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Don't Overthink It
What It’s About
How to stop spiraling on small decisions. Anne Bogel walks through the small daily moves that quietly build a calmer mind: setting up frameworks instead of debating each choice, building decision-making rituals, accepting good-enough. Practical, warm, and unusually compassionate for a productivity book.
Three Key Ideas
Default Decisions Save Energy
Pre-deciding recurring small choices, from breakfast to work routines, conserves mental energy for decisions that actually matter.
Good Enough Beats Perfect
Accepting a good-enough answer almost always costs less than the time spent chasing a marginally better one.
Margin as a Precondition
Building slack into your schedule turns unexpected events from crises into manageable interruptions.
Read a Sample
Don't Overthink It
Anne Bogel is in Louisville, twenty-seven hours before she is supposed to drive to Nashville to start work on a new book. There is one problem. A storm front is moving across the region, and she keeps clicking refresh on the forecast, hoping it will give her a better answer. It does not. Each click makes her more agitated. Her work is not getting done. She knows the spiral is pointless. She keeps clicking anyway. At some point, the absurdity catches up with her. She is overthinking a trip whose whole purpose is to start a book called Don't Overthink It.
That is the opening scene of the book, and it tells you everything about what kind of book this is. Bogel does not write as a recovered overthinker dispensing wisdom from the other side. She writes as someone who still does it, regularly, knowingly, while in the middle of writing a book about how to stop. The whole project is built on the assumption that the reader has been there, will be there again, and is not interested in being lectured by anyone who claims to be cured. What Bogel offers instead is a set of small, practical, gentle tools that she has put together over years of trying to keep her own thinking from running her life.
Don't Overthink It came out in 2020 from Baker Books. Bogel is not a psychologist. She is not a productivity guru. She is a reader, a writer, and a friend, and the book reads exactly like that.
About the author
Who It’s For
- Anyone who loses hours replaying small decisions or rereading sent emails for hidden meanings.
- Anyone who suspects perfectionism is quietly blocking them from starting or finishing projects.
- Anyone who feels mentally drained by midday despite not having done anything that important.
- Anyone who wants a practical, non-preachy framework for spending their attention on what actually matters.
About the Author: Anne Bogel
Anne Bogel is the creator of Modern Mrs. Darcy, one of the most widely read book recommendation blogs for women in the United States, and the host of the podcast What Should I Read Next?, which she launched in 2016 and which has been downloaded over fifty million times. Her writing is observational and friendly, grounded in everyday domestic life rather than academic research.
Her previous books include Reading People (2017), a guide to personality frameworks, and I'd Rather Be Reading (2018). Don't Overthink It, published in 2020 by Baker Books, is the book she describes as the one she wished had existed when she was first trying to get her own thought life under control. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
