Lauren Gemmell

Food, Fitness, and Technology

Category: Books

The Next Step: How I deal with anxiety

Last time I wrote about how I managed to find a new way to feel more productive at work. Writing three concrete things to accomplish each day has lead to a dramatic change in how I feel. But, what about the issues that are too large to fix by the end of the day?

Anxiety

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Three things: Experimenting with working less and feeling more productive

I have a post-it note stuck to my monitor at work. It says “Get shit done”.
Bitches Get Shit Done

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Audio Books and Podcasts for Tech Women and Entrepreneurs

For the last year or so I have been listening to many Audio books and podcasts. It started for two reasons, I realised that I wasn’t taking the time to learn new things (outside of work) and I wanted to use time out walking a young Whisky pup more effectively.

After a year, here are some of my favourites:

  • Being Boss. Podcast for creative entrepreneurs, but generally useful for anyone that wants to get stuff done.
  • The Creative Penn. Podcast for author entrepreneurs, aimed at self-published authors and how to grow their business and multiple streams of income.
  • The Sell More Books Show. Podcast for author entrepreneurs, again aimed at self-published authors, but more focused on recent developments.
  • Tech Forward. Podcast about diversity in technology, this is a newer one on my list, but I love the blend on entrepreneurship across many industries and roles.
  • The Read to Lead Podcast, about the books on leadership you should be reading, each episode is a 30 minute overview with the author on a different leadership topic. I have bought so many audiobooks because of this one podcast!
  • FT Startup Stories, another podcast of interviews but this time with founders of startups. Episodes cover a range of startups – not just tech ones.
  • The Guilty Feminist. A great slice of feminist humour, I’m a feminist but…
  • Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. It’s sort of obvious from the title, I read this to understand myself and others better, it was gaming changing for me.
  • Ego-free Leadership: Ending the Unconscious Habits That Hijack Your Business this book again helped me understand why work or personal relationships have conflict. Understanding my own pinch-points has been super helpful in trying to move past them.
  • Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity The first book at our Manager’s Book Club at work. Made me think a lot about the sort of boss I want to be, something I come back to time and time again.
  • The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. While this may not be as relevant to the sort of team I run, maybe there are similarities with different divisions in tech organisations, could you get similar benefits if you merge tech and product teams?
  • The Sales Acceleration Formula I switched roles earlier this year, and am now building out tools for internal teams, not quite sales, but close. I wanted to understand more about these functions and the sort of tools that help or hinder. But also how do you measure success?
  • The Multi-Hyphen Method: Work Less, Create More and Design a Career That Works for You. To be honest I am not really clear how I ended up buying this book (surprisingly Ctrl Alt Del is not one of the podcasts I regularly listen to), but I am glad I did. If the world of work is changing, and what people expect from their jobs is too, it’s really interesting to hear more about how we should adapt.
  • Being Boss, not the podcast this time but the book. I haven’t finished it yet, but I am already altering my boundaries, sticking up post-it note mantras and experimenting with my personal processes.

Books set in or about Orkney

Ring of Brodgar, Orkney

I recently read a book about Orkney called Orkney Twilight (then its follow ups The Salt March and The Dark Isle). I loved the books, but what I loved even more is the location, the remoteness, the history, and the life.

Purely because of these books I am now planning a trip to Orkney (hopefully later this summer) with both Matt and Whisky; it’ll be a first time in Orkney for all of us.

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