These coffee-break short books will help you get more gigs and manage successful projects.

No job? Fresh out of school? Laid off? In the rapidly emerging gig economy, millions of workers will never have a job. But they can have a lifetime of profitable and satisfying assignments and projects. Written by an adept consultant who hasn’t had “permanent employment” since 9/11, this handy little book will help you survive – and thrive – as an independent contractor. Don’t wait for someone else to decide your future – here’s how to write your own story. First in this series of guides for independent contractors and project managers.

Learn how to avoid misdirection on the information superhighway. Not to school hackers but to warn you, here are the most common ways someone can bend or break the truth to generate misinformation. Many of these tricks rely on leveraging emotion to cloud logic. Another technique is to confuse cause and effect, often implying that perpetrators are actually victims (and vice versa).

No one need fear metadata or metadata analysis as long as it’s summary-level data being shared. Unintentionally or deliberately using short-term trends or individual cases to generalize about the long term is a common pitfall. Thoughtful examples in the book include analyses of world population growth and climate change. The intent is not to advance any conclusions but to examine carefully the methods used to generate charts and interpretations of the underlying metadata. Other examples include analyzing stock market trends and preventing misuse of Electronic Health

Records (EHR).

In this team-building game, participants collaborate in small groups. A team score determines whether the team survives, and a private individual score helps participants evaluate their effect on the outcome. For example, evaluating their own performance during team play, participants should learn how to answer, “Should I listen more and talk less? Assert myself and talk more? Learn to identify and credit the opinions of quiet experts? Press my point of view even if I feel intimidated or embarrassed?”

Learn to make your financial reports both professional and classy. Diligent proofing in itself won’t make a killer impression. But failing to proof for both accuracy and consistency could have woeful results. Perhaps numbers don’t lie, but you can’t afford a comma or a decimal point in the wrong place.