Book Review: The Art of Laziness

Published in 2023, The Art of Laziness by Library Mindsight is marketed as a productivity book. This book was reviewed here per a recommendation.

After reading through about 125 pages of the double-spaced contents of the book in about an hour and a half, a couple of salient aspects illuminate the intended audience and, consequently, the unintended audience.

Unfortunately, I fear I was not among the intended. My suspicions rest on the applicability of the first few "you" statements, which accuse the reader of laziness, procrastination, and, at one point, of spending too much time on video games. My only credentials that even reference video games are a few fond memories of stealthily securing a Blackberry away from one of my unsuspecting parents to sneak in a quick game of Brickbreaker while they weren't looking. I don't play too many video games.

A cleverly positioned chapter that warns against the pitfalls of perfectionism near the beginning of the book keeps the various 'sentences' constructed sans verb vouchsafed from criticism. There are other parts of the writing in this book that either obstruct a clear understanding of the content or provide overzealous explanations of familiar concepts. There are many grammatical, stylistic, and even spacing errors.

Divided into two components, the first part of the book is titled "Mindset" - it provides various anecdotes, quotes, meditation exercises, and antagonizing tidbits of life advice doomed to solicit mostly supercilious responses; for example:

"Don't become so weird with learning things that you start learning local languages spoken in some villages in nowhere" (p. 95)

The second part, 'Tips & Techniques,' contains, in a list format, more broadly practical recommendations for productivity. This second portion is only about 24 pages long and contains information, exercises, and concepts easily found by searching "productivity tips" in a search engine. The chapters in 'Tips & Techniques' are more purposeful than the previous one-hundred pages detailing 'Mindset' and appear somewhat sound, if redundant.

The book also endeavors to drive many of its points home through a liberal use of inspirational quotes (I counted over 30) from figures such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Confucius, etc. I could not locate any quotes by women, though, confirming my suspicions that neither I nor my fellow women were generally accounted for among the target audience.