I finished Jonathan Goodman’s Unhinged Habits at the end of 2025 and immediately texted him: “You did it. You pulled it off. This book was fantastic.”
He did something most authors attempting to write about productivity and life design completely fail at: he showed up as himself.
The opening connected with me immediately when he talked about his approach to travel:
- Don’t look it up in advance. Photoshopped images of what you’re about to see ruin what you’re about to see.
- Don’t do your research. Learning about the thing while you’re visiting the thing adds to the joy of the thing.
This could be cliché advice, but for Jonathan, it was how he actually lives.
And the book works because he does this over and over, showing you how he actually lives, with all the contradictions and trade-offs that entail.
The Problem with Most Productivity Books
I’ve read dozens of books about rethinking work and productivity over the past few years. Most fall into the same trap. They make an intellectual critique of hustle culture while the author clearly remains trapped in it themselves. You can feel it. The book itself becomes another hustle, another thing to optimize, another way to signal that you’ve transcended the very game you’re still playing.
Jonathan doesn’t do this. The book feels like he’s already made the unconventional choices and is simply reporting back. When he writes about his “8:4 seasons” or leaving his cup half-empty, he’s literally been doing it for years.
The 8:4 Life and Uncompensated Loss
The central concept of the book is what Goodman calls the 8:4 approach. Eight months focused intensely on one thing, four months in a different season entirely.
He writes: “Four mornings a week, I wake up early to write for two hours. Before bed, I review my notes and plan the next day’s writing. Three days a week (Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays), my entire work day is dedicated to this book. I have no meetings, no phone calls, and I don’t respond to emails.”
Then he shares his “off-season checklist” for all the things he’s letting slide while working on the book.
This is where most authors would offer some hack for how to do it all, and now this will help you 10x your productivity. Instead, he says: Some things will suffer. That’s the point.
I know he thinks about this because he then introduces the concept of “uncompensated loss.” Most decisions we make with our time can’t be compared directly. “If I wake up early to work on this book, I might not recover from my workout as well as from the day before. What impact will that have on how I feel, my long-term health, or my short-term levels of sexification on a completely subjective scale of how I feel I look from 1–10? I’ve no idea. The loss, therefore, is uncompensated. Incomprehensible. Impossible to calculate.”
This is refreshing. A human writing a book is way easier to connect with.
Real Human Stories
Throughout the book, Goodman weaves personal stories that don’t come with forced lessons. He talks about being bad at staying in touch with his brother.
Instead of offering a productivity hack for maintaining relationships, he writes: “I used to beat myself up about being bad at staying in touch. But then I realized that it is what it is, and as much as I don’t like this part of me, it’s not a part that’s going to change. Instead of trying to slowly improve my relationship with my brother over time, we took a trip to Halifax.”
This sort of storytelling is rare in books like this. I half expected to find a way to optimize long-term friendships. But instead, we are left with a story that many people can relate to.
Similarly, when he writes about buying a bike without doing any research and having it not work out, he doesn’t conclude with a grand lesson. He admits defeat of his system and moves on. It literally made me laugh. I loved it.
Finally, he weaves in two personal stories about his family and a friend in interlude chapters that were very refreshing change of pace. I felt very moved by his stories and it was awesome to see how they ended up toward the end.
The Half-Empty Cup
One of the most powerful concepts in the book is leaving your cup half-empty. Goodman contrasts his life with friends whose “cups are full. No room for anything unexpected. Of course, their kids have to obey the rules and rituals of the household. There is no other way that their household can operate. No space. Which is fine, until it isn’t.”
He continues: “It’s likely that you’ll notice others who have decided to fill their cups to the brim get more attention, make more money, or even have better-behaved children. You might question your life’s decisions to leave your cup half empty. Until one day, your wife gets pregnant and becomes bedridden. And then your neighbor gets cancer. And you’re somehow not stressed and miserable. Instead, challenged. Grateful that you’re able to enjoy the miracle of a pregnancy you never thought would happen. Grateful to be able to help a friend in need.”
I like to leave slack in my life too. It was nice to read about someone taking the same approach.
Leaving slack is hard. That space is vital but it can often feel or look like failure.
Why This Works
Unhinged Habits has useful frameworks, but it’s powerful because Jonathan brings you on his personal journey. He has genuinely decided there’s more to life than work and is showing you what that actually looks like. As someone with a much lower net worth than him, I didn’t get distracted by this at all because throughout the book he finds something I’ve found: freedom is a choice. The tradeoffs are different for everyone.
Goodman writes about creating fifteen million words on the internet from 2011 to 2024, with 90 percent of his income coming from one program and most of his reputation from one book. But crucially, he adds: “But if I just created that program and just wrote that book, much of the good that ended up coming from them wouldn’t have happened.”
I liked this reframe on the Pareto Principle as well:
“The part that’s missing from the famous Pareto Principle—the 80/20 rule where 80 percent of your success comes from 20 percent of your actions—is that you still have to do the 80 in order to figure out what the 20 is. Then, once you figure it out, go all in. Outsized efforts flanked by years of consistently good enough actions are the key.”
The book ends with permission. “An 8:4 habits approach isn’t about perfection—it’s about permission. Permission to be gloriously unbalanced in pursuit of what matters most. Permission to let some areas coast while others transform. Permission to sketch your life with bold, imperfect strokes rather than tentative, careful ones.”
15 Favorite Quotes
On Exploration: “Don’t look it up in advance. Photoshopped images of what you’re about to see ruin what you’re about to see.”
On Risk: “His story illustrates something profound about exploration: it often means ranking safety third. Not first, not even second, but third—behind growth and experience.”
On Productivity: “Hardworking people often feel stuck because they don’t have a definition of what being unstuck is. They don’t feel joy because they don’t know what they’re trying to achieve at any given time. They work on a lot, not excited by much. It sucks.”
On Focus: “If I didn’t write something almost daily, my books probably wouldn’t get done. But also, my books don’t get done because I write every day.”
On Consistency: “Intensity is for gaining. Consistency is for maintaining. You can’t have one without the other.”
On Priorities: “And so, at any given time we must be selective of which priority we want to focus on, pursue it aggressively, and be okay with just being okay at anything else . . . for the time being.”
On Missing Out: “There is consolation in the fact that missing out is an inexorable side effect of the richness of human life. It reflects something wonderful: that there is so much to love and that it is so various that one history could not encompass it all.”
On The 80/20 Principle: “The part that’s missing from the famous Pareto Principle—the 80/20 rule where 80 percent of your success comes from 20 percent of your actions—is that you still have to do the 80 in order to figure out what the 20 is.”
On Trade-offs: “If I wake up early to work on this book, I might not recover from my workout as well from the day before. What impact will that have on how I feel, my long-term health, or my short-term levels of sexification on a completely subjective scale of how I feel I look from 1–10? I’ve no idea. The loss, therefore, is uncompensated. Incomprehensible. Impossible to calculate.”
On Permission: “An 8:4 habits approach isn’t about perfection—it’s about permission. Permission to be gloriously unbalanced in pursuit of what matters most. Permission to let some areas coast while others transform.”
On Living: “An overly productive life is not worth living, either. But the unbalanced life . . . the 8:4 life . . . is absolutely worth living. Because the unbalanced life is full of meaningful work, serendipity, exploration, and wonder.”
On Margin: “It’s likely that you’ll notice others who have decided to fill their cups to the brim get more attention, make more money, or even have better-behaved children. You might question your life’s decisions to leave your cup half empty. Until one day your wife gets pregnant and becomes bedridden. And then your neighbor gets cancer. And you’re somehow not stressed and miserable. Instead, challenged.”
On Social Media: “The flashier the Instagram profile, the more perfectly manicured the social media, and the more confident the online exterior, the more likely it is that the entire thing is a charade.”
On Finding Your Thing: “There’s nothing else that causes me the same exquisite combination of anger, frustration, and elation that writing does. It’s never burned me out. No matter how hard I’ve struggled with it, it’s never burned me out. That’s how I know that it’s my thing.”
On Relationships: “I used to beat myself up about being bad at staying in touch. But then I realized that it is what it is, and as much as I don’t like this part of me, it’s not a part that’s going to change. Instead of trying to slowly improve my relationship with my brother over time, we took a trip to Halifax.”
