to submit. I loved doing it; writing is fun for me even though I know how much better I could be at it. Not all hobbies are for money-making.

I was writing one day in my office and my daughter was playing and I asked her if I should put all this stuff in a book and publish it and she said "yeah, sure". So I named the book that. She was 3 years old at the time; I don't always recommend following advice from someone so young, but every once in a while they are great counselors. They are without fear.

If you are looking for true advice from someone who understands the struggle of remote work and has actual useful advice, check out  Navigating Remote Work.

Just punch yourself in the face every day instead

I wrote a blog post years ago, when I had been working from home just long enough to hate it fiercely, but not long enough to have it figured out. There were enough people that saw it and nodded their head that I thought "hey I should write more about this". I put up a landing page and said that I was writing a book about remote work. This was back when it had just stopped being called telecommuting and was called working from home. Before distributed or remote were the right terms.

Then I didn't publish the book until last week, which is ten full years later. Why did it take so long? Many reasons:

• Although the blog post might have gotten a lot of views, it didn't contain any real solutions. I didn't have any solutions. So I felt unqualified to write more about it. I wrote up an outline and then did nothing for a few years.
• I didn't at the time have any experience with working from home outside of my own limited experience at the time (1 spouse, 1 toddler, with an office door that shut).
• I hadn't managed anybody who worked remotely, or started a company remotely. I had met in person every single person I was working with and ate lunch with them once a week, so it didn't feel like real remote work.
• I didn't have the time; I had more important things to do, like rewatching The Wire, having three more kids, starting a company, and writing other stuff to figure out what I thought about what worked and what didn't.
• I hadn't followed the advice of Scott Berkun, who said that in order to write a book about something, you need to read at least 10 other books in that style, and many more on that subject. Also, I couldn't find many books about remote work. Then Scott published his, and then Wade Foster published a guide, and many other companies told you how to run a remote team.
• But there was still a gap, but it felt a bit too personal to talk about. Nobody seemed to write about how it takes to work remotely personally. Nobody was spitting the truth about what it is like for the worker in the negative. There was only talk of going to recitals and school events and hiking in the woods; there wasn't any discussion of how lonely and disconnected it felt, and how hard it was to get stuff done alone.
• But by this point I had figured out some things that worked for me, and had met a lot of other remote workers that knew you have to do it just right. You also have to establish boundaries to keep yourself from going too lonely, or stir-crazy, or feeling like work and home are the same thing.
• So I sat down and worked on it, and writing a book is harder than reading a lot of books, much harder. Writing a book is like cutting all the letters out of your favorite book, then re-assembling them using loose staples. You have to write 10 words to keep one. I remember as a child my father telling me that he had run into an author and asked him how his day was going and his reply was "Great, I've already written 3 pages today". I thought that sounded good, but my father said it meant that the book was going to be bad; that three sentences a day is more like it. I didn't understand that at the time, but I do now. You write 3 pages and cut 2.5.
• I picked at the book for years, writing down unpolished ideas as I became more experienced with remote work. I took months away from it, and did things like watching Mad Men, The Wire in full again, and sleeping and having a career and being a father. If you don't work on it nearly every day, writing a book is even harder.
• Then the pandemic hit, and I saw so many people struggling with sudden remote work done in an emergency. This motivated me to finish and hit publish, maybe it would help somebody, and there were suddenly many somebodies out there.

If you are looking for true advice from someone who understands the struggle of remote work and has actual useful advice, check out  Navigating Remote Work.

Remote work isn't about where you are, it is about how you work

Hybrid remote work, where you got into the office 1+ days, and work from home 1+ days a week, will increase over the next few months. There is a huge disconnect between what most companies think is about to happen and what many employees expect. Many companies will lose good people because they want to get back to normal, but some of their best people have found a new normal that allows them to be just as productive and have greater margin in their life.

Hybrid remote setups can work, but only if you fully support a remote work manner. To have effective remote work, you have to work async, write everything down, and meet only when needed. In-person time, however rare, needs to be spent building relationships and major coordination activities. Activities should be either rapid, aggressive collaboration or quiet, flexible concentration. A well-run remote team speaks deeply in-often and works the rest of the time deeply. A remote organization needs to focus on work output and not work appearance.

Working in an office 2 days a week doesn't necessarily jive with this in a few ways:

1. If you genuinely understand async, then being in an office in general forces sync behavior which might not be how most people work. Work best in the morning? Well, one of your best hours is going to be spent getting ready, in the car, and then getting settled.
2. Being in-office means you have in-office traditional herd behavior like more meetings and people thinking about what they look like as they work rather than how much work they are getting done.
3. If in-person time is best spent establishing relationships, then employees sitting around chatting will be interpreted as employees slacking off.

So if you are an organization, this boils down to the following equation:

• If you force people to go back into an office too many days a week, you will lose a few people to companies that are 100% remote-friendly.
• If you want to be a remote company, you must be OK with the office days being a bunch of people working on their computers without many meetings, but more small talk and laughing.
• Your leadership and management staff need to adjust their behavior to work with async, written communication, and tracking output rather than hours.

The alternative is that you default back to old behavior:

• A full return to the office, which means you will lose a greater number of people.
• A return to a more manager-friendly environment for managers that haven't worked remotely.
• A more significant amount of long-term attrition as employees leave and you have trouble competing for good people as more companies flip to remote.

In my opinion, there is not a traditional way of working the says: "we let people work from home 2 days a week". Those two days will fail, and you will end up with five days soon enough.

It is all or nothing. Remote work is a wildfire.

There is no going back; for millions of employees, they have seen the promised land; they can work from where they want while still getting as much done, but now have more time for exercise, cooking, and spending time with their families. The work/life balance equation has changed, and it is taking your traditional views of the office with it. Adapt or die.

If you are looking for true advice from someone who understands the struggle of remote work and has actual useful advice, check out  Navigating Remote Work.

If you are thinking towards your 2021 New Year's Resolutions this week, I'll offer an idea: think of new habits or systems you want to execute in 2021, not firm goals.

For example, here are some traditional resolutions:

• Run a 5K
• Spend more time with my kids
• Cook at home more, learn some new recipes
• Lose some weight

Here are some systems:

• Run or walk every other morning
• Make Wednesday a family game night every week
• Take turns between my wife and I cooking Monday, Wednesday, Friday
• Track what I eat every day

The issue with goals is that they are too concrete and finite - run a 5K doesn't tell you what to do to get there or what to do after completing the 5K. There is a good chance you will just stop running.

Goals don't tell you what to do; they just tell you a place you want to be. You want to establish a habit of being healthy, a 5K just seems like something that a healthy person would do.

Also, weak goals like spending more time on something don't provide an easy way to tell if you are doing well or not. By saying you want to do more of something, you are saying that it is more important to you. Focus on figuring out a way to make yourself a person who prioritizes differently instead of just declaring the universe that you want to spend two more hours a week. Use a system to establish a habit to change your identity so that you are a person who does this naturally, regularly, as part of who you are.

If you are looking for true advice from someone who understands the struggle of remote work and has actual useful advice, check out  Navigating Remote Work.

My normal goal is 52 books a year, without a strict week over week schedule, a burst method following my interests as they come.

Like many, 2020 was an atypical and stressful year for me, but reading is an atomic habit, and this year I managed to still read 42 books.  

I'll highlight five as particularly good IMHO:

1. Solutions and Other Problems
2. Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps
3. Exhaltation
4. The Stench of Honolulu (reread)
5. The Nickel Boys

I discovered some authors that I'm reading more of in 2021:

• Ottessa Moshfegh
• Colson Whitehead
• Amy Hempel
• Charles Bukowski (I can't decide if they are garbage or just a guilty pleasure)

Everything else, including many good books:

• Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
• Homesick for Another World: Stories
• I Remember Nothing
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation
• MAKE: A bootstrapper's handbook
• Resilient Management
• Whistleblower
• The Manager's Path
• Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps
• The Motive
• The Manual
• Eileen
• Nine Lies about Work
• Uncanny Valley
• How to Lead When You are Not In Charge
• How Design Makes the World
• The Basics of User Experience Design: A UX Design Book
• The Nickel Boys
• Apple, Tree
• The Art of Leadership
• This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
• Medallion Status
• Company of One
• The Art of Noticing
• The Exploding Detective
• The Squirrel Who Saved Practically Everybody
• The Stench of Honolulu
• The Meditations
• Exhaltation
• Post Office
• Consider This
• Strange Planet
• Stranger Planet
• The Largess of the Sea Maiden
• Sing to It: New Stories
• The Truth about Employee Engagement
• Solutions and Other Problems
• The Founder's Mentality
• The Almanack of Naval
• Debugging Teams

If you are looking for true advice from someone who understands the struggle of remote work and has actual useful advice, check out  Navigating Remote Work.