Stop what you would not start. — Peter Drucker

When we want to improve our lives, we tend to add.

• We add in a run before work.
• We start meal prepping on Sunday afternoons.
• We take up woodworking, painting, or volunteering on the weekends.

We are eager to add new habits and commitments, but how often do we subtract? Like our homes, our lives accumulate clutter as the months and years pass. This is not something to chastise ourselves about—it’s just the way it is—but it still results in a mess. We eventually declutter our messy houses, but how often do we declutter our lives?

Whether or not you make New Year’s resolutions, the end of the year is a great time to reflect on the past year and plan the next. You likely have some ideas already for how you’ll approach 2020, but I’d like to encourage you to reprioritize reading in the coming year. Here’s why.

A book is a screaming deal.

In exchange for $20 and a few hours of your time, you receive distilled wisdom on a subject you care about. Okay, okay, wisdom isn’t guaranteed, but nearly all nonfiction books contain at least one good idea. Some contain a couple; some a dozen. The fact is, $20 for an idea that helps you solve a problem or generally enriches your life is about the best bargain you’ll find anywhere.

Email is a huge part of modern life.

I’ve had my personal email account since 2004, and out of curiosity, I just checked the number of emails in the Sent folder: nearly 6,000. I haven’t totaled up how many work emails I’ve sent—some things are better left unknown—but it’s far more.

Despite the rise of texting, social media, and instant messaging services like Slack, email is still the de facto standard for electronic communication. Yet, many of us haven’t given much thought to how to write an effective email (and those of us who have can probably use a refresher).

Let us consider the humble break.

Breaks are an essential part of the workday. We talk about an eight-hour workday, but the fact is no one works eight hours straight. A full workday is really a series of work-break cycles: work for a while, take a break, and repeat.

Breaks can be a reward, but they’re mostly about rest—rest for our minds and bodies. But not all break activities are created equal. We can meditate, or we can grab a bag of M&Ms from the vending machine down the hall. We can take a walk, or we can check Twitter. We can grab a power nap, or we can watch YouTube videos.

I'm in the middle of a big, long-term project at work right now---one that eats up a significant portion of my workweek. It's a federal grant application that's due soon, so it's go time.

When I'm carving out time to work on this project, I always seem to forget one thing: it's so massive, so complex, that I rarely accomplish anything significant until I've been working on it for 20-30 minutes. During this warm-up time, I'm remembering the parameters I have to work within, reviewing recent progress, and painting a mental picture of the current state of the project as compared to its desired final state. In essence, I'm loading the project into my working memory.