If you’re like me, you have lots of tasks to juggle, and you may find that the tools you use aren’t sufficient to manage your work. Jeff Porten’s new book Take Control of Your Productivity has shown me that there are many options that I had not considered to develop a system to efficiently manage what I do.
Jeff has been studying and using a wide variety of productivity systems for decades, and although they all offer useful insights, none of them worked well for him. So Jeff developed a system that combines some of the best features of other approaches with his own “special sauce.” The result, described in detail in Take Control of Your Productivity, is a powerful yet flexible way to get all your ducks in a row and keep them there.
Whether you’ve been using a formal system like Getting Things Done or just making do with simple lists and calendars, this book will show you how to improve your approach so you can finish your projects and reach your goals–on time, with as little stress as possible.
Some of the things you’ll learn in this book:
- What’s good (and bad) about your current approach to managing your time and activities
- How to set and prioritize both short-term and long-term goals
- How to pick a task-management app that’s appropriate for your needs (and whether that should be a simple app like Reminders, a more robust app such as Things or OmniFocus, or a super-complex tool such as Daylite)
- What other productivity tools you’ll use alongside your main task management app, and how they all work together
- Exactly how to track all your events and tasks, making sure everything happens in the right order
- How to transition from an old system to your new system without worrying that anything will fall through the cracks
- Where and how to collect all the thoughts and facts you encounter during the day that you might need to remember later–and what to do with them
- What to do when you start on a task, only to find out that it’s much bigger than you expected
- How to cope and adjust when something goes wrong–whether it’s a minor setback or a major life problem