Time to unpack the pile of unread books that have been sitting on the bookshelf at home
~Monosus' "Reading Club" #11~

I was attracted by the title and wanted to read it, but it has been on my backlog. The author is Satoshi Nakajima, a former Microsoft employee who created the concept of right-clicking. Starting this year, Monosus has introduced a full-flex system, and there are many work style reforms in the world, so I brought this book with me, thinking it would be a good opportunity to reconsider my own work style.

The book is divided into four major parts, and the first chapter lists the following three reasons why work never gets done:

1. I take on jobs too easily.
2. Don't do it until the last minute.
3. Don't estimate your plans.
   

“1. Making easy promises” is a pattern like, for example, taking a math test, where you think the first basic questions will be easy and make all your estimates, but then the applied questions take too long and you don’t finish as planned.

"2. Leaving things until the last minute" is when you end up doing small things like replying to emails, and then you don't have time to do the important work, so even though you work through the night, you still can't finish in time.

"3. Not making estimates of the plan" is a pattern in which features that were not initially included in the program are added later, causing the program to be delayed overall or end up being different from what was originally planned, resulting in failure to proceed according to plan.

I think everyone has experienced this. Even when creating a document, when you actually start working on it, all sorts of things pop into your head, and what you intended to do in a day ends up taking two or three days.

So how should we use time? In the second chapter, the author explains the time management technique (Rocket Start Time Management) and describes the benefits of mastering it. The third chapter describes how the time management technique was created, and the fourth chapter onwards introduces the actual know-how.

What was interesting was that by stopping trying to do things as quickly as possible, a sense of tension was created.

"As soon as possible" is a vague instruction with no deadline, so I thought that by setting a specific deadline, things would run more efficiently. In fact, even if I was told to do it "as soon as possible," I would still be in trouble. I have other projects, and I don't know how to prioritize them. Even in my daily work, I had asked people to stop using "as soon as possible" as much as possible, but I realized that this was true after all.

I've always loved art, and even when I was in my hometown of Hiroshima, I looked forward to going to art museums and galleries on my days off. I picked up the book I brought with me today, "Art no Iriguchi: Utsukushii Mono, Sekai no Owarikata [European Edition]," because I had read the previous volume, "America Edition," and found it very interesting.

From Picasso and Van Gogh to David Bowie and Robert Capa, it features not only paintings but also photography and music artists.
It's about art, but the content is more like a story... For example, the painter Henri Matisse actually liked paper cutting and continued to do it in his later years. It describes in such detail the era and environment in which the artist lived that it makes you feel as if you were watching from the sidelines. There are 359 short stories of about 2 or 3 pages. Some chapters are connected like a film, so it's the kind of content that you can read in your spare time without getting bored.

The author, Mr. Kawachi, is a curator of contemporary art and photography, and is currently the chief director of the Amana Photo Collection. He is so knowledgeable about a variety of things that it seems like he is always thinking about art. In addition, when introducing Matisse, he uses the Sex Pistols as an example, explaining him from a slightly unusual perspective.

It's not stiff, but allows you to touch art in a more gentle way. It can be a chance to learn about artists you don't know, and if you do, it can deepen your understanding. I think this book is truly a "gateway to art."

I read it for a while, basking in the memory of how cool Kikuchi was in person, but it gradually piled up and two years passed (laughs). I managed to get tickets to an event where I could meet Naruyoshi-san for the second time in person, so I brought it with me, hoping to finish reading it before then.

As the title suggests, the book is about how I hate current events, and in the preface it says, "Current events have the tendency to make people more adult, like liking current events = being an adult, but that power didn't have any effect on me."
Besides his main job, Kikuchi also writes reviews on a wide range of topics including clothes, music, and movies. Oh, I'll read some of them... "What news are you getting angry about and getting complicated about? You're bored. Anyway, this is so good, Robert Longo's new work. It's really going to change your worldview, and now I'm 50 years old and still like that." I thought Kikuchi's perspective on the Akihabara massacre and the Lehman Shock at the time was interesting.

I used to think it would be embarrassing if I didn't know about current events, and that I should read the newspaper, but it turns out this is okay too. I recommend this book to both people who like current events and people who don't, as I think it will be seen in a variety of ways.

What kind of things do you talk about on your radio show, Mr. Kikuchi?