Doable by Deborah Reber

New year, new resolutions, fresh start. Although I haven't been doing a very good job blogging - exams seem to come much sooner than last year, and I fell sick :/ I spent the weekend drinking cup after cup of warm water to try and reduce a cough.

But you know, the whole fresh start sentiment counts. Which is why Doable seemed like a good book to read. Subtitled: The Girl's Guide to Accomplishing Just About Anything, I was hoping for a dose of inspiration and practical advice. And yes, I was curious about what kind of special methods girls use to do stuff.

For most of the book, nothing should come as a shock, especially if you've read self-help books before or attended goal setting lessons before (I had them many, many times over the course of my school years). The book goes through 8 steps to achieving your goals, starting with goal setting (remember SMART goals and you're fine), and then going into breaking up the goals into manageable sub-goals, making sure you actually start, getting others to support you, and so on and so forth. Every chapter ends with a quick recap.

Everything is really solid, practical advice that applies to both genders. The only "girly" thing about this book is that all the examples are that of successful girls. If you think about it, that's sad - does it imply that most books focus on boys and therefore girls need their own niche of self-help for what is essentially the same things? I don't think I want to continue down this path - this is the way to ranting.

Out of all the chapters, the one that I learnt from the most (and liked the most) was Chapter 6, "Do the Work". The author goes through a variety of ways people do things, from the short spurters, who can only focus for short periods of time, to the easily distracted (me!) and cliff divers and so on. Each section has a description of how said category-person does work, along with hints on how to use that style productively. I thought it was useful, and I don't think I saw this before.

I think that this book would be useful for people who want to start, but don't know how. There's nothing earth-shaking in here, but then again, there aren't really any earth-shaking secrets to getting things done. All you need to do is to take it one step at a time. Like Lao Tzu says, "千里之行，始於足下" (A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step).

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.