Three books to help you in our post-COVID-19 life

If you find yourself with down time on your spring break or on a long weekend, it could be the perfect opportunity to catch up on your reading. Here are three books with life hacks for our current times.

While none was written specifically to resolve COVID-19-era issues, each offers something that could reduce some of the stress as we emerge from our pandemic life- and workstyles.

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“Bridge the Gap: Breakthrough Communication Tools to Transform Work Relationships From Challenging to Collaborative,”

by Jennifer Edwards and Katie McCleary, McGraw Hill, 2022 ($26). For some people, the pandemic has opened new pathways for communicating with co-workers. Being able to “chat” on the side with a colleague while simultaneously participating with the larger group is just one way remote sessions have changed the concept of business meetings.

In this book, authors Edwards and McCleary elevate the issue of communication to transcend our recent fascination with the technology. Their concern isn’t what we use to communicate with one another, but how we show up for the conversation itself.

Defining the gaps that keep us apart — including our own emotional state, assumptions we make, generational differences and more — encompasses the first third of the book, with a strong middle section on listening, and final chapters with useful conversation prompts for difficult situations.

“Bridge the Gap” is a helpful tutorial in any time, but for those of us emerging from stay-at-home or work-alone cocoons, it could be a critical guide for relearning how to be in society.

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“Go to Help: 31 Strategies to Offer, Ask For, and Accept Help,”

by Deborah Grayson Riegel and Sophie Riegel, Panoma Press, 2022 ($22). Improving communication skills is essential, but the Riegels (a mother and daughter team of authors) suggest those skills might be best used to ask for help. As in, Helllllpp! (OK, emphasis mine.)

Actually, their book is as much about how to offer help as it is about requesting it.

In “Go to Help,” the Riegels draw from their professional and personal backgrounds, analyzing the problem from the perspective of both asking for and offering assistance. The strategies include sample conversations, processes and scenarios, as well as tips for identifying classic resistance issues. For those who feel powerless when witnessing someone else’s struggle, this will be an especially useful guide for offering a helping hand.

■ “Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked,” by Devon Price, Simon & Schuster, 2021 ($18). It’s hard not to love this title, unless you’re an overachiever who does not wish to reform. For everyone else, letting go of the idea that we’re lazy might be just the motivation needed to create a more enjoyable life.

With chapter titles such as “You deserve to work less” and “Your achievements are not your worth,” it’s easy to see where this book is heading. And even so, the author’s journey to that destination is full of “aha” moments. The premise of the book is based on what Price calls the Laziness Lie: “… a belief system that says hard work is morally superior to relaxation, that people who aren’t productive have less innate value than productive people.”

Taking another perspective, Price calls laziness a warning. The apathy, depression or procrastination we often describe as being lazy are more likely sounding an alarm about being burned out or on the wrong path.

While this reexamination of a cultural mainstay may seem most relevant to work issues, Price provides engaging examples of how the penchant to do too much extends to personal life, and even to our relationships.

This is an intriguing and important conversation for our culture, especially as we reshape our work lives in a post-COVID-19 era. But don’t feel guilty if you decide not to read it during spring break after all — maybe that time should just be for fun.