Divide your hardbacks and paperbacks for a cleaner and more streamlined look on your bookshelves. It is also helpful if you're a visual person.

Separate your hard covers and paperbacks

If you're a reader who tends to associate certain stories with their covers, stack your books by colours, try an ombré pattern, or opt for a rainbow look.

Arrange your books by colour

Organising by genre and subject makes it easy to find the right book you find interesting. Group together your mysteries, travel memoirs, 18-century English literature novels, cookbooks, etc.

Organize books by genre or subject

The alphabetical organisation is ideal if your collection of books is so huge it’s essentially a mini library. It works well if you remember book titles and author names more than genres and plot points.

Organize your books alphabetically

Gather all the books you haven’t read yet and place them in their own particular To Be Read section, so they don’t get lost among the other titles.

Group together the books you haven’t read yet

Organising your books by contemporary or classic is useful if you have a diverse collection of old and new books. You can define contemporary and classic as you desire, for example, living and deceased authors, books written before and after a certain date, or books published in specific periods.

Separate your books by author: contemporary or classic

Bookstores around the world use this method because it is simple, effective and classic. Group non-fiction books together and keep the other books in another spot.

Separate fiction and nonfiction

Reorganising books in different ways can help you rediscover old favourites or find the ones you've always wanted to read.

You don't need to be a professional librarian to expertly organize your novels, biographies, encyclopedias, and still-need-to-reads

Stashed ideas

How to Organize Books: Cool and Clever Tips

In 2010, Photoshop was commonly used for everything design from editing a photo, making a poster or designing a website. Today, Adobe still seems very strong, they have great stock performance and their transitions to SaaS has been seamless. Yet, they are no longer the market leader in a few segments of design. Companies like Figma, Sketch, and Canva are examples of products that have become top products in the market.

Figma and Canva are taking on Adobe

Companies like Figma and Canva are able to thrive against a strong incumbent like Adobe because they have a distinct atomic concept. Their products are built around a different strategy than Adobe's product lineup.  These different fundamental atomic concepts turn Adobe's advantage of an established product and existing userbase into a weakness that handicaps them to compete against these startups. It is worth understanding the phases of market transition that drives these companies.

Why young companies are able to thrive

Startups can take advantage of market entropy. Changing customer needs are the biggest source of entropy in markets. When the customer needs change quickly, legacy companies are left with all the overhead and product that no longer serves the market. There are many causes of changing customer needs.<ul><li>There are new and growing segments of customers with different use cases. However, companies may resist changing the core parts of their product.</li><li>The scale or dynamics of a market shift enough to make a product obsolete.</li><li>The type of user change. These new types of customers care about different things.</li></ul>

New use cases: designing for digital

The best products map to how customers think about their workflow. They choose the right atomic concepts around which the entire product is built. They align with how customers think of their workflow and crystalise how they ought to. Great atomic concepts are refined and built upon in more complex compounds. When similar companies have slightly different atomic concepts, they become meaningfully distinct. A company can rarely change its core atomic concepts. Startups thrive because they can find asymmetric angles on incumbents.

Tapping into the right level of abstraction

When Figma started, it was a direct Photoshop competitor. But, over the next two years, they shifted their focus to designers working on the UI and UX of digital products. The key for designers was a product that enabled collaboration. Building for collaboration led Figma to rethink almost everything about the company, leading to new pricing models, distribution models, and sharing form factors.

Figma bet on collaborative product design

Photoshop can do many things, but it is too low level. Photoshop's atomic concepts are images and pixels. But Canva operates at a higher abstraction level and one that users care about. Canva designs start with their purposes in mind, such as designing a pitch deck, an Instagram post, or a wedding invitation. Canva has templates and layouts for that purpose and makes it easy for users to add their own creativity, such as adding their own photos or using graphics and components made by the community.

Canva bet on marketing design by non-designers

As Canva grew, it expanded its ecosystem by creating marketplaces and communities around templates, layouts, fonts, and more. Users prefer not to build from scratch, and instead support free and paid Canva marketplaces of pre-built components. The add-ons are very powerful. They allow Canva to address the huge scale and varied needs of all its customers, enabling each customer to use Canva in a personalised way.

Defensibility through becoming a platform

Design is not unique. The same factors that drive demand for new and large use cases are arriving in most fields, especially in all forms of digital content. The most active area undergoing this market transition now is the broader productivity space. Companies like Airtable, Notion, Coda, Roam, Retool, Webflow, and Loom have seen huge early traction, but it's tricky to describe the exact spaces within productivity and collaboration. Many companies have lots of product roadmap overlap. They still need to define the atomic concepts they're betting on before they can position themselves.

Extending this playbook to other spaces

Companies with early success have yet to define what atomic concepts they focus on. Who are their competitors? Who are their customers, and which use cases should they build their workflows around? Companies have difficulty navigating these questions because customers don't know what they really want. These companies have the opportunity to change how customers think. Strong enough products will have ecosystems around them. The best companies build the platforms to enable and direct these ecosystems to empower the customer more.

Opportunity knocks

How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time - kwokchain

Establishing a bond between remote employees in the virtual office culture can be challenging. Virtual Team building activities can bring teams together by using a collaboration platform like Google Meet or Zoom.

Virtual teams 

Virtual team building activities can ensure that your team stays in line. <ul><li>It establishes a good relationship among peers, which encourages better collaboration.</li><li>It gives a break to remote employees from their work routine, which will help them focus better on their work.</li><li>Trigger lateral thinking ability, which employees can apply to solve work-related problems.</li></ul>

How remote team activities add value

Use icebreakers to start a virtual meeting. It creates a quick personal connection with teammates. Before starting the virtual meeting, ask an easy ice-breaking question such as share the emoji you used today while texting. What is your go-to web series to watch at night? Give everyone a minute to answer the question.

Happy First Minute - Unusual Icebreakers

Try to get remote teams to think about new ideas and concepts for an upcoming project or current work. Get a whiteboard, excel or document sheet from your collaboration tool, start the idea talk and watch the team responds.

Catch-up Over a work Talk with Idea Board

Encourage coffee chat moments. Block the calendar for the break, and allow your team to grab their coffee or beverage before digging into happy moments.

A Virtual Coffee Station

Encourage team members to share information on the latest trends and technologies. Give work updates and reviews, give ideas and suggestions to improvise. Use screen sharing and code sharing tools to help solve complex codes.

Virtual Pooling of Knowledge

Do weekly online gaming activities, also known as "office Olympics". Form teams and invite them to play online team games such as Pictionary, trivia, virtual board games, virtual puzzles, etc.

Virtual Office Olympics

Show and tell is a popular trend in virtual team meetings. Show an image or picture and question what it describes. You can also draw half the picture and request to fill the remaining.

Pic Talk

Pair up two members and ask them to discuss their vacation plans in a one-on-one call. Later, one member must brief the travel plan of another person to the group.

Discuss Over Plans for Vacation

Virtual Team Building Activities For Remote Teams In 2022

Our fascination with productivity is making us depressed, stressed out, and physically ill.
For ages, as if high productivity were what truly counts in life, we have followed ever-increasing milestones. In the end, we just managed to make ourselves sad.

The Cult Of Productivity

If your to-do lists seem to be getting longer every day, you are trying to optimize your hours, and hoping to find extra hours in the day somehow, you may have fallen victim to the “cult of effectiveness.”  This is a mentality that assumes that the busier we are the better. And while this movement has never been more dominant than it is right now, it didn’t evolve instantly.

The Never-ending Marathon

We have not all worked as hard as we do today. Even peasant farmers spent fewer hours and they still had more holiday leave than the typical industrial worker!  In the stage of the Industrial Revolution, though, changes occurred. Factory operators began to pay salaries per hour instead of paying staff per assignment. This led to a drastic rise in the number of hours that persons were forced to work.

History Is Embedded In Our Current Obsession With Competitiveness

The consequence of contaminated time is that many individuals never feel at ease. And one of the key disadvantages of new, flexible working hours is this.  Back when we worked every day from 9 to 5, it was easy to realize when the job finished and our leisure time started. These two realms are much more likely to converge now that our hours are “flexible.” There are many negative sides of contaminated time. Our imagination and competitiveness are improved by a genuine break from work and can also improve the immune system.

Contaminated Time: Never Being At Ease

Things have been very simple so far. We also explored the roots of the productivity cult and examined some of how jobs can “contaminate” our time off and compete with our pleasure.One of the most significant points about the rise towards productivity is that it left its roots in the office quite rapidly and became an approach towards life in general.

We Aim For Productivity In Our Private Relationships

<ul><li>The notion of enjoying “quality time” with family is one way that we can track the penetration of productivity into our personal lives. </li><li>There is nothing unusual about having to spend time with loved ones; it is always a satisfying remedy to our normal emphasis on “getting things done.” </li><li>But the idea of quality time suggests that in a few satisfying, condensed, yet unforgettable hours we can and should pack our family responsibilities.</li><li>Bonding time, in other terms, is family life tailored to a philosophy of success, a mentality only limited to the office.</li></ul>

Spending Quality Time Means It is Limited By Nature

The overwhelming majority of individuals lived in rural, close-knit neighbourhoods until the Industrial Revolution attracted workers to big cities. People wanted a limited number of close friends, a smaller community of close companions, and a wider network of familiar associates.Sadly, much of our social needs go unfulfilled these days. The interpersonal bonds of a warm, real-world group can not be replaced by getting hundreds of “friends” on Facebook.in our search to make our lives more successful, we have lost a lot of human connection, a reality with unignorable repercussions.

We May Be Robbed Of Real Interpersonal Relations

The urge to outshine others, if we are not cautious, will find us engaged in a constant competition to be the most successful and efficient individual on the internet. Pointless to mention, this is a fight that we will never win.  Comparing ourselves with those around us is human nature. It is doubtful that this fact would change any time soon, and it did not arise in the social media era. Much the same, the laws of the game have been fundamentally modified by social media.

Social Media Makes Comparisons Easy

If we follow top tier celebrities, some glorified by paid media, we unconsciously convince ourselves that we are not great enough as we associate ourselves with hugely popular outliers like these and that the lives we live are grossly insufficient. Learn to base your assessments on yourself, without caring about someone else and what they may have achieved.

Following Elon Musk or The Kardashians

One of the very few challenges we can address by simply doing little is our single-minded emphasis on competitiveness. Although as simple as it is, what we need to prepare actively is to do nothing.In addressing our emphasis on performance, the first thing we need to address is that many of us have no clue where our time goes.Our judgment and empathy can be impeded by thinking that we are overstressed, whether or not we work long hours.

A Few Basic Adjustments To Decelerate And Enhance Our Standard Of Life

To enhance your time perception, begin by maintaining a list of your tasks. Log all down, even though it’s just social media surfing. When you have a good vision of how you are spending your time, build a plan that outlines how you would like to look at your days. Note, this is a timeline that promotes recreation, not efficiency. To encourage yourself to be completely lazy and inefficient, set aside a bunch of time each day.

Check Where Your Time Goes

One of the challenges of celebrating success and performance is that these ideals can allow us to lose track of the bigger picture. Not only does a society that emphasizes hard work and busyness convince us to ignore free time; it also allows us to rely on means rather than ends. Focusing on how much we get accomplished, to be more specific, might cause us to forget what we get accomplished. Most of us are so nervous about ticking boxes that we have avoided wondering if the stuff we’re doing makes us happy.

Differentiate Between Means And Ends To Reclaim Our Free Time

Examine the “productive” things you do and make sure that they bring you closer to your long-term goals in life. Is looking at emails on a Sunday morning helping you achieve the things you want in life? If not, forget about it. Once you learn to drop unrewarding tasks, you’ll find you have much more time for leisure.

How To Do Nothing

Oddly, our fascination with changing our lives has made us more lonely, unhealthier, and anxious than ever before. The remedy to this state of affairs is easy: make time in your life for genuine pleasure and just do nothing.

“A welcome antidote to our toxic hustle culture of burnout.”—Arianna Huffington “This book is so important and could truly save lives.”—Elizabeth Gilbert “A clarion call to work smarter [and] accomplish more by doing less.”—Adam Grant We work feverishly to make ourselves happy. So why are we so miserable? Despite our constant search for new ways to optimize our bodies and minds for peak performance, human beings are working more instead of less, living harder not smarter, and becoming more lonely and anxious. We strive for the absolute best in every aspect of our lives, ignoring what we do well naturally and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. Why do we measure our time in terms of efficiency instead of meaning? Why can’t we just take a break? In Do Nothing, award-winning journalist Celeste Headlee illuminates a new path ahead, seeking to institute a global shift in our thinking so we can stop sabotaging our well-being, put work aside, and start living instead of doing. As it turns out, we’re searching for external solutions to an internal problem. We won’t find what we’re searching for in punishing diets, productivity apps, or the latest self-improvement schemes. Yet all is not lost—we just need to learn how to take time for ourselves, without agenda or profit, and redefine what is truly worthwhile. Pulling together threads from history, neuroscience, social science, and even paleontology, Headlee examines long-held assumptions about time use, idleness, hard work, and even our ultimate goals. Her research reveals that the habits we cling to are doing us harm; they developed recently in human history, which means they are habits that can, and must, be broken. It’s time to reverse the trend that’s making us all sadder, sicker, and less productive, and return to a way of life that allows us to thrive.

Do Nothing

The more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website. When you’re getting your first domain, GoDaddy and NameCheap will tell you that, yeah, that’s what they do: They will sell you a domain.Why the big companies with the big products don't do the same? Do they lack self-awareness? Do they have nothing of value to provide, and hide behind flowery marketing babble that’s as empty as their offering? The big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.

Please tell me what your company does

Meltwater is a company with a simple product: A database of media contacts. These contacts are otherwise hard to find, as most reporters don’t want every “disruptive” startup out there calling them…

For the love of God, please tell me what your company does

We’re taught laughable misinformation about money and then we go out into the working world to dedicate our career to earning it.If you’re working for money and you don’t understand how it works, it’s going to hurt you in so many unexpected ways. You have to move away from the mindset that “saving is good.”There is a much simpler way to think about your money that will set you up financially and allow you to stress less and work less if you choose (not financial advice).

Understanding Finance

You can make lots of money and still lose the lot if you don’t understand how it works. Many famous people <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/24/investing/mike-tyson-bankruptcy/index.html" target="_self">like Mike Tyson</a> made plenty of money and still ended up broke.Lottery winners are <a href="http://it%27s%20not%20how%20much%20you%20make/" target="_self">more likely to end up bankrupt</a> within three to five years of them making millions of dollars, than the average person. I know guys making $500K a year who, when this recent recession hit, started running out of money real fast.

Making Money Is Easy

Every minute you save money is another minute <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inflation.asp" target="_self">inflation</a> is eating away at you, and the time and effort you spent to earn it. Why work really hard and then have your money be devalued? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s madness.If you take the simple approach of making money and then saving it, it’s not going to end well for you.

Saving Money Is Madness

There is a solution to this problem of saving money and you don’t have to be an investment guru like Warren Buffett to understand it.You can prevent yourself from being financially destroyed by money when you change your approach to this:It’s *not* about how much money you make.It’s *not* about how much money you save.<a href="https://medium.com/swlh/lessons-ive-learned-from-studying-money-for-10-years-50ca03854887" target="_self">It’s about you how much you invest.</a>

The Answer Is Investing

Even if you invest your money it still won’t help you. Investing your money is not enough because you need to understand one more idea: diversification. (Money experts that charge you $1000 an hour for their time call it asset allocation but we’re not fancy and just want to get to the point.)The hardest part to understand is how much money to place into each asset class. Hedge funds that invest billions of dollars spend decades mastering this one skill and it’s their secret sauce.

Diversification Of Investments

If you’re a millennial like me then you may want to go a little more aggressive into stocks because you’ll have time to ride out any recessions.The way to save yourself financially is to learn about where you should invest your money and how much cash to allocate to each asset class.In really simple terms, you want to learn enough about money that you can successfully put a percentage value next to each asset class. Here is a mock example:<ul><li>Gold: 5%</li><li>Real Estate: 30%</li><li>Digital Currency: 5%</li><li>Bonds: 20%</li><li>Stocks: 40%</li></ul>

Asset Allocation

An easy solution is to buy index funds for stocks, bonds, and even real estate, so you get exposure to each. The cheapest index fund I’ve found is Vanguard <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buffett-advice-5-vanguard-funds-194833003.html">and they are widely recommended</a>. They obviously have many different products so it requires a bit of research before deciding.

Index Funds

I worked in banking for most of my career, and as bankers, we used to laugh at savers. That’s a truth I don’t like to admit. It wasn’t because we liked being right or thought we were smarter; it was…

You Will Destroy Yourself Financially If You Save

Everyone in a critique has a role they must play. The three roles we rely on are presenter, audience, and facilitator.<ul><li>The presenter is the individual sharing work, their role is to: Succinctly describe the problem being solved (or ideas being explored) and present design or content solutions they have come up with</li><li>The audience's role is to: Understand the problem statement and context and ask a lot of questions</li><li>The facilitator’s job is to: Create a schedule for each critique in advance, ensure that everyone in the group stays on the agenda, take notes during critique to help those presenting.</li></ul>

 Establish clear roles

It’s immensely helpful to reiterate the problem being solved before showing any work in a critique.Vocalizing the problem and context for the work—and why it’s a problem or idea worth tackling in the first place—helps establish a foundation from which productive feedback can be given

Ensure everyone understands (and agrees on) the problem

It’s important to know the difference between helpful feedback and unhelpful criticism.If the goal of critique is to help move solutions forward and empower the team, feedback should primarily be presented in the form of exploratory and guiding questions, with an intent of building up and improving the work, and with the mindset of working together as opposed to criticizing the presenter.

Focus on feedback, not criticism

The point of a critique is to explore problems, nurture ideas, and grow the team, primarily through listening and asking questions. You can’t accomplish this goal if you’re constantly checking your phone or working on your computer (or checking Facebook).

4. Laptops (and phones) stay closed

Critique is an important part of any design process, whether you work within a diverse team or independently. The feedback you get through a formal critique can help get you outside your own head in…

Four Things Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique

This is what happens when you hit that Play button:<ul><li>Hundreds of microservices, or tiny independent programs, work together to make one large Netflix service.</li><li>Content legally acquired or licensed is converted into a size that fits your screen, and protected from being copied.</li><li>Servers across the world make a copy of it and store it so that the closest one to you delivers it at max quality and speed.</li><li>When you select a show, your Netflix app cherry picks which of these servers will it load the video from.</li><li>Your lifespan decreases as your binge watching turns you into a couch potato.</li></ul>

In a nutshell: How Netflix works

Netflix estimates that it uses around 700 microservices to control each of the many parts of what makes up the entire Netflix service: one microservice stores what all shows you watched, one deducts the monthly fee from your credit card, one provides your device with the correct video files that it can play, one takes a look at your watching history and uses algorithms to guess a list of movies that you will like, and one will provide the names and images of these movies to be shown in a list on the main menu. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Hundreds of microservices, one giant service

Not long ago, House of Cards came back for the fifth season, finally ending a long wait for binge watchers across the world who are interested in an American politician’s ruthless ascendance to…

How Netflix works: the (hugely simplified) complex stuff that happens every time you hit Play

<ul><li>Ask an interesting question. What is the scientific goal?</li><li>Get the data. How were the data sampled?</li><li>Explore the data. Plot the data. Look for patterns and abnormalities.</li><li>Model the data. Build a model. Fit the model and validate it.</li><li>Communicate and visualize the results. Share the lessons.</li></ul>

What is the data science process?

A year ago, I dropped out of one of the best computer science programs in Canada. I started creating my own data science master’s program using online resources. I realized that I could learn…

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Hannah Pratt
@hapra

How to Organize Books: Cool and Clever Tips

How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time - kwokchain

Virtual Team Building Activities For Remote Teams In 2022

Do Nothing

For the love of God, please tell me what your company does

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Hannah Pratt@hapra

How to Organize Books: Cool and Clever Tips

How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time - kwokchain

Virtual Team Building Activities For Remote Teams In 2022

Do Nothing

For the love of God, please tell me what your company does

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Hannah Pratt
@hapra