Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.
Today’s book recommendation is an older pick that I read years ago, yet the lessons I learned from it have continued to be relevant. It’s a new year and while some of us are yelling, “Yay, productivity!” many others of us are saying, “Productivity? In this economy?” Yes, this is a self-help productivity book but I want to offer a reframe: I like to apply “productivity” hacks to do less of what I don’t want to do and more of what I do want to do. For example, using productivity advice to spend less time in email and more time making pasta from scratch. If you’re a high-achieving Type-A personality, then this book definitely should be on your TBR.
Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu
I initially thought I was not necessarily the target audience for this book. It’s very heteronormative, and there’s a lot of “women are like this” and “men are like that” in this book, to which I apply my usual nonfiction rule of taking what’s best and leaving the rest. That being said, the author, Tiffany Dufu, is a high-achiever, Type-A personality and I definitely identify with that. Dufu writes about how this behavior is not sustainable, especially if one is going for perfection both professionally and as a mom and wife. She was juggling work as a major gift fundraiser while weekly meal planning and prep on top of tracking every ounce of breast milk that her infant took in and every ounce of poop that came out. The amount of things she was trying to do and how tightly she held onto control of household tasks was extreme and she was feeling the strain.
She writes about what she calls “imaginary delegation,” for instance. One week she didn’t cut up the week’s meat and put it in the freezer because she thought that if she didn’t do it and just left it hanging out, her husband would pick up it and automatically just take on the task that she had been doing forever. This is what she calls “imaginary delegation” and it does not set up you or your partner for success! Understandably, she harbored a lot of resentment over the split of household and parenting duties according to typical gender roles.
This is a really useful book about communication and Dufu talking with her husband about her needs and how they can support each other. It’s also about letting go of how things are done. For example, when she did the meal planning, there would be a variety of meals over the course of the week. When she asked her husband to do the meal planning, he made a large amount of a single dish and that’s what they ate for the next week. She learns over and over again that just because it’s not the way she would do something, doesn’t mean it’s wrong or even bad.
This book may have come out a few years ago but some of the lessons continue to have a lot of value.
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English (US) · 