Customer Reviews

Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is easy to read, informative, well written, fun, short and practical. Buy it immediately!! If I had had to pay $500 for this book, it would have been worth it. The book addresses the nuts and bolts of getting through the day easily and with grace. . The author understands that most of us have a misguided sense of urgency and teaches us how to be selective in terms of declaring what is urgent so that you can stay on track with what you planned for the day. The book helps you get everything done you are committed to, so that nothing falls through the cracks. Your kitchen floor is just as important as the report due on your boss's desk. How you can get both the mundane and the big projects done day by day is the meat of the book. Project work due in a week, or a month becomes a piece of cake-because you learn to start it right away and keep going in little steps. I already feel more relaxed since I have started followed his suggestions, and am getting more done. I can see that it would be possible to be on top of everything, which would make life a pure delight. I had never seen that possibility before even as a time management consultant! There is nothing like it out there as much fun, doable and original in the time management field. Once you try some of his suggestions you will truly be in a position to go for your dream life. But on the other hand by doing what he suggests, you may already find yourself living it. If you are always struggling to get a grip on time like most of us----this is the book for you.

Mark's book is amazing, and following his principles has changed my life. He gives concrete ways to work -with- our natural resistance to whatever we might need to do.

For example, most of us use to-do lists. Mark recommends closed lists. Instead of our to-do list being a never-ending story - you finish what you're doing.

His method of dealing with backlog is killer. No - it doesn't involve throwing it out or ignoring it. Instead it makes the backlog entirely managable. Imagine coming back from a month long vacation and being relaxed about what you need to do?

A lot of people like David Allen's "Getting Things Done" and I do too. But even David needs to be listening to Mark. Want proof? After he wrote Getting Things Done, he put out his newsletter VERY sporadically and always apologized for it. I'm sure he now has systems and people in place now to get the newsletter out the door - but if his system worked - he'd have it together. He didn't.

The two books together are a good combination, but "Do It Tomorrow" definitely comes first - by far.

1st edition (2006), 203 pages

Do It Tomorrow is only the fourth useful book on time management that I've come across (the other three are The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker and The Management of Time by James T Mackay - the last two of which were published decades ago).

Most standard time management dogma seems to involve advice about how to cram ever more of what you are currently doing into your day. I have been deeply suspicious of this approach for a long time now. It never worked for me and I've not seen it working for other people either.

I'll quote a paragraph from the beginning of chapter four (`The Problem with Time Management') which gives a good flavour of Forster's style and approach to his subject:

"The two things I want to examine are the concept of prioritising by importance and the frequently used tool of making a to-do list. Both of these tend to be the sacred cows of time management, and I believe both of them are fundamentally wrong. The reason is the same in both cases: they tend to make us do more of what gave us the problem in the first place."

It is a great shame that it is so rare for an author to pay close attention to the evidence, even if it leads to conclusions totally opposite to conventional wisdom on the subject. Mark Forster is one of those authors and I strongly advise reading his terrific little book - you won't be disappointed.

"Do It Tomorrow"

Although I don't like the title of the book at first glance because of the tendency to think that procrastination is occurring, the depth of the book and the usefulness of it make it one book that I will never loan out.

This book is about the combination of skills including drawing a line in the sand with backlog work and creating what's called a "closed" list of daily work. The unique benefit of creating a closed list is that you truly learn what you are capable of doing within one day. This, of course, helps you determine when and if you should hire an assistant and what work you can possibly delegate to them to increase your own productivity.

When I use the principles from this book combined with the classification of work as described by D. Allen in Getting Things Done ("at computer", "phone", "waiting for", etc.), I'm actually getting more things done with less stress!

I wrote the author when he first started teaching these skills in seminars over in the U.K. a year or two ago. Unable to travel to the UK, I kept sending an occasional letter asking for a book. I'm glad I waited for two reasons:

1. The material is unique in many ways. It is because of flipping something on its head that allows me to enjoy some INCREDIBLY productive days that leave me filled with energy about accomplishment knowing I did the best I could possibly do with my time.
2. The material is something I can use to teach my employees how to better manage their time in an office that doesn't always have the ability to work completely off a closed list, due to emergencies and procedure/process execution.

I'm still working out some kinks, but have found his online blog help very useful for answering questions related to the book.

This book is 5 star on useful information!

I have been following the precepts laid down in this book for the last three weeks. By adopting Forster's methods, I have seen my productivity soar 30-40%. By accomplishing more, I am experiencing a qualitative improvement in feelings of well-being and contentment.

There is no magic to improved productivity. You have to do the work. No system will do the work for you. But there are experimentally validated, proven tricks for getting oneself motivated to do things instead of procrastinate. Forster is a master of these tricks and he lays them out in clear, simple language in his book.

The key insights are almost laughably simple. So simple, it's all too easy to reject them as childishly simplistic. But they work if you give them a try. And if you have substantial, difficult, and complex goals that still remain to be accomplished, you owe it to yourself to give Forster's method a test.

The fundamental fact of human nature that underlies Forster's system is that we crave completion. Forster criticizes conventional to-do lists because we can add new items to them throughout the day, impeding us from ever completing them. Forster's solution is to create a list of items to do tomorrow, and then draw a line under those items. If you complete everything above the line, you've succeeded.

Of course you never know exactly what will come up tomorrow. Things are going to demand your immediate attention and you will have to do them as well. But those new things are things you add below the line of the list you made up yesterday. As much as possible, you try to avoid doing today incoming new tasks that came in today. Your goal is to complete today all the items that you wrote down yesterday for today.

You can't imagine how powerful a motivator it is to complete today's list until you try it. The mind does crave completion. If it's getting near the end of the day and I still have a few items remaining on my list, I will move heaven and earth to get them completed. If there are still two hours left in the day and I am almost done with my list, I will complete those items. Then I will spend those two hours doing whatever I want. Maybe I'll do some more work. Or maybe I'll goof off. If I choose to goof off I will do so totally guilt-free. I know that I've done what I've set out to do and I know that I deserve the time off.

I've been following David Allen's Getting Things Done system for more than five years. I have found that adding Mark Forster's list-making system to Getting Things Done has been a boon to my productivity.

Good advice should, among other things, a) accomplish what it purports to do, b) not be patently obvious, and c) be recognizably correct from the get-go. Forster's book accomplishes all three.

Like other major books in time management, for instance Steven Covey's _First Things First_ or _7 Habits of Highly Effective People_, Forster's advice feels a little like common sense. Unlike Covey, Forster generally avoids jargon and High Morality. This is practical stuff.

Unlike the current champ in this area, David Allen's _Getting Things Done_, Forster's system does not require membership in a cult, does not take Constant Vigilance, and does not have the complexity that spawns and entire industry. What Forster provides here is solid, do-able, practical, provable, and simple. No one will build whole software applications to try to manage a hyper-complex system of interlocking lists: read the book, follow the advice, and start feeling better about yourself because you're unlocking more of your potential. Easy-peasy.

If your _Do It Tomorrow_ needs constant tweaking, it isn't the highly-involved refactoring that GTD requires. It does not need a soul-searching mission statement of roles and values, like Covey asks. It's simple stuff, and it works.

From my perspective, this is the most outstanding book on time management. This is not to say that there aren't other good books on the subject(although most systems just don't work). From Dave Allen's excellent book "Getting Things Done", I learnt the importance of writing things down, and being specific about the next step. From Neil Fiore's "Now Habit" I learnt how to spend limited but quality time on projects.From Kelly Gleeson's "Personal Efficiency Program", I learnt either a thing is worth doing or not worth doing and if it is worth doing do it now. Most other books talk about things that don't really work (such as prioritizing) or create complicated systems that add more to your work.
Even with such excellent systems as GTD, I wasn't quite getting things done. It was with great reluctance I picked up "Do it Tomorrow", strangely titled for a time management book. I am glad I did. This book defines exactly what a day's work consists of and how you would know if you had finished doing it. It is such a great feeling that you can do that day's work every single day and have time left for other things you may want to do. It is wonderful to know that you can be up to date with all incoming work even if you have a huge backlog. The book's suggestion of doing "little and often" when you have a project with no urgent deadline is particularly useful in avoiding last minute "emergencies" and ties in nicely with the "15 Second Principle" by Al Secunda. There are not many original thinkers in the field of time management and Mark Forster (the author of Do it Tomorrow) is one of the very few.
If you are like me (that is, interested in being up-to-date with your work but don't have the discipline to follow complicated systems) you want a system that is simple to follow and yet more effective than most others. "Do it Tomorrow" is it. It delivers.

When my husband saw me reading this he told me, "What are you reading that for? You could write the book on time management!"
True, I am very good at managing my time, but I couldn't have come up with these strategies.
I was having so much trouble getting a few tasks finished--just filing papers away, following up on phone calls, writing my special reports for my website. My writing coach suggested this book and it was one of the most helpful books I have ever read.
Amazingly there are a couple of simple steps you can employ to get things done. Forster explains the best way to use your time, your inbox, and your 'to-do' list. It works for me!
The best tip was to make your to-do list just 2 or 3 items long, but get them done. Simple, but not something I was doing: I had 8 items on my list everyday and I would cross 3 or 4 off and move the others (like filing in my office) to the next day--over and over and over again for weeks! So I put "file" and "write report" on my list one day and got them done.
Another was how you can trick your own brain into getting things done by just telling yourself "Today I will just write 2 tips for my 10 free tips sheet". Once you open the file and start writing, you miraculously finish the entire list! I don't have any idea how it is that I can trick my own brain, but it works.
Do It Tomorrow is the time-management book with secrets that work!

I recommend reading Getting Things Done by David Allen before reading this book. A lot of the approaches and philosophies of this book are addressed in a more eye-opening way in GTD. However, GTD is an impractical system for most people, and hard to implement long-term. Do It Tomorrow is a very useful system that thrives on simplicity, which is what I love.

The gist of this system is that everything assigned to you today, you do tomorrow. Even stuff like answering e-mail, returning voice mail, and simple tasks. Close your to-do list for today, work only on that today, and let the new tasks you accumulate be added to tomorrows to-do list (which then is immediately closed when you begin work the next day).

The book proceeds to clarify exactly how one might implement this system. I thought most of it was great and really insightful, I just had a few minor quibbles.

First, I thought the book was too long. At a couple hundred pages, it's not ludicrous in length. But describing such a simple system shouldn't take so long. A lot of the quizzes bogged down the pace, and there was a chapter or two that felt unnecessary and redundant (perhaps that's because I'm a veteran of GTD, though).

Next, the author fleshes out some details in great depth, but glosses over what seem to be good points. How do we make sure that there's nothing we're accidentally leaving off of our to-do list (excuse me, our "will-do list" which is the author's renaming of the tool)?

But with common sense and experience with other key productivity principles, this system is a great breath of fresh air of simplicity. It's creative and the basis of how I plan my days now. So far (a few weeks), so good. Pretty effective.

A phenomenal book that turns traditional time management practices on their head. Much of what Forster recommends is rooted in not only neurological understandings of the brain but also rooted in common sense. My only quibble is that Forster seems to have moved on from the method described in this book and onto the new Autofocus system described on his website. Nevertheless, there is a ton of useful information described in this book that has much to recommend it.