Customer Reviews

How to Organize Your Work and Your Life

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Moskowitz has written an excellent title on different ways to eliminate the unnecessary clutter and techniques that rob us of precious time.

Now to save you some time, I will briefly mention some the topics covered in the book:

1. How to best use your garbage can (didn't they tell us the computer age was suppose to eliminate paperwork?!).
2. How to arrange the items in your office.
3. Getting control of your telephone.
4. Confirm appointments to save time.
5. A different plan for the homemaker or professional.
6. How to avoid unwanted meetings.
7. 5 easy ways to say no.

Now that I've saved you time by writing a short review, go get the book and read to find out how you can save more time!

Highly recommended!

This book has the expected material on organizing yourself, your home, and your office, that you'd find in any number of books. But it also has an extremely valuable and specific chapter on how to set goals for yourself. It does not define WHAT goals you should set, but describes a useful process for setting up goals and breaking them into steps to help you make a plan for reaching them. The goals chapter alone is worth the price of the book

I suspect this book isn't as popular as David Allen's GTD for a few reasons.

1) this author hasn't ever been on Oprah, at least that I'm aware of.

2) there's no 'personality' associated with it ("Dave says..."). The word 'I' appears much less in this book. There's no color photo of this author anywhere, much less on the cover. Put another way, this author is less of a self-promoter. (I mean, who cares what the author looks like?)

3) there's no TLA (three-letter acronym) to describe this book's ideas, suggestions, and activities--whereas GTD is often called a 'system'. People like to give things names, and nicknames.

4) There aren't a myriad of software-widgets that people have built using this book's suggested activities. To draw a comparison with making paintings: people first like to focus on buying supplies. Why? It's easy and fun and tangible. After finding that supplies don't make you a great painter, they focus on 'secrets' and technique. Maybe a better painter, but still not great. Then they realize that design is what makes paintings great. Design is much harder and elusive than supplies and technique. Books are the paints, GTD-plugins are tips/technique, and figuring out what you really want to do is design. This book focuses 70% on design and 30% on tips.

5) The book is much older -- 1993. It has fewer computer-focused tips, and more tips on figuring out how to get from Your Big Dream to tomorrow's to-do list.

6) It's not in stores anymore so you can't tell without holding both books, but this book is simply larger: the type is larger (i.e. easier to read) and the margins are larger so you don't have to keep angling it to see what the inside gutter words are. This book was sized and typeset to be legible, and GTD was designed to look small-therefore-easy.

For all these reasons, I enjoyed this book much more. The primary difference of course is the focus: "How to Organize Your Work and Your Life" clearly accepts that without enjoying what you do (or some other strong motivation) everything's a chore. So, the first chapter gets going right away with clever ways of asking you to search for answers to Difficult Questions about what you really want to do in life. Then the author takes you through activities to determine the steps needed to make Big Dreams become Happy Accomplishments. You will really feel energized after reading this book, and more calm. Calm because you have more knowledge about yourself, and calm because you will have more acceptance of uncomfortable truths about productivity and priorities and how time is finite.

The other big difference is the tone. This author talks about his own experiences much less, and less author-ego shows through the text. An over simplification might be "Time is finite" vs. "Let me tell you that after working with thousands of overwrought clients, I've discovered that time is finite."

GTD has some useful information, and fun discussion and quotes. Many concepts (keep your desk uncluttered, re-evaluate your activities to see if they lead to your goals, learn how to delegate) are covered in both books.

But I preferred the focus, approach, style, and printing of this book much more.

I found this to be a well written, concise, and very useful and practical guide to organizing your life. As there are many such books on the market these days, I looked at a number of them before chosing this book. I found this to be one of the best, addressing all the things I wanted advice about, from organizing one's home and personal life to career and the office. Overall, a fine book on the subject with much good and practical advice.