What I'm Reading
Right now I'm reading four books that keep orbiting the same idea: that less — less stuff, less noise, less optional work — can be the point. They've started to talk to each other, so let me introduce the conversation.
Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman) is the anti-productivity book. It sounds like a time-management manual and is the opposite: no system ever clears your inbox, and the real skill is accepting which things you'll miss. More useful to me than any trick it could have taught.
How to Simplify Your Life (Tiki Kustenmacher & Lothar Seiwert) is a checklist in disguise — seven areas of life, each with concrete things to let go of. The habit it left me with is a question I now ask about almost everything: does this need to be this complicated?
The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg) made me see my own loops. Every habit is cue → routine → reward, and you rarely destroy one; you replace it. Naming the cue is what lets me catch the routine before it fires.
Early Retirement Extreme (Jacob Lund Fisker) is the sharpest of the four. The core claim is simple and humbling: your savings rate matters more than your income. Treat your life as a system to redesign, not a budget to endure.
They're not a reading list with a unifying thesis — they're just where my head is lately. The working list, with the full short reviews, lives on my Now page.