Readers of this blog will know that I am an avid consumer of books. In my ebook, From Apps to Zen: 26+ Ideas for Building a Business with Balance, the letter 'K' stands for Knowledge and my goal to read a (non-fiction) book a week (which I have managed this year!).

Being a minimalist, I tend not to buy and collect books but prefer to borrow them from the library or friends or pick them up second-hand in charity shops (the Oxfam bookshop in Bloomsbury is excellent). But there are a few key books that I have bought and that I return to again and again, and I wanted to share a few key ways that these books have shifted my perspectives on work and life.

So if you are looking for a little inspiration or a new direction for 2012, get some of these onto your Christmas wish list!

1. Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, David Rock

I first saw David Rock being interviewed at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in February this year. He was speaking about mindfulness and our brains and how we can work with our brain rather than against it to be more effective and productive. I bought this book from Amazon before the interview was even finished (so much for paying attention in the present moment!). Using the characters of a self-employed consultant and a corporate executive, he follows their working day showing on one hand the difficulties of the modern workplace, and on the other how much easier things are when we work with our brain. A fascinating book that will illuminate your working habits in a new way.

Perspective Shift: Our pre-frontal cortex (the thinking brain) doesn't cope well with doing more than one task at a time. To get stuff done, single task don't multitask.

2. Full Catastrophe Living: How to Cope with Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Meditation, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn

An expert in the area of stress and meditation, Dr. Kabat-Zinn runs the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Written over 20 years ago, this book is a practical handbook for anyone who wants to delve deep into the science and practice of mindfulness and how it can be used to deal with stress in our everyday lives. I read this book a year ago during my month in Amsterdam researching mindfulness at work and its key messages have influenced my work today.

Perspective Shift: You only have moments to live. Every moment is a new beginning. We can choose to ruminate in the past or dream about the future, or, choose to live intentionally here in the present, from moment to moment.

3. Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, Scott Belsky

Scott Belsky is CEO of Behance, one of the most innovative and creative companies in the world. Though his work and his blog, the 99%, he has observed that Edison's statement that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration is true. Making Ideas Happen is a guidebook to ensuring your creative ideas happen through getting organized, collaborating and leading effectively.

Perspective Shift: Not all projects are created equal. Create an 'energy line' of your current projects in order of the energy they should receive. Use this when prioritising your work.

4. How To Be Free, Tom Hodgkinson

A funny book with a serious message, How To Be Free asks how can we be free of the absurdities of modern life with its focus on working to buy more stuff and to get a bigger house. While I don't aspire to some of the rural bliss that Tom advocates, being too much of a city girl, reading this book was a key driver in my current minimalist lifestyle.

Perspective Shift: Stop working to buy more stuff you don't need to impress people you don't like.

5. Happiness at Work: Be Resilient, Motivated, and Successful - No Matter What, Dr Srikumar S. Rao

Based on his popular courses at top business schools, Dr. Rao poses the question of how we can be happier at work and delivers 35 digestible nuggets of wisdom of how we can get there. A chance find while 'wasting' some time in a bookstore, this book has been a solid companion to me this year.

Perspective Shift: Positive thinking is bad for you. If we stop labelling things that happen to us as 'good' or 'bad' we can start to see that life is just series of moments ebbing and flowing, and that everything, happiness and sadness, passes.

6. Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values, Fred Kofman

I came across the work of Fred Kofman and particularly the ideas in this book again in my month in Amsterdam. One of the owners of The Hub also ran a company called Realize! and there was a downloadable summary of this book on their website. A conscious business is one that operates with integrity and creates value for all of its stakeholders, employees and customers. In these interesting times when the Occupy movement are asking for an alternative to capitalism, conscious business with its emphasis on responsibility and authenticity could be the way forward. I wish every business leader would read this book.

Perspective Shift: The power of Unconditional Responsibility. You have the power to become the main character in your life and choose how you respond to external factors.

7. The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, Tim Ferriss

I have written many times on this blog about Tim's book and how it shifted my perspective from a structured career path until retirement to design my business to suit my lifestyle. It was instrumental in my move in Spain in 2008 and my current part time location independent lifestyle (I will be writing my final blog post of the year from sunny Lisbon next week!). You can take parts of this book with a pinch of salt but Tim's new perspective on work is worth a read.

Perspective Shift: Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available. Set yourself crazy deadlines to work faster and better.

8. ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

I love this book so much I dedicated the letter 'R' in From Apps to Zen to it. If you are looking to change your perspective on the workplace, then this book is for you. In fact, buy one for every member of your team. With ideas such as Meetings are Toxic, Long Lists Don't Get Done, and Planning is Guessing, ReWork will debunk some of the persistent myths about what it takes to make a successful business.

Perspective Shift: Good Enough is Fine: find a judo solution one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort.

9. Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork Start the Work That Matters, Michael Bungay Stanier

A little gem, the book inspires us to stop the ‘busywork’ and start the work that matters. With 15 practical exercises or ‘maps’ Michael takes your through step by step how to identify, start and sustain your Great Work. This book was my holiday reading this year in Vietnam and it allowed me to get a fresh perspective on my work and provides daily reminders about how important my Great Work is and how to focus on it.

Perspective Shift: Tap into the power of Role Models – when you are trying to identify what your Great Work is, think about your top 5 role models in your work and life. What are their common or distinct characteristics? What do they tell you about your Great Work?

I hope one or more of these books has captured your imagination so ask Santa if she will bring one : )

Merry Christmas!

Scanning my twitterfeed yesterday, a tweet linking to an article called "Social Media: The End or Start of a Golden Age?" naturally caught my eye.

The article in question was by Vivek Wadhwa, an academic and researcher from Duke University in the US. Mr Wadhwa had recently been to a conference where Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and other commentators were debating whether the internet is rotting our and our children's brains.

We've heard this debate before. On one side sit authors like Carr who argue that due to the plasticity of the brain, the internet is fundamentally changing the way we think and communicate, with the prediction that "mankind will lose its ability to perform 'deep thinking;' that we will become as shallow as the websites we visit."

On the other side sit commentators like Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everyone and the recent Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky is a web positivist - he sees the internet as a force for good that connects people and has the potential to bring about significant social change (some of which we are already seeing in the Arab world). Mr Wadhwa sits in this camp dismissing the naysayers in the same vein as the clergy in the late eighteenth century who thought that the mass production and availability of novels would rot the brains of the young people.

So where do I sit in this debate? Well, somewhere in the middle. I truly believe that the social web is an amazing thing - it opens up the potential of what we can achieve to a global audience; it allows us to interact with loved ones all over the world; it allows us to be as informed about the world as we wish. However, our increasing digital lives, where we are never very far from a computer, tablet or smart phone, has meant that sometimes we are just not very present. The danger is that we can miss the tiny opportunities and moments that make life interesting because we are buried in our device rather than open to the world. In this way, I think I am most aligned to the views of William Power in Hamlet's Blackberry who advocates balance, the smart use of our technologies, and disconnecting from the crowd, now and again.

But what has this got to do with multitasking? Well, one of the major disagreements between the two camps of opinion is that of multitasking versus monotasking or singletasking. The first camp say that multitasking is bad for you and that the internet is rendering us incapable of deep thought; the second camp say that our brain is adapting to this new phenomenon and that our children are becoming excellent multitaskers.

Another presenter at this same conference, Clifford Nass, is firmly in the first camp. He talked about how multitasking — walking and talking, eating and reading, texting while watching TV — is making us inefficient, distracted, and hurting our memory. In the second camp is one of Mr Wadhwa's colleagues Cathy Davidson, author of the forthcoming book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Davidson talked about the industrial workplace which was designed for monotasking, in which an individual takes one task from inception to completion. She asserts, however, that the harder we concentrate on one task, the more we miss everything else happening around us. This is the phenomenon of 'attention blindness'. Wadhwa concludes that monotasking, in this context, not multitasking, limits us.

I think both arguments are wrong.

Nass's arguments about doing more than one thing at a time totally miss the point. The fact that we can walk and talk at the same time or cook a meal while emptying the dishwasher or text and watch TV is because these activities do not require much thought. They are embedded routines controlled by our basal ganglia not requiring any original thinking by our pre-frontal cortex. If you were not used to cooking, however, you might find it difficult to cook and do other chores at the same time. Similarly, just because you can watch TV and text as the same time doesn't mean that you are really paying attention to either.

I also disagree with Wadhwa's opinion that monotasking limited us. What mindfulness teaches us is to become aware of awareness itself. When we use mindfulness in a work context we can create a relaxed state of focus that provides an expansive awareness, not a narrow 'fight or flight' contraction of awareness. In this way we can really open up the potential of the task in hand to new insights. This is impossible when we are distracted by our email notifications, texts or tweets.

What do you think? Are we becoming better multitaskers?