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87 of 91 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Book on Work Place Productivity on the Market, November 10, 2005
This review is from: Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work (Paperback)
The last reviewer must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed the morning he decided to review this book, because even the cover of Never Check Email in the Morning states that it was "Originally Published as Making Work Work"...and does it really matter anyway?!
I can honestly say that Ms. Morgensterns' book has had a huge impact on my life...at work AND on my time off. First and foremost, her advice about never checking email the first hour of the day is genius. My first thought...wishful thinking. Being in sales I was initally hesitant to believe that this was possible in my position, and that I would lose out on client opportunities if I didn't check email immediately. But when I actually understood what my email addiction was keeping me from, was when I finally decided to give it a try. And I was AMAZED at the results. Because I am now able to use my first hour on strategic planning, my sales and client retention have actually increased!
But don't get me wrong, this book has much more to offer than email advice. In fact, any one of her "grab and go" strategies will directly increase your productivity and improve your relationship to your job. More than anything, her simple strategies allow you to take back control of your workday, which in this fast paced world seems to have slipped away. And possibly more importantly, she recognizes the need for a work-life balance, giving us permission to leave work at work and use our time off to refuel ourselves with what's most important to us.
I thoroughly recommend this book! It will not disappoint.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A different approach to organizing for efficiency, June 27, 2007
This review is from: Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work (Paperback)
I read this book with some trepidation since I've read lots of organizing and efficiency books over the years. However, I was pleasantly surprised by this one, since it offers nine "competencies" that all should master, and number one is "Embracing your work/life balance". With this as the foundation, she builds all other competencies on this one. So, when discussing competency three (Choose the Most Important Tasks) or competency five (Control the Nibblers), they aren't described as in typical efficiency/organization books. Typically, these types of tasks are encouraged to allow us to 'get more done', but in this book, taking control of these types of issues is encouraged to allow us to achieve the ultimate goal of work/life balance, instead of making us more efficient cogs in the corporate wheel.
A nice approach, and well done.
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71 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
do what works best, December 21, 2007
This review is from: Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work (Paperback)
Lets start with the bad. The book is mostly stuff you've already heard or is completely obvious to you. Morgenstern's advice for organizing information is to 'do what works best for you'. Gee, thanks for the hot tip.
The book starts with an address to those who work far too many hours. I work an average number of hours but if I can be more efficient I'd like to see if I can make that number smaller. So I read the first part and didn't really get anything from it. As the book progresses she gets into how time is wasted and how to avoid the things and people that waste your time. This is the heart of the book's message because time is our most precious commodity. That's why I found it counterintuitive that the author's language was... far from concise; I was surprised by the amount of text devoted to the biographies of her clients. When you say something like, "meetings can be a large waste of time," we understand what you mean. You don't need to illustrate that point by telling us about someone who worked a lot of hours and attended many pointless meetings. Remember, our time is precious and this isn't exactly Literature; you would think Morgenstern would be more conscious of how much of our time she's taking.
Toward the latter half of the book Morgenstern meanders into a topic that begins to contradict her earlier ideas. When she was describing situations that waste your time she hit on the idea of other employees wasting your time. But towards the end she gives us examples of people who don't make enough time for other employees and so one can only conclude that the unifying message is don't give too much time but also not too little. This is in all capacities the same advice for how to organize your data: 'do what works best'. So in the end Morgenstern hasn't really come up with solutions. She addresses a variety of different problems people have but her advice in the end is always the same: pick your head up, figure out what's important and do it without wasting your time. Again, not a very profound message and not one that should take 272 pages to explain.
Now on to the slightly more positive. The title of the book is quite provocative and an excellent advertising scheme. Sorry to those of you who didn't realize it's the same book and now own two. The title can be explained as follows: If the first thing you do in the morning is check your email then there are any number of ways that you'll be diverted from your critical tasks to deal with all the little things your inbox has for you. Email creates a false sense of accomplishment for people because in the span of an hour or so you're likely to deal with a large number of different issues (likely half of them are personal) and so you feel like you've accomplished quite a bit but now that it's almost time for lunch you really haven't done much at all (including writing a review for this book on amazon). You've been in the office but you probably haven't done anything that makes money for your company - anything worth telling your boss about.
Lets face it. For a number of jobs not checking your email in the morning is absurd. The underlying idea, however, is that at work you spend too much time multitasking and not enough time getting that really important job done. Multitasking slows total productivity and it hurts the quality of each individual piece of work. The real skill to learn is to avoid clicking that forwarded link for a youtube video.
So Morgenstern recommends that you do one thing at a time and that you plan when to do these things based on when you have energy during the day. She also tells you to let others know your schedule so they'll be more accommodating. This again, depending on the job may be totally unrealistic but I guess if you're in charge you can set whatever rules you like.
If anything in this review is unclear to you then perhaps you should buy the book but if it all makes sense to you then you're better off looking elsewhere. You're welcome.
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