Can a business guide or manual live up to the promises on the dust sleeve? Is it possible to become a success just by devouring the latest best-seller? Our regular critic PAT McPARLAND of public relations firm Stakeholder Communications brings them to book
ONE of the first and golden rules in world of self improvement/time management/individual empowerment should be to avoid books that make you feel bad about yourself.
Seriously, week after week I'm toiling away to give readers tips about the best and worst business books - steering them in the direction of how to set up a business, be the best they can be, unleash their potential, etc.
All the time, however, I'm being reminded about all the things I haven't done and being admonished for not being better organised.
This latest offering from top GB life coach Mark Forster is possibly the worst book I've ever read from this perspective.
After spending just a few short hours with it, I realised that I have the dubious distinction of sharing all the attributes of all his worst examples of poor time management.
What distinguishes Forster's latest effort is the fact that it captures the reality of working in a modern office better than any time management book I've read before. While many of the principles I've been taught in the past all seemed to come from some 1970's idyllic workplace, Do It Tomorrow recognises and acknowledges the full horror of the broadband/blackberry/mobile phone nightmare.
His advice is simple and at its core is an appeal to throw off the tyranny of constant 'urgent' demands on our time. He challenges readers to take a note of how they perform over the course of a day to see how much of their work goes to plan, and how much of it is simply a response to some of the many stimuli that the modern office worker can't avoid. Your reviewer didn't do very well.
Breaking out of the stimulus - response pattern isn't easy, but luckily Mr Forster has a plan. As a starting point (and one that ultimately endeared the book to me) he urges us to dump the rolling 'To Do List' arguing that it simply exacerbates the problem and causes more of the sort of tasks that we should be trying to avoid.
Secondly, he rejects the principle of 'prioritising' tasks on the basis that if one job is less important than another, you should question whether it's worth doing at all.
What we should be doing is 'declaring a backlog', moving the stuff that is hanging around our necks to a drawer where we only approach it when we have absolutely nothing else to do and setting a list of things that we will absolutely do today.
ONE of the first and golden rules in world of self improvement/time management/individual empowerment should be to avoid books that make you feel bad about yourself.
Seriously, week after week I'm toiling away to give readers tips about the best and worst business books - steering them in the direction of how to set up a business, be the best they can be, unleash their potential, etc.
All the time, however, I'm being reminded about all the things I haven't done and being admonished for not being better organised.
This latest offering from top GB life coach Mark Forster is possibly the worst book I've ever read from this perspective.
After spending just a few short hours with it, I realised that I have the dubious distinction of sharing all the attributes of all his worst examples of poor time management.
What distinguishes Forster's latest effort is the fact that it captures the reality of working in a modern office better than any time management book I've read before. While many of the principles I've been taught in the past all seemed to come from some 1970's idyllic workplace, Do It Tomorrow recognises and acknowledges the full horror of the broadband/blackberry/mobile phone nightmare.
His advice is simple and at its core is an appeal to throw off the tyranny of constant 'urgent' demands on our time. He challenges readers to take a note of how they perform over the course of a day to see how much of their work goes to plan, and how much of it is simply a response to some of the many stimuli that the modern office worker can't avoid. Your reviewer didn't do very well.
Breaking out of the stimulus - response pattern isn't easy, but luckily Mr Forster has a plan. As a starting point (and one that ultimately endeared the book to me) he urges us to dump the rolling 'To Do List' arguing that it simply exacerbates the problem and causes more of the sort of tasks that we should be trying to avoid.
Secondly, he rejects the principle of 'prioritising' tasks on the basis that if one job is less important than another, you should question whether it's worth doing at all.
What we should be doing is 'declaring a backlog', moving the stuff that is hanging around our necks to a drawer where we only approach it when we have absolutely nothing else to do and setting a list of things that we will absolutely do today.