Archive for February, 2010

Last week, I talked about the principles of time management covered in an excellent book: “The 7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen Covey.  I went over the four quadrants in which we can place any and all of our activities and how leadership is focused on Quadrant 2 activities (those that are important but not urgent).  The book also talks about how we should identify the different roles we have in our lives (e.g. entrepreneur, father, husband/partner, etc.) in order to establish our priorities.  We can then identify a few key quadrant 2 activities for each role that we hope to accomplish over the course of following week.

This week, I will summarize the point of view of another great author on the subject of personal productivity.  In his book, “The 4-hour Workweek”, Tim Ferris uses an interesting title for his chapter on time management: “The end of time management” (how can anyone resist after reading such a title?).  He makes an interesting distinction between ‘being effective’ and ‘being efficient’.  Read more »

Time management is a skill that most of us have yet to master.  No matter how many things we do during the day, there always seems to be a long list of unchecked ‘to do’ items.  This is something that I’ve struggled with as of late.  Starting a business on your own can become overwhelming very fast. The volume of things to do sometimes reaches a point where all you feel like doing is stashing them in a big bag and hiding it somewhere for a few days.  But that only compounds the problem.

I decided to go through the titles in my bookshelf and take a look at what the experts had to say on the matter.  The two that were most useful were “The 7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen Covey and “The 4 hour workweek” by Tim Ferris.  In part 1 of 2 of this blog posting, I will go over what Stephen Covey has to say on time management and in part 2, I will do the same for Tim Ferris. Read more »