Patrick has been a close and dear friend for about 6 years now. He is well versed in what it takes to make your life easier on yourself. He cares deeply about not just making his family’s life better, but also making the lives of all of his reader’s lives better. So when he told us that he would be releasing his first book, I jumped at the the chance to grab it.
Keeping It Straight is a collection of 48 essays that he had written and released on one of his many online ventures. So I had read most of them when they were released. He did divulge on his podcast ‘Enough’ that every single one of the 48 essays was looked at, edited, revised or expanded upon for inclusion in the book. He structures the book into three themes (which are also the subtitle of the book) titled: You, Me and Everything Else. The You theme are posts that he hopes will touch us as a reader of his work. The Me theme shows some posts that affect him as a writer and a person in hopes that we, his readers, will find inspiration like he did. The Everything Else section deals with, well, everything else that we as beings on this planet have to deal with day-to-day.
He discussed money, time management, honesty, blame, worry, karma and many other things that we all struggle with all the time. He provides simple answers for us to overcome the things in our life that get in our way. He also throws in a good bit of himself into these pages. There are a number of essays that cover his life as he grew up in New Orleans and the experiences that would shape the man that he is today.
My only disappointment with the book, and it is minor, is that there is no new material in it. I know that there are some posts that he expanded on, but I was hoping for an entire volume of “Rhone-isms” to fill my day to enjoy. If I know Patrick, I am sure that he is hard at work on his next book, and hopefully, there will be some new material for all of us to enjoy together.
Patrick entered the Internet world as a Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity blogger (like I did, way back in 2006). One of his first widely read piece was his white paper for his productivity and organizational system, that he lovingly dubbed Org-Fu. He is also the creator of the Dash/Plus system for pen/paper list makers to denote the status of list items.
Today, he still writes about productivity, but it is at such a higher lever than just GTD, his writing teaches all of us how to be more productive, but more importantly, better human beings. He is one of the most talented writers of this generation, and I am proud and honored to call him my friend.
You can get a paperback copy of Keeping It Straight from the book’s website and it is available for the Amazon Kindle.
