The best part is that $20 of every copy sold goes to Malaria No More to purchase mosquito nets which prevent the spread of malaria.

In short, the book saves lives. It's also a great read.

My favorite essays include Kevin Kelly's piece on shedding the work you shouldn't be doing, Steven Johnson on how focus is overrated, Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice, David Allen on clearing space to make a mess, Jeff Jarvis on beta-think, and Chris Brogan on getting to the "escape velocity" you need to move on from a bad situation.

Thanks to Michael Bungay Stanier for inviting me to be part of the project. I'm buying several copies of the book to give to friends and family. You should, too. Buy yours now.

Update: Not convinced? Read Seth Godin: That buzzing in my ear didn't mean I was about to die.

Congratulations to Kevin for publishing his first book, and to our publisher 3ones for continuing this iterative, collaborative tech book publishing model that we started with The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

I look forward to watching this book evolve as Android does, and also, asking Kevin all my hardest Android questions.

The Complete Android Guide

The new edition is double the pagecount of the Preview PDF released last fall and it's packed with screenshots and examples. In this expansion, Adam and I went out of our way, page after page, to illustrate the answer the most common question about Wave: "What is the point?" We added two new chapters, completely rewrote several existing chapters, and since the book is now available in print, added an index for easy reference. We scored a Foreword from one of my web heroes, Lars Rasmussen, who with his brother Jens created Google Maps and Google Wave.

The coolest part of this DIY undertaking is that a portion of print book sales go to a great cause. San Diego-based charity Partnerships with Industry fulfills our print book orders. Instead of sending half the cost of the print book in an existing online print-on-demand service, your book dollars create a job for adults with developmental disabilities in my community.

The new edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave is available as both a PDF ($9) and a print book ($25) and on the web site (free). If you've already purchased the Preview PDF, to thank you for your early support, we're upgrading you to the First Edition PDF for free. Keep an eye on your email inbox for that. If you haven't already bought a copy, order one here. Thanks for checking it out, and I hope you'll let us know what you think.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave
San Diegan Self-Publishes First Google Wave Book [NBC San Diego]

As they do every day at their blog, in Rework the Signals break down their minimalist philosophy into a series of essays written in uncompromising language. Expect a table of contents full of sections entitled things like "Learning from mistakes is overrated," "Planning is guessing," "Outside money is plan Z," "Throw less at the problem," "Skip the rock stars," and "Meetings are toxic." While it's billed as a business book, at its core Rework is a get-up-off-your-ass, stop-talking-and-start-doing book--a productivity book that uses 37signals as its main case study.

People who follow 37signals online know that they are opinionated and contrarian--sometimes to the point of abrasive. At least one person thinks their small business philosophy is downright dangerous. Personally I give 37signals credit for having a strong point of view, a well-executed shtick, and for having shipped some fantastic software products. (At Lifehacker we lived in Campfire.) My advice? Take the book with a grain of salt. After reading it you don't have to cancel every meeting you have at your company. But, if you shorten a few, you've gotten something out of it.

To get a taste of how the book reads, download this PDF excerpt with essays on why workaholism, business plans, and meetings don't work. The book is available today in bookstores and on Amazon.

Rework

Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison.

You'll notice that Wave doesn't have a green yes in every cell in its column; it's still missing functionality that's holding it back from being a viable alternative in a production environment--specifically, user permissions (everyone can edit everything) and the ability to export a wave or publish it so that anyone can see its contents (not just folks logged into Wave).

This table is slated to go into chapter 1 of the first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, so give me a shout if you've got ideas for how to polish it up before we boot up the printers.

Update, January 21st: Changed Wave's user access permissions column to reflect the newly-announced feature.

Anyone who reads my stuff or listens to This Week in Google knows that I'm a Google Wave nut. Yes, it's a hyped, complex, do-it-all web application, but the sheer ambition is part of Wave's appeal for me. Since I logged onto Wave's developer sandbox back in June, I've spent a whole lot of time in Wave, figuring out how it works and what it might do--and blogging about my discoveries just didn't cut it. So, along with Adam Pash from Lifehacker, I've compiled everything we know how to do in Google Wave in a book format at completewaveguide.com. I'm calling it a book, but for now it's just a web site--with eight "chapters" and two "appendices," free for you to read, share, and if we're lucky, help us expand. The site will grow into traditional book formats, however: thanks to the team at 3ones, a PDF version of the book's preview edition will be available for purchase this month. In January of 2010, a softcover print version of the book's first edition will be available as well as an updated PDF. Adam and I have committed to four editions throughout 2010, so the book will change and evolve along with Wave. The latest and greatest version of the book will always be available for free at completewaveguide.com.

I turned down a request-for-proposal from my traditional book publisher to try this experiment in iterative self-publishing. I ran down the whole story of why on the book's About page. This approach scratches several itches I've had for years: I've always wanted to publicly collaborate on a book using MediaWiki, try my hand at self-publishing, and license a book under Creative Commons. Now, to see how it will all turn out. Check out the book and let me know what you think. (Also, follow @gwaveguide on Twitter for Wave tips and book news.)

That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.

Collins is a whole lot more diligent about tracking his progress than I've ever been, though.

These aren’t ballpark guesstimates. Mr. Collins, who is 51, keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times, stopping and starting them as he switches activities. Then he regularly logs the times into a spreadsheet.

Collins also logs how many hours he spends sleeping, at night and during naps, and logs a rolling average which he compares to the amount of sleep he needs over 10 days (70 hours).

Collins is also laser-focused on being a ruthless editor, and saying no to taking on too many speaking engagements or consulting gigs (at a hefty $60-65k a pop), book tours, or staff members.

This orientation — a willingness to say no and focus on what not to do as much as what to do — stems from a conversation that Mr. Collins had with one of his mentors, the late Peter F. Drucker, the pioneer in social and management theories.

“Do you want to build ideas first and foremost?” he recalls Mr. Drucker asking him, trying to capture his mentor’s Austrian accent. “Zen you must not build a big organization, because zen you will end up managing zat organization.”

Usually I'm distrustful of anyone who gets called a "guru" (note that people have called me that, much to my dismay), but I really enjoyed Good to Great. Collins' painstaking workflow ranked him even higher in my book. Check out the whole NYT profile: For This Guru, No Question Is Too Big.

After two years and 1,700 updates on Twitter, this insta-Q&A is my favorite use of the service. The only problem is, I always want to archive and share what I learn from my followers on my blog, and it's not easy. My post on what people love and hate about netbooks, sourced entirely from Twitter replies, took me hours to compile manually, because Twitter doesn't easily list replies to a particular "tweet" in a very readable or republishable format. So this weekend I dug into the service's API to make that happen. Using Kevin Makice's new book, Twitter API: Up and Running, after just a day of coding I had my entire Twitter archive plus replies ready for viewing and publishing. While the code itself isn't ready for sharing, a few questions and subsequent replies posted on Twitter and compiled here recently include:

• What info do you wish Twitter gave you about your followers/updates that it doesn’t or that it makes you dig for?
• What are your telltale physical signs of stress?
• What's the most expensive software you’ve ever paid for?
• What’s the best project management software?

Update: I've posted a pre-alpha, nerds-only version on GitHub, tentatively named Twitalytic, called ThinkTank.

Of course, I included only replies from Twitter users whose updates are public, and I didn't include direct messages (because, by nature, they are private). I hope to post more lists of curated public replies going forward; I'll file future posts under "Twitter Q&A." Let me know how I can make posts like these more useful and readable.

In fact, the I Will Teach You To Be Rich book, which went on sale today, is an excellent graduation gift for the college students in your life who are venturing out into a horrible economy steeped in student debt. To get a taste of what it's like, download the introduction PDF for free.

When you do get the book, you can find my contribution on page 134, a short piece on how I automate my week-to-week transactions in order to set and track long-term goals. Here's a full reprint.

Set It and Forget It: Automate Your Finances to Focus on Long-term Goals

Tech-savvy folks who want to get more done in less time don't want to fuss with tedious money tasks like writing checks and transferring funds, so financial automation is very popular among the Lifehacker readership. Personally, I'm right there: "Set it and forget it" is my guiding personal finance system principle. Well, not exactly "forget it", but I set up my accounts to run themselves to the extent they can, and check in on things monthly to make sure all the gears are turning as I intend.

I'm a busy person who doesn't want to think about money matters any more than I need to, so I rely heavily on automated transfers, deposits, and email notifications to keep my dollars and cents where they need to be. Most good banks these days offer electronic bill pay, direct deposit, recurring savings account transfers, and some even offer email notifications if an account balance goes above or below a certain threshold. I use all these tools. My income goes in, bill payments go out, and my credit card gets paid in full with minimal intervention. If my credit card debt in a given month goes above a certain threshold--like $3,000--I get an email letting me know so I can make sure I've got that cash ready in my checking account. For week-to-week money tasks this all works like a charm.

For a longer, birds-eye view of my finances, I use a desktop copy of Quicken to suck in all my account transactions and make me pretty charts. Using Quicken I check in on my net worth over time and see if there are any expenses that I can cut down. This kind of overview work is where I spend the most amount of time--deciding on my savings goals, tracking them, seeing where I was same time last year, plotting where I want to be same time next year. Being a personal productivity obsessive, I'm big on having goals and using checkpoints along the way to get there. I use my Google Calendar to set 12 savings goals throughout the year, with an email reminder for each one. At the end of each month I get an email from my calendar saying something like, "It's October! Should be $X in the nest egg account by now!" That really keeps me on track when life has swept me away and I'm thinking about other things.

As a freelancer things get tricky around tax time--and tax time happens 4 times a year for self-employed folks. I use automated monthly transfers into an income tax holding account so I can pay my quarterly estimated taxes without feeling like I just lost my shirt. (That's not a good feeling, ever--so do whatever you have to do to avoid it. In fact, having your mind right about your money, and keeping an attitude of confidence and prosperity is one of the best financial moves you can make, regardless of what your account balance is.) I use a simple spreadsheet to track deductions, and a big manila envelope to keep original receipts--one envelope per year.

Some of the best debt reduction strategies we've gotten from Lifehacker readers involve tricking yourself into putting money aside, and making it hard to spend. Many endorse the old-fashioned way: cut up the credit cards, and pay down the ones with the highest interest rates most aggressively. One of the wackier suggestions is freezing your credit card into a block of ice, so that you literally enforce a "cooling off" period (or in this case, a melting period) for any credit card purchase. Another strategy to avoid impulse buying is filling up online shopping carts or wishlists and then making yourself wait a week or two before you pull the trigger and hit the "Check out" button. I use this method a lot: usually, impulse buys make much less sense when you've had some time to think about it.

In the end, managing your finances well is a lot like developing a strong personal productivity system: you keep track of everything without making it your full-time job, you set goals, you break them down into small bite-sized tasks, you save yourself time by automating manual work, and spend your time and brainpower focusing on the big picture. That's what I try to do with my time AND money.

Pick up a copy of the I Will Teach You to Be Rich book at Amazon, or head over to Ramit's blog to find out more.