Do it Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management
Customer Review: Best Time Management Book Ever
Mark’s book is amazing, and following his principles has changed my life. He gives concrete ways to work -with- our natural resistance to whatever we might need to do.
For example, most of us use to-do lists. Mark recommends closed lists. Instead of our to-do list being a never-ending story – you finish what you’re doing.
His method of dealing with backlog is killer. No – it doesn’t involve throwing it out or ignoring it. Instead it makes the backlog entirely managable. Imagine coming back from a month long vacation and being relaxed about what you need to do?
A lot of people like David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and I do too. But even David needs to be listening to Mark. Want proof? After he wrote Getting Things Done, he put out his newsletter VERY sporadically and always apologized for it. I’m sure he now has systems and people in place now to get the newsletter out the door – but if his system worked – he’d have it together. He didn’t.
The two books together are a good combination, but “Do It Tomorrow” definitely comes first – by far.
Customer Review: An absolutely terrific little book
1st edition (2006), 203 pages
Do It Tomorrow is only the fourth useful book on time management that I’ve come across (the other three are The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker and The Management of Time by James T Mackay – the last two of which were published decades ago).
Most standard time management dogma seems to involve advice about how to cram ever more of what you are currently doing into your day. I have been deeply suspicious of this approach for a long time now. It never worked for me and I’ve not seen it working for other people either.
I’ll quote a paragraph from the beginning of chapter four (`The Problem with Time Management’) which gives a good flavour of Forster’s style and approach to his subject:
“The two things I want to examine are the concept of prioritising by importance and the frequently used tool of making a to-do list. Both of these tend to be the sacred cows of time management, and I believe both of them are fundamentally wrong. The reason is the same in both cases: they tend to make us do more of what gave us the problem in the first place.”
It is a great shame that it is so rare for an author to pay close attention to the evidence, even if it leads to conclusions totally opposite to conventional wisdom on the subject. Mark Forster is one of those authors and I strongly advise reading his terrific little book – you won’t be disappointed.
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Even In Retail, Time is Not a Four Letter Word – Furniture World Magazine (press release)
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Even In Retail, Time is Not a Four Letter Word
Furniture World Magazine (press release) - With a master’s degree in counseling from Johns Hopkins University and life coach training from the Coaches Training Institute, she is a constant student of … |
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