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5 Books to Grow Your Design Career

How to avoid distractions, structure your experiences and assess the big picture

Joanna Ngai
2 min readDec 27, 2021

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Whether you’re new to the design field or a seasoned pro, these books can offer new perspectives on how to make work and time management happen more intentionally, whether in leveling up in your career aspirations or in daily life.

  1. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (Bill Burnett, Dave Evans)
    A practical book with questions and exercises that provoke greater alignment between what engages you the most and how to pursue it.
  2. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Cal Newport)
    A persuasive introduction to the concept of ‘deep work’: activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration, and the habits to help you cultivate this skill in the modern workplace.
  3. Good to Great (Jim Collins)
    Most individuals at work are part of a larger team, sub-group or organization. By looking at the the leadership strategies which shape your organization’s long term success, one can understand how to produce better results.
  4. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (Nir Eyal)
    A thought-provoking and actionable guide on how to deal with common pitfalls of distraction and invest time toward…

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Joanna Ngai
Joanna Ngai

Written by Joanna Ngai

UX Designer at Google, illustrator, green tea drinker dribbble.com/joannan | UX for Beginners https://amzn.to/3ekRM00

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