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201 Ways to Manage Your Time Better
Book

201 Ways to Manage Your Time Better

A Quick-Tip Survival Guide

Alan Axelrod and Jim Holtje
McGraw-Hill, 1997

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Editorial Rating

5

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • Engaging

Recommendation

This cheerful and snappy little book offers a host of helpful suggestions for using your time and talents. You will appreciate Alan Axelrod and Jim Holtje’s humor, practicality, and common sense. Their advice - which applies to people at all organizational levels - ranges from planning timely and productive meetings to using the telephone wisely. They also discuss voice-mail etiquette, the best way to start your day, travel tips, and how to improve your reading speed and skills. You will benefit from the suggestions for managing your personal time, too. Supervisors can use this book to help their employees manage time more skillfully. The book is short and to the point, and happily devoid of verbosity. getAbstract recommends it as a text that will help you save time, calm frustrations, increase efficiency, multiply successes, impress others, and please yourself.

Summary

Efficiency

You, too, can become one of those "perfect" people you admire - the kind of person who never forgets birthdays or misses deadlines.

If your lack of efficiency frustrates you, solve it. List the tasks you usually perform each day. Then, beside each task, write down how you generally handle it. Do you procrastinate because you don’t want to do something? Do you get to the tasks you want to do first, but put off doing things that don’t interest you, or seem too hard or tedious?

Creating this list is a good way to analyze how efficiently you use time. Logging your tasks and activities will help you assess if you are spending too much time on particular things and will help you set time limits. Assign "start" and "stop" points for your tasks, so that you allot appropriate amounts of time for everything you have to get done.

If you receive an annual workplace evaluation, use it as a source of suggestions and observations. Do your supervisors see you as efficient? If you do not receive evaluations, discuss effective time use with an older, more experienced coworker.

Starting your Day

The way you start each day affects the hours ahead. ...

About the Authors

Alan Axelrod is the producer of numerous business and communications books. Jim Holtje is the director of International Client Services, a corporate communications and public relations management-consulting firm in Washington, D.C.

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