If you’re finding yourself tied down by piles of paperwork, endless unanswered emails and thousands of to-do lists, then this is the book for you! Become a more efficient, effective and productive you with Time Management For Dummies- your one-stop guide to taking control of your life. Packed with hundreds of time-saving ideas, techniques and strategies, you’ll be able get on top of your workload, communicate effectively, make the most of your business meetings, organise your desk and files, prioritise and delegate well, and kick the procrastination habit. With tips on getting more out of your time away from your desk, maintaining a productive home office environment and still finding time to see to your finances, health and social life, these time management tools will leave you feeling in control of your life – at work and at home.
Time Management For Dummies
What is Time Management? Getting Your Time in Order Organising The Work You Have To Do Working From Home The Bigger Picture
The book I read to research this post was Time Management For Dummies by Clare Evans which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is a UK edition which basically means the web addresses quoted are mostly British ones. One important point in this book is you aren't managing time but rather what you do with your time. Many people procrastinate over something they would be better getting on with and doing. A good bit of advice is don't spend hours pouring over something but break it up maybe into 20 minutes segments and have regular breaks. Also invest in a PDA or a smartphone and synchronize it with your computer personal contact software, Microsoft Outlook is probably the industry leader. There are online websites that let you make notes on the web and then can co ordinate it with a whole host of devices. Plaxo at http://plaxo.com is suggested but another very popular one is Evernote at http://evernote.com. Making a list of what you must do in a day and then prioritizing it on a scale of 1-3 is one of the key things time management is all about. Also with your new found spare time learn to mind map. I have done reviews of books on this at http://scratbagroberts.com. Another good website suggested in the book and by the creator of mind mapping is http://buzanworld.com/mindmaps. This book is a little bit short for a dummies but the information contained in it is great.
Much of what is written in this book is not new to me but much has been forgotten. It made me think which can never be a bad thing. It has even prompted me to do some research into how I spend my time which can’t be a bad thing. My thought for the day - challenging everything because it will never stay the same for ever.
This book on time management was actually rather good - yes it needed updating, their was an entire segment on PDAs and having to manually sync with other devices, but overall the vast majority of the information contained was still fairly relevant.
Interestingly for a self help book, it even contained a section on working from home. I mean yes, some of the information here was outdated, and doesn't take into account those who work for big organisations and just take a laptop home, but alot of the tips are still very relevant to today.
I especially liked the section on the script for telephone calls, as someone who hates having phone calls with somebody new, the idea of having an outline of who you are, whether its a good time for a chat and the purpose of the call has definitely been very helpful in organising my thinking.
Overall, I'm glad I read this book, and will keep an eye out for if I can get my hands on a more up-to-date version.
This is not just a book on time management it’s a book for managing your whole life it’s great to read from cover to cover or you can dip in at all the different ideas on managing the work and family environment to help you manage life better in all areas full of useful resources to just make things better and help us be the best version of ourselves that we can be
I started re-reading this in Jan 20 on my commute. The best advice? Time Management is about making the space for your priorities. If you don’t hit your priorities first, you’ll feel as though you got nothing done
It offers some good insights about managing time and using it resourcefully. However, it is not a book that is life-changing or of very much significance. Insightful nonetheless.
Having read it quite a number of years ago, I remember liking it, yet I can't seem to remember too many specifics about it. Obviously it wasn't bad, otherwise I would have remembered that, but neither was it good enough to burn a vivid image into my mind, so three stars is probably the fairest rating I can give it.