Thanks for checking out the Weekly Learning Roundup. These bite-sized, weekly posts are designed to give you a quick hit of interesting learnings and articles I came across this week.

It’s a motley assortment of tips, resources, and links that will hopefully give you a bit of inspiration for the upcoming week. Enjoy!

What I’m reading —

The Top 10 Fiction Books for Non-Fiction Addicts by Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss put together a great list of fiction books to checkout if you’re non-fiction fiend like him. I really enjoy reading fiction before going to bed as it usually puts me in a more relaxed and creative mood. I’m looking forward to getting through some of the books in this list.

A quote that’s inspiring me —

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

— Albert Camus

a French philosopher, author, and journalist.

Productivity tip of the week —

Experiment with your most productive hours and block them off.

I’ve recently been obsessed with the concept of sleep chronotypes and the unique sleeping patterns that we all have. Sleep patterns dictate not only when our bodies prefer to sleep but also when we find ourselves at the most productive during the day. When I took the quiz, I discovered that I’m a “bear” which means that my body naturally wakes up around 7am and is ready to go to bed around 10:30 to 11pm.

The biggest revelation from this was finding out my body’s most naturally productive hours lie between 10am to 2pm. I’ve always had a hunch about this but never really thought about how valuable this time really is. So something I’m working on over the coming weeks is to try to block off that time for focused project work instead of meetings or phone calls which I can push to later in the day.

Product or service I’m loving —

Productivity Planner by Intelligent Change

This tool has been a huge addition to my productivity arsenal. At the start of every week, I list out all of the most important tasks and projects that I need to complete. In addition, it asks me how many Pomodoros (i.e. 25-minute increments) it will take to complete the task. The idea behind it is to help me plan out each day and determine the ONE most important task or project I need to complete. The concept is simple but extremely powerful, and I feel a lot more focused and productive when I get my ONE task done during the work day.
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Featured image via Pixabay by Wokandapix.

As always, thanks for checking out this Weekly Learnings Roundup. Follow me on Twitter @peternakamura to see the full list of articles that I share on a daily basis.