Hi there,

Happy Saturday! I hope you had an absolutely fantastic week 🥰

Thank you for being part of the Presently Reading community with 2,314 bookworms from around the world.

​For the month of July 2025, we're reading ​Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World​ by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.​

Enjoy!

Warmly,
Maneet (pronounced muh-neet)

Weekly Bookmark

I used to think being busy meant being important.

In my first corporate job, I loved the idea of having a full calendar. I’d try to join every every meeting and reply to Slack messages instantly because that’s what I thought success looked like. If you were somebody always doing something, it meant you were doing something right.

But looking busy isn’t the same as being productive.

That’s what Cal Newport calls pseudo-productivity. It’s the illusion of getting things done simply because you look like you’re working. He argues that true productivity isn’t about constant motion. Rather, it’s about deliberate, focused effort on the work that actually matters.

This is a big reason why I’ve never vibed with corporate culture.

People seem to be rewarded for being reactive. Jumping into threads, chiming in on meetings, pinging people constantly. It all feels like progress. But most of it just clutters your brain and calendar. It creates the illusion of momentum, but in reality it takes forever for anything to actually get done.

I don’t know, maybe this is just the introvert inside me talking 🤷🏽‍♂️

With that being said, I’ve been experimenting with something simpler.

Back in early April, I ran a two-week experiment: one hour of focused work on my YouTube channel every morning. That’s it. No multitasking. No “strategy” planning. Just straight up execution on the work that matters, which was mostly scripting or editing.

The results speak for themselves.

I made four or five solid videos in those two weeks, more than I’d produced in months of scattered effort. It reminded me that consistency matters way more than complexity. One focused hour beats ten chaotic ones, every time.

So here’s a lesson I’m sitting with this week, and one I challenge you to reflect on, too.

Busyness is not the badge of honor we think it is. Just because something fills time doesn’t mean it fills your goals. It’s easy to fall into pseudo-productivity, especially when everyone around you is doing it, but I’m starting to see the value of slow, focused, intentional work.

Discussion Highlight

Every week, I'll select a comment from our community discussions and highlight it in the following week's email.

Last week, our discussion question was: What’s one thing you contribute to that makes you feel happiest?

Jana shared:

Want to be featured in a future email? Participate in today's discussion over on Patreon (free, just create an account) and I'll select one every week!

My Favorite Things This Week

💌 Newsletter: I've been subscribed to Alice's newsletter, Internetly, for a while now. I enjoyed this week's issue about different ways to get into the writing flow. It felt very relatable, and I loved how all the tips were unconventional.

🔌 Amazon Product: My wife wanted to install some fun new string lights in our living room this week. These are normally pretty simple, but I wanted to integrate them into our smart system, so they turn on with all our other lights using Alexa. To accomplish this, I purchased a Govee Smart plug (not sponsored) to turn them into a smart light. It was super simple to set up, and it works flawlessly!

✈️ YouTube Video: Taylor Bell is another creator I've been subscribed to for a while. She recently decided to focus full-time on content creation, and I appreciate how much transparency she has with the behind-the-scenes of her business. This recent video about "passive" income and how she manages to work while traveling was fun to watch.