Book Review: Take back your life!

Catchy title, eh? I gotta admit, when I first saw the title, I judged the book by its cover, and thought it was going to be some awesome revolutionary, fight the man, david vs. goliath, beat the corporate rat race sort of book. Then I received a copy and read its goal - using Outlook to get organized and stay organized. Ok, not too bad, probably a simple tips and tricks book on Outlook.

And this is when Take Back your Life really surprised me. I started reading through the book and slowly got immersed. The book details a set of problems that probably everyone goes through - email is chaotic, time consuming, generally ill organized, addictive and very poorly converted to tasks. As a result, unless you have a system, you just arent that productive with email (and in general at work).

This book goes on to give you a system for organizing your email and tasks at work. It details how to use outlook tasks to define your performance goals, define supporting projects for each of those goals and then define specific tasks that support those projects. Once done, you schedule those tasks on your calendar and voila - you are more productive. It advocates keeping your inbox at 0, and moving email to the tasks folder to be tracked, or to a reference system for later use. It strongly advocates that if you can do something in less than two minutes, just take care of it now. Over the long run this will pay off.

I've been using the system advocated all week. I have to say I'm more productive and I feel just more focused on the core things I need to do at work. It makes me really happy not to have 3000 pieces of badly categorized email in my inbox - rather I bounce at 0 everyday.Another subtle change is that I dont spend time looking at my inbox all day, waiting for the next mail - instead I tend to stare at my calendar and tasks and work through them. A positive reinforcement cycle sets in when I see the list of cool things I've done all week. My old boss took the class around this book - and had the same aha moment. I would strongly advise you to give this book a spin if you work in a corporate environment and use Outlook. It needs  a little discipline to use, but the results are really good.

Shaykat

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 18, 2005
  I use the David Allen Getting Things Done outlook add-in. It basically helps you do the things the book suggests.
  It places a toolbars in outlook and helps you schedule, task, file, or delegate mails. I can't believe how empty my inbox is these days.
  I especially like the way it can convert e-mails to tasks and defering e-mails is also cool.
  
  Scoble and others were talking about this add-in a while back.
• Anonymous
  March 19, 2005
  I feel that everybody in MS need to do something with their emails.
  It's often requered to resend some emails or wait for 2-3 weeks to get short by important answer from MS.
  Not so funny expirience :-(