Top 5 Books to improve your Time-Management
Feeling anxious and overburdened? You are not alone. I’ve chosen some of the best books on time management, including two classic how-to guides and various books aimed at assisting you in making decisions about how you want to spend your limited time on earth.
I ask myself, “What is time management?” It’s all about how you organize your workday or why you should prepare all of your meals for the week on a Sunday afternoon to save time in the shallow time management type. But if we start by acknowledging that we don’t have a lot of it, time management is something that is far more significant than that. To talk about creating a meaningful life with your finite amount of time on earth, one must take the challenge of time management seriously.
Another important point is that time is a very odd phenomenon. At least not in the same manner that managing money or physical assets is possible. It just keeps obstinately moving forward. There are 24 hours in a day for everyone, and you cannot set any of it aside for later. And you never know when that moment may come around again.
If you had this problem so, I recommended these books to you:
- Getting Things Done By David Allen
One of the books that first sparked my interest in this topic was this one. In its day, which was more than 20 years ago, it was groundbreaking. Silicon Valley residents, including software professionals and computer geeks, loved this book. The book contained a few truly profound, accurate, and potent thoughts about how to structure your work over time — the discoveries that are now so obvious that Allen probably doesn’t get as much credit as he deserves because they just seem like givens.
One of Allen’s main principles is that if you put everything on your plate into what he refers to as “a trusted system” — in one location, such as a computer or notebook — your mind can rest and stop trying to remember it all.
He refers to incomplete jobs as “open loops.”
2. Deep Work By Cal Newport’s
The risk of a specific application of the Getting Things Done approach is that you just complete 8,000 little things in a row without ever getting to enter a state of profound thought. Deep Work is partially about how to secure that kind of time in your schedule.
One of the concepts that I believe Newport is especially strong on is what he refers to as “fixed schedule productivity.” According to this theory, you should approach your work by first determining how much time you’re going to devote to it, then choosing what to work on based on that pre-decided container of time.
He is pretty realistic about the various lifestyles and circumstances of people, which is another positive aspect of this book. Deep work can range from cutting off all communication with the outer world for six months to focusing on a pretty complicated scientific proof to set aside a few discrete hours within a busy schedule. He is not proposing that everyone can go to a cottage on top of a mountain and live there.
3. The Tao of Time By Diana Hunt and Pam Hait
This speaks to the idea that time is something you must work with as an ally rather than a predator, as another time management guru puts it. Time is not something you can expect to master, dominate, or dictate to.
The Tao Te Ching, which I’m sure you are familiar with, is full of all these idioms: the wise man is like water, flowing over the rocks in his path; the strong reed is the one that bends in the breeze. That sort of resilience — clinging to reality while gently letting go. I believe that’s a wonderful crucial realization to impart on time.
“Time is not something you can expect to master and dominate, but something you have to work with as an ally”
This fundamental idea of bending time can take many different forms. It could entail making plans for the day’s events, holding them loosely and anticipating changes, or using them as a guide for decisions being made right now rather than as a rigorous directive for the future. Moving through reality and accepting things for what they are at different times, including inescapable interruptions and possibly also your levels of motivation, that you can’t fight in the present, could also speak to some of the motivational concepts we were talking about, in my opinion.
4. Drop the Ball: Achieve More By Doing Less By Tiffany Dufu
Dufu is a writer and a leadership specialist. What I enjoy about this book is that, while it has an aspect of “you can accomplish anything you set your mind to!” in it, on the one hand, it also makes a point that is very dear to my heart: accepting the reality of limitation and infinitude.
“Getting more efficient at tasks just causes the standard you’re trying to reach to drift higher and higher”
This book discusses a variety of subjects, including how to convince males in heterosexual marriages to contribute fairly as well as the possibility that there may be a large number of tasks that no one in the family should ever undertake. Thus, the title.
This book challenges the presumption that just because you can think of something that seems to require doing, you must consequently locate someone who can do it. There is no reason to believe that a list of “things that seem to require doing” will be well-suited to people’s ability to complete tasks.
5. Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World by Iddo Landau
This book explores the meaning of life and what it means to live a meaningful life. One of the core ideas in this book is that striving for a definition of meaning that is beyond the capabilities of the majority of people is a bizarre, pointless act of selfishness. If you believe that for your life to count as meaningful, the cosmos must be changed in some manner, then virtually none of us ever could. We are tiny little beings on a planet of billions, little pinpricks of consciousness in eons of cosmic time. However, this does not necessarily imply that if in 100 years no one knows I ever achieved anything or even existed, then my life has been meaningless as a result.
“If you think you’ve got to change the cosmos in some way, in order for yours to count as a meaningful life, then basically none of us ever could”
