kellyreadingbooks 's review for:

Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

4.0

challenging informative medium-paced

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“It’s time to stop viewing your off-hours as potential money-making time. It’s not worth it. You can’t put a monetary value on your free time, because you’re paying for it in mental and physical health.”

I started this book for nonfiction November, and it came at a great time to read for me. It’s full of reminders on working to live vs living to work. I’ve been working more overtime packed weeks than normal 40 hour ones since the pandemic started. This talks a lot about the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality and how it’s ingrained in us to moralize work. 

The first half of this book covers what people thought of work and how they worked historically and has supporting current studies on how where we are now isn’t working. The second half covers actionable steps of how to re-examine working a bit smarter and achieving rest time. 

While the author acknowledges privileges many times over of having some sort of flexibility over your schedule, I’d have to say the actionable portion of the book isn’t as feasible for people in hourly or consistently “on” front facing positions. The history provided of work though is fascinating and it did give me multiple moments of pause and re-examination of how I felt about our work culture.