How many tasks did you promise yourself to do in the past months, but stopped short of performing it, every time you put your hand to it? Or imagine those umpteen times, when the week-day ended and you sincerely wished you hadn’t obsessed with searching for a missing file, which turned out to be peanuts compared to the backlog of a high(-er) profile project that got relegated to a back-burner.
What to do when there’s too much to do by Laura Stack drives home the fact that time is our most precious resource. Stack, a seasoned pro in the field of productivity-enhancement and time-management, puts in black-and-white her quintessential ‘6-D Information Management System™’ formula here.
What sets the book apart, though, is the excellent use of anecdotes from her life as well as examples you-and-me can connect well with. At the end of your reading, you will value your time and the fact that every time you let the sands slip away from you hand, you are doing great injustice to your productivity.
The book leaves you charged-up — I have put her ways to test in the past couple of days, and simple as they are; therein lies the power of it all.
We all have a list of to-dos so long that we stop following it! Stack exhorts us to prioritise things accordingly, passing every decision through her ‘6-D’ and see the list getting easily divided into two manageable smaller lists — the HIT for the high impact tasks, and Master for ‘important but not urgent ones’.
She also brings to fore some interesting rules. My favourite among these is the ‘superglue’ rule. However, the book has largely been written from a Western perspective. True, with the economic downturn the West has been the most affected, so increasing productivity per person is largely the mantra of all corporates there, but for us this means tweaking the book to fit the Indian jigsaw.
Again it toes the line of a workplace, and much adaptation has to be done to make it apt for a student’s campus. So it’s the perfect tool for working professionals, but for students it’s not probably a rule book to follow by the word.
Nonetheless, the cardinal aspect of the book has to be Stack’s catchy, fluid and to-the-point writing that brings to you the tragedy of the ‘hamster wheel’ — life running endlessly without achieving comparable output.
Her six-point ‘Productivity Workflow Formula’ and the Productivity Pro Day Timer which, simple as they are, promise far reaching changes in your life, if implemented!
Go for this book. At Rs 250 it comes in cheap, but promises to deliver you the price of the priceless-your time. Accomplish more by doing less!
— samyakxioen@gmail.com