It’s the end of the week, you’ve been grinding since Monday, and we both know that very little actual work is getting done today.
After all, you wouldn’t be on WSO right now if you were in the middle of a fire drill.
Instead of endlessly clicking through WSO / FaceBook / BarStool / Reddit / Etc., why don’t we turn that wasted dead time into something more productive?
Things to Read While Pretending to Work is a weekly column compiling interesting and useful articles from across the interwebs. It’s designed to be a mental break from work, while also giving you some tangible, actionable advice that will make your life better.
I’ll follow the same format each week — one article loosely aligned to three categories: WORK, LIFE, and FITNESS.
Take a read and let me know what you think of the format and contents in the comments.
Enjoy the weekend!
Work
The Buffett Formula — How To Get Smarter (link: Farnam Street) - If you don’t know about the Farnam Street Blog, get your ass over there and absorb some knowledge. This article is a good one to start with, and contains advice from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on how to get smarter.
Their formula is simple, but it’s not easy.
Life
Books to Base Your Life on (The Reading List) (link: Ryan Holiday) - Books can serve a number of purposes in your life: entertainment, escape, companionship, information, etc. The books in this article serve a different purpose: they teach you how to live. They’ll change how you think, how you act, and how interact with the world and people around you.
I’ve read 8 books from this list and loved them all, and the rest are sitting on my bookshelf or my Amazon wish list. If you’re looking for a short, simple book to get started then try On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.
Fitness
How to Choose Wine Infographic (link: Wine Folly) - When I say articles will be “loosely” aligned to these categories, I mean very loosely. I use ‘fitness’ to describe anything health-related: my workouts, my sleep, and what I eat and drink. I drink a lot of wine, therefore it goes in the fitness category. Let’s just assume this logic makes sense, unless you want to read another BuzzFeed post like “19 Delicious Superfood Combos That You Need To Try”.
Anyway, if you are clueless about how to buy wine then this infographic will help. No more feeling lost and confused by the 20-page wine menu, and no more looking like an idiot in front of clients at dinner by ordering a bottle of “two-buck chuck”. Order with confidence and impress even the biggest win snob.
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Is this post useful? Should I write another next week? Let me know in the comments.
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Alistair Clark is a former management consultant that runs worklifefitness.co, a website with realistic work-life balance advice for people in finance. I help people become one of the best at what they do for a living —a top-performer— without sacrificing everything else in their life.
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Download Kindle to your comp and practice alt tab. It amazes me how I get paid to read at work. :)
I do the same as you, but I have a friend who takes it to the next level.
On nights/weekends he'll use his personal computer to copy-paste entire blog articles into a word doc with the company's letterhead, and then he'll email it to his work email. Then at work he just opens up the word doc and pretends he's working on some big report or something.
No alt-tab required and no internet history. Needless to say, but his job is boring.
Haha, that's some serious commitment. I've definitely taken advantage of it, a large part of the reason I've passed a couple levels of the CFA is because of my free time at work. It's sad though, the amount of time people waste at work just browsing the web or playing clash of clans on their phones (As I sit here typing on WSO).
Did this as an intern. I would copy and paste entire online poker strategy forums, paste them into a word doc, and read for half the day. Then I hit the casino at night. Those were the good ol' days
Do people sit around checking people's browser history? I thought it was kinda like as long as there are no dings for inappropriateness or whatever, you're good. Now I'm paranoid.
Thanks for posting!
When I worked in IT, I would have long compile times, I read Project Gutenberg. Lots of free titles and some good stuff. I read a lot of "The Classics" that I sparknoted in HS and knowledge of them has actually come in quite handy during networking situations.
IS Facebook banned on BBs computer screens ?
Good post, thanks. And yes, definitely do it again next week.
Is it frowned upon to read on the job if you have nothing else to do? Say you're at a BB in IBD
If you get caught, yes. May vary per BB, but at my BB for sure it was considered bad form - then again pretty much all analysts and interns did it to some extent.
I'm in if you keep posting, all good topics from my view!
Keep posting! SB!
thanks for sharing!
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