Hi friends,

Happy Saturday. And a happy Valentine's Day to you as well 🥰

For February, we'll be reading Unhinged Habits by Jonathan Goodman.

For March, we'll be reading Shift by Ethan Kross.

— Maneet

Weekly Discussion

I’ve been working remotely for over six years now.

By some stroke of luck, I ended up working mostly remotely right before the pandemic hit. I was still going into the office occasionally, but I was fortunate to have a job that was agnostic to where I was physically located. When the world went on lockdown, I was already a few months ahead of the game with my home office all set up and ready to go.

Those days of commuting to an office every day feel like a different lifetime.

I know many people have gone back to in-person work in recent years, so this is a privilege that I still get to carry. However, after working remotely for over half a decade now, it’s hard to imagine going back. Even though I tend to work from different places throughout the week, a majority of my work still gets done while I sit on the living room sofa.

Remote work has its perks, but it’s not all roses and rainbows.

Let me paint a picture of what a day might look like for me. It’s time to work, and I sit down at my laptop to join my first Zoom meeting. I continue to join various Zoom meetings, back-to-back, for the next few hours. I finally have a short break in my schedule, so I use it to do some actual work that is on my to-do list. A version of this cycle repeats for the entire day until it’s time to unplug. I close my laptop and turn on the TV right in front of me.

Sure, it’s nice being at home doing all of this, but do you see the problem?

The responsibility to take meaningful breaks is on me.

In this week’s reading of Unhinged Habits by Jonathan Goodman, I learned about the concept of cognitive snacks. These are short activities you can do during your breaks to recharge yourself. The best ones tend to involve something physical, like getting up for a short walk or even doing a little errand or chore. They force you to break focus between tasks and reset yourself before continuing on to the next thing.

When we work in a physical office, these cognitive snacks are built in.

Commuting is a cognitive snack. It provides space between home and work. A short walk to the conference room is a cognitive snack. It forces you to change locations before starting your next meeting. A trip to the kitchen for a glass of water is a cognitive snack. It creates an opportunity to bump into people and have micro-conversations. All of these little moments may not sound glamorous, but they truly add up and make a big difference during the course of a day.

All of this got me thinking about how I can incorporate more cognitive snacks into my own routine.

Working at home has plenty of opportunity for these types of breaks, but nobody is going to hold you accountable to them. Nobody is going to force you to get up between Zoom meetings or go for a short walk before starting your day. If you ask me, this is why working remotely can be extremely challenging if you do it full-time. Our bodies aren’t designed for it.

Speaking from experience, I felt that burnout for quite a while during COVID. Now, I make an active effort to leave the house and work from different places a few times each week.

I’d love to hear from you. Are you good at taking breaks and having cognitive snacks?

Reply and let me know!

Weekly YouTube Video

​🎬 My Bold 2026 Kindle Predictions (I'm Probably Wrong)​

I just published my annual Kindle predictions video, and once again, I’m fully prepared to be wrong. I talk through what I realistically think Amazon will do in 2026, especially around the Kindle Scribe and AI features, and then share my personal wishlist for Kindle software improvements. If you’re curious where Kindle might be headed, this one’s worth a watch.

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