Mind / Free tier / fills one slot
The Reading List
Twenty books, papers, talks and courses that changed how we work across the five axes. Each one has a single line on why it is worth the hours. Nothing is rehosted here — every link goes to the source, and none of them are affiliate links.
Entries
20
Total time
113h
Axes
5
Axis
Type
20 of 20 entries shown
| Title | Author | Type | Axis | Time | Why it is worth it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Random Walk Down Wall Street1973 | Burton Malkiel | book | Money | 11H | Read it once to stop paying people to guess the market for you. |
| Your Money or Your Life1992 | Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez | book | Money | 7H | The chapter that converts spending into hours of your life is worth the whole book. |
| The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing2006 | Larimore, Lindauer, LeBoeuf | book | Money | 8H | Boring, procedural and correct; the closest thing to a checklist for index investing. |
| The Psychology of Money2020 | Morgan Housel | book | Money | 5H | The clearest argument that behaviour, not arithmetic, decides most financial outcomes. |
| Getting Things Done2001 | David Allen | book | Time | 7H | Dated in its tooling, still the best description of why open loops cost attention. |
| Deep Work2016 | Cal Newport | book | Time | 6H | Skip the manifesto, keep the scheduling protocols in part two. |
| Inside the mind of a master procrastinator2016 | Tim Urban | talk | Time | 14M | Fourteen minutes that reframe deadlines as the only working mechanism most people have. |
| How to Do Great Work2023 | Paul Graham | essay | Time | 40M | A long essay on choosing what to work on, which is the decision that dominates every schedule. |
| Thinking, Fast and Slow2011 | Daniel Kahneman | book | Mind | 15H | Long and uneven; read parts one and four and you have the useful third of it. |
| Learning How to Learn2014 | Barbara Oakley, Terrence Sejnowski | course | Mind | 15H | Free, evidence-led, and the spaced-repetition sections change how you study within a week. |
| Make It Stick2014 | Brown, Roediger, McDaniel | book | Mind | 6H | The research behind retrieval practice, written for people who have to apply it. |
| How to Take Smart Notes2017 | Sönke Ahrens | book | Mind | 5H | The one note-taking book that explains why the writing, not the filing, does the work. |
| Scientific Principles of Strength Training2015 | Israetel, Hoffmann, Smith | book | Body | 10H | Where volume, intensity and fatigue management stop being opinions. |
| Strength training frequency and hypertrophy2016 | Schoenfeld et al. | paper | Body | 30M | The meta-analysis usually quoted second-hand; twenty minutes to read the actual thing. |
| Why We Sleep2017 | Matthew Walker | book | Body | 7H | Read with scepticism — several claims are overstated — but the behavioural advice holds. |
| Nutrition for strength and physique athletes2019 | Eric Helms | talk | Body | 55M | A calm hour on protein, deficits and why adherence beats optimisation. |
| Retinoids: mechanisms of action2006 | Mukherjee et al. | paper | Skin | 35M | Explains what retinoids actually do to the dermis, which makes the twelve-week wait obvious. |
| Sunscreen and photoageing: a randomised trial2013 | Hughes et al., Annals of Internal Medicine | paper | Skin | 25M | The four-year trial that makes daily sunscreen the least arguable step in any routine. |
| The Skincare Bible2018 | Anjali Mahto | book | Skin | 5H | A dermatologist's baseline, useful mainly for what it tells you to stop buying. |
| Understanding cosmetic ingredient labels2021 | Lab Muffin Beauty Science | course | Skin | 3H | Teaches label reading properly, which is most of what separates a claim from a formula. |
- Nothing is rehosted. Every link points at the original source.
- No affiliate links, so nothing on the list pays us anything.
- An entry is removed when we would no longer recommend it, rather than quietly downgraded.
- Time cost is an estimate, and deliberately honest about long books.
The Lifemaxing Playbook turns this reading into a working method: a review cadence, a note structure and a scoring sheet for what you actually applied.
See the playbook