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Sometimes, we can feel as though we’re stuck in a rut. The daily routine of work, chores, and family begins to become very “samey”. Perhaps we stop at the same coffee shop each morning, grab lunch from the same outlet each day, and invariably spend the evening slumped in front of the tv or computer.

If you’re trying to get inspired – whether for a creative project, or simply towards life change – a routine can actively work against you. Your mind is comfortable with the small bit of world that you see each day, and you never challenge yourself to go beyond your comfort zone.

Here are some simple ways to take small steps outside your usual routine, to dip your toe into the bigger world beyond the wake-work-home-sleep model, to expand your horizons and get inspired…

Take a Different Route to Work

Do you travel to work (or college, or your kids’ school, etc) every day? My bet is you always take the same route – and you probably feel quite put out if you have to divert to a different one. Once a week, why not set off ten minutes earlier and take a different route? Walk down a street you’ve never been through before, or stop off for coffee in a different part of town.

This is a very easy way to give yourself new input from the world: new sights, sounds, perhaps new people to meet along the way. If you’re lucky, you might even find that your new route is better than the old one!

Another way to mix up your commute is to try a different form of transport. If you usually take the train, can you get the bus instead? (It’s often cheaper.) If you normally drive alone, how about carpooling? You’ll save money and have someone to chat to on the way.

Ask a Friend to Recommend a Book

Most of us are quite conservative in our reading habits. Perhaps we only read crime novels, or wouldn’t touch science-fiction with a barge-pole. Maybe we think “literature” is all boring and worthy, or conversely, that “commercial” fiction is trash. Or, we only read non-fiction, or would never dream of picking up a book of poetry.

Ask a friend or colleague to recommend one of their favourite books – ideally, something that changed the way they think, or that they’ve read time and time again. Get hold of a copy and read it. You might be surprised how it sparks new ideas, or opens your mind to a new way of thinking.

Do Something Different in the Evenings

Are your evenings packed with emails and chores? Or, do you spend the evening hours drifting around the house aimlessly, watching television and pretty much filling time until you go to bed? Neither is especially healthy.

Why not go out on a weeknight, for a change? This can make your evening into an event – you’ll go to bed feeling satisfied that you’ve done something interesting and enjoyable. If your weekends are busy with family obligations, going out on a weekday evening can be a great way to do some things out of your usual routine: perhaps a trip to the theatre, to a gallery, or even a museum.

Take a Day Off

One of the most powerful ways to break out of a rut is to take a whole day off. If you don’t have any leave left at work, use a Saturday or Sunday. Cancel all your usual activities and obligations, and give yourself permission to do anything you want with the day. Go for a long, solitary walk; write poetry; go shopping; read a whole blockbuster novel; lie in the grass and gaze at the clouds…

If you’re one of the many people who find it almost impossible to identify what you actually want to do, that’s a good place to start. Write a list of things you might like to do, see, or achieve. Can you do any of them in a day? If you’re really stuck for ideas, try rolling a dice or flipping a coin. What you do doesn’t matter so much as the fact that you do do something!

Have you ever felt stuck in a rut? Do you follow the same routine, day in, day out? What small changes could you make?

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Why You Should Read Personal Development Books

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Since you’re reading Pick the Brain, it’s a safe bet that you’ve got some level of interest in self-improvement, personal development, or simply getting a bit more from life. Whatever your goals, you’re hoping that you’ll find some advice that will help you reach them. You might well read a number of other popular blogs on similar topics, such as Dumb Little Man or Zen Habits.

Yet, although you’re getting some good advice and putting some tips into practice, you might feel like you need a bit more. You’re skimming blogs on coffee breaks at work, or in between childcare duties at home. And with bite-sized posts of 600 words or so, bloggers are only covering individual topics in discreet sections.

If you want to take yourself to a new level, you need to read books as well as blogs.

Why Should I Read Books?

Don’t get me wrong, blogs are great, and you can get true and deep insights from individual blog posts. They’re also easy to fit into your day, and there tends to be a focus on practical, easy-to-implement advice. But books can complement blogs powerfully:

Books Give You Greater Depth

It’s an obvious point, but a three hundred page book allows an  author to fully explore a particular theme or theory: a three hundred word blog post doesn’t allow for much depth. Books can help you to make a paradigm shift or step up a level in your thinking.

When You Read Books, You Focus More

Are you skimming this? Look how I’ve put in subheaders to help you follow the argument. If this was a book, the paragraphs would be longer and you might have pages and pages without a subheading. When we read on paper, we tend to be much more focused than when reading online: no stopping to answer emails or see what’s being said on Twitter.

You’ve Paid For The Book

We often value things we’ve paid for over things that are free. Whilst I’m fully in favour of the amount of free content available online, I do find that I’m more likely to commit myself to in-depth reading when I’ve paid for a book.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you of the “why” – now you just need to find time to do some reading…

Finding Time To Read Books

With most of us spending a lot of the day in front of a computer screen, blogs slip easily into little gaps of time, with content designed to be read in just a few minutes. Books are trickier – do you buy books and leave them unread on a shelf for months, even years? Do you make resolutions to read every day, but end up falling into bed each evening without having cracked the spine of your book?

I find that the best way to “make time” is simply to get into a book: once I’m hooked, the extra time seems to materialize from nowhere! Having said that, you might find it easier if you can establish a routine of reading at a particular time of day:

First Thing In The Morning

Reading something motivational can be a great start to your day. The beginning of the day is a great time to work on any big goal: it means that your reading won’t be squeezed out by other demands on your time.

In Your Lunch Hour

If you tend to work through lunch – or if you end up watching YouTube clips and looking at LOLcats – try reading a book instead. It gives your eyes a break from the glowing screen. Find a park bench (which means you’re actually outside!) and steal half an hour away from fluorescent lights and glowing computer screens to really immerse yourself in a different world. Just this switch in environment will allow more absorption and enjoyment of the material.

End Of The Working Day

If you’re a freelancer, or if you have a lot of control over your own hours, you might find that reading a few pages of your book is a good way to close the working day. This can also help you to “switch off” from work mode.

What Should I Read?

So you’ve got the time and the desire to read some useful, insightful books … now you just need to find the reading matter.

I’ve got a few favorites, but I won’t recommend them here: your needs might well differ from mine. This is how I found the books that I now love…

Read Book Reviews

Most popular books are heavily reviewed on Amazon.com. Don’t focus too much on the star rating – instead, read some of the reviews. You can often get a feel for which reviewers have similar objectives to yours. Sometimes, one or two star reviews don’t mean a book is bad – they just mean that a reader thought it would be a different sort of book!

Don’t just rely on Amazon though: I’ve found it very useful to read book reviews by bloggers who I admire. You might want to check out these lists of reviews:

If you find that everyone seems to be recommending one book, it’s probably worth checking it out!

•    Steve Pavlina’s list of Personal Development Books (very short description of each book)
•    Tim Brownson’s Inspirational Books By Inspirational Authors (short reviews of each book)
•    Trent Hamm’s Twenty Big Ideas: Detailed Summaries and Reviews of Great Personal Finance and Development Books (does what it says in the title!)

Do you have any favorite self-improvement, personal development or similar books? Do you struggle to make time for reading books? Let us know about your tips, experiences and challenges in the comments…

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There’s so much to be gained from reading books. The mind-expanding benefits are huge – and bear in mind that, while there’s a lot of great online reading (like Pick the Brain ), anything written by great thinkers in the past is often only available in books.

If I’ve not convinced you yet, here are just some great reasons to pick up a book regularly:

Escape

When life feels like it’s all getting too much, escaping into a book for half an hour can really make a difference to your mood. The great thing about reading a book is that it’s something that can completely absorb your mind: you’ll find that you can often tune out background chatter on a train, or the TV blaring on the other side of the room.

Entering into a world of fictional characters and their problems also lets you “tune out” the chatter in your own mind. When you’ve got a to-do list that never seems to get any shorter, or when you find your attention jumping between a dozen different things (as is often the case when reading online), you’ll find that books form a welcome oasis where you can escape from the stresses of life.

Entertainment

Books are also hugely entertaining. You might be reading a thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat, a sci-fi novel that sets out a brilliantly imaginative view of the future, a biography of a colourful historical figure, or a scientific book that opens up a new world. If you struggle through the first thirty or forty pages of a book and you’re bored, it’s worth seriously considering picking something else (don’t feel obliged to finish a novel just because you’ve started it).

And don’t dismiss books as less entertaining and exciting than television and movies. Words can do things which images and sound can’t: they can take us deep into a character’s mind, delight us with cunning wordplay, and deliver a much deeper, richer story than is possible in an hour-long episode of your favourite show. And, of course, books don’t break off every fifteen minutes for a commercial…

Learning

Of course, escape and entertainment might be nice, but they aren’t all that books offer. One of the biggest reasons to turn to books is because they offer an outstanding wealth of learning – at a far cheaper price than going on a course. Whatever you want to learn, it’s a safe bet that there are books on it. From computer programming to Latin, DIY to planning a wedding, there’s a huge amount available in your bookstore (and your local library).

Don’t dismiss fiction as a source of learning, either; great novelists can give you insights into people’s motivations, as you read about the characters in the novel. You can also learn lots of small things along the way: perhaps new words in a literary or classic novel, new facts in a historical novel, or new scientific information in a sci-fi novel. (As a young teen, my introduction to supernovas and black holes was through Star Trek novels…)

Now, despite having loads of great reasons to read more books, many of us (myself included) complain that “there just isn’t time.” But it’s always possible to make time for something important. Here’s a few ideas:

Schedule Your Reading

Whenever you want to fit something into your life that you’d like to do but never get around to, it’s worth scheduling it. That can seem a bit silly for something like “reading”, but it really does work. How about setting aside half an hour every evening (maybe before dinner) to read?

Turn off the Television

How much TV do you watch every day? Can you find an extra half-hour to read, simply by switching off the TV? If you’re like me and spend much more time glued to a computer screen than a television screen, how about switching off the computer at a set time each night (nine pm works well), then reading for the rest of the evening? You might even find that you sleep better when your mind isn’t buzzing from emails, Twitters and trying to keep up with the never-sleeping online world…

Read During Your Commute and Lunch Hour

If you commute to work by train or bus, take a book with you, instead of buying a newspaper. If you drive, you could listen to audio books. If you cycle like me, you need your eyes and your ears on the traffic, but how about using your lunch hour to read instead? Get away from the office, perhaps to a local coffee shop, and put your feet up with your book for a bit – you’ll probably have a much more productive afternoon than you do when you try to work through lunch.

Do you read as many books as you’d like to? What reasons do you have for reading books (or for not reading books!) and what tips do you have on making time to do so?

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About the writer: Ali is a postgraduate student and professional writer. She runs Alpha Student (grab the RSS feed), a blog which aims to help students get the most of their time at university.

Image courtesy of Striatic.