Hi there,

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

Thank you for being part of the Presently Reading community with 2,316 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

Lately, I’ve been opening my laptop and have no idea what to work on.

I’m not procrastinating, exactly. It’s more like I’m working on everything and nothing at the same time. I usually have a dozen things open: half-written video scripts, grad school homework, Slack messages from work, and tons of unread emails. My focus is so scattered because I can’t decide what really matters.

That’s why I really resonated with this week’s chapter from Slow Productivity.

Cal Newport suggests defining your missions and doing less.

A mission is more than just a goal. It’s an ongoing focus that guides how you spend your time and creative energy. We should only pursue two or three active missions at a time. For Newport, his original missions were academic research and writing books. He later added a third: teaching as a professor.

After reading about this concept, I sat down and reflected on what my own missions are.

At first, it felt impossible. What about all the other areas of my life besides work? Don’t I need a mission for everything? If I narrow my focus too much, how will I ever manage to accomplish anything?

Then it hit me: having a mission for everything is exactly why I’m not getting anything done.

We’re often conditioned to believe that doing less means accomplishing less. But that’s not true. When you stop trying to do everything, you finally create space to go deeper on the few things that actually matter. The number of hours we work remains the same, but we are spending those hours in more focused and intentional ways.

Imagine living a life where you had a clearly defined mission for work, and then full freedom over the rest of your time.

That always sounded like a fantasy to me because I created goals and objectives for everything. If I had just a couple of clear missions, I’d actually be able to focus.

So, after giving it some thought, I’m committing to two missions:

Producing YouTube videos, and building my new career in grad school (and beyond).

This is a big shift for me. I’m no longer going to focus on writing new books or launching side projects “just because.” When it comes to YouTube, I want to double down on making videos that matter. And when it comes to my professional life, I want to give my full energy to finishing grad school and becoming a rock-solid therapist.

Working on my missions comes first, everything else is extra.

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 area of your life where slow, focused work would make a big difference?

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

🎥 YouTube Video: My YouTuber friend Shnoop recently published a new video about how 26 assassins hunted down one man. This channel will be huge, definitely subscribe if you're interested in high-quality short crime documentaries.

🇧🇻 Note: My wife and I are vacationing to Norway next month. If you have any suggestions for places to visit or things to do, please let me know. Here is a rough note containing a list of activities we've already researched. We will be renting a car and road tripping for several days!