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She has endless bullet points and numbered lists that are shallow random thoughts that read like a collection of Oprah magazine articles. She should purchase a copy of Strunk and White Elements of Style, save us the sophomoric prose and write a 50 page concise, focused time management and office organization book. Claire's eyes sparkled with a sense of adventure, and her face was always on the verge of a huge, warm smile." This dribble goes on for 3 more long paragraphs. I found myself skimming the paragraphs looking for any specific original material. Ironically a book on time management and organization takes 72 pages to get to the first time management tip, "focus on tasks that are closest to the revenue line".
Morgenstern undermines her credibility with these exaggerated fairy tale descriptions. The first chapters are wordy cliché discussions such as work life balance, develop an entrepreneur mindset.blah blah blah. Even worse are the self indulgent verbose romance novel examples, including this gem from page 165 "A news writer for a national trade magazine, Claire was a five-foot-one dynamo transforming her industry. A terrific alternative is 4 hour workweek by Timothy Ferris which covers many of the same points in a more compelling, concise and convincing manner. Working alone, she was a one-women wonder, churning out cutting edge stories from an office as wild as her mane of curly black hair.
Additionally, smaller businesses tend to "run lean" with limited back up if someone is absent. No apparent consideration for time and attention necessary for maintaining the culture and values of the company (e.g., customers always come first, or great performance every time or measure twice, cut once, etc). If done well, it will also result in better work life balance and a less stressful workplace.Two caveats, particularly for management and business owners: 1. Small business employees--and their owners--continually are confronted by many more types of tasks requiring attention. Small or large, the tasks and responsibilities every organization must complete to be successful are pretty much the same.
Woefully inadequate attention (in this book) to the value of planning as the most effective way to minimize "fires" and "the tyranny of the urgent";2. But employees of smaller businesses have a wider range of responsibilities than the more specialized staff of larger firms. These factors tend to foster an unfocused and inefficient workplace. This book offers employees in such situations with insights and strategies that show them how to be more productive and efficient.
The book helps you in self-assessment, helps to embrace your work/life balance, to develop entrepreneurial mindset, to choose the most important tasks, to create the time to get things done, to control the nibblers, to organize at the speed of change, to master delegation, to work well with others and to leverage your value.Like other popular self-help books, "Never Check E-Mail In the Morning" has no "references" section, which I don't like. She covers the problems related to e-mail much better that "Hamster Revolution" by Mike Song.I highly recommend "Getting Things Done" by David Allen and "Time Drive" by Gleb Arkhangelsky in addition to this book. She offers to break counterproductive habits and stereotypes related to our way of emailing. "Never Check E-Mail In the Morning" is not about e-mail, it is about time management, self-discipline and productivity in general. Once you have completed this book, you have no direction what to read next. Julie Morgenstern, the author of many time management books and a monthly columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine, and a guest on television and radio programs, probably supposes that you will continue with her further publications.When the author writes about e-mail and the productivity issues that relate to e-mail, I fully agree with the author.
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. Gee, thanks for the hot tip. You're welcome.
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. When she was describing situations that waste your time she hit on the idea of other employees wasting your time. So I read the first part and didn't really get anything from it. 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.
far from concise; I was surprised by the amount of text devoted to the biographies of her clients. Morgenstern's advice for organizing information is to 'do what works best for you'. The underlying idea, however, is that at work you spend too much time multitasking and not enough time getting that really important job done. For a number of jobs not checking your email in the morning is absurd. You don't need to illustrate that point by telling us about someone who worked a lot of hours and attended many pointless meetings. That's why I found it counterintuitive that the author's language was. This is the heart of the book's message because time is our most precious commodity. Toward the latter half of the book Morgenstern meanders into a topic that begins to contradict her earlier ideas.
So in the end Morgenstern hasn't really come up with solutions. The book starts with an address to those who work far too many hours. Sorry to those of you who didn't realize it's the same book and now own two. This is in all capacities the same advice for how to organize your data: 'do what works best'. 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.
The title of the book is quite provocative and an excellent advertising scheme. 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. The book is mostly stuff you've already heard or is completely obvious to you. As the book progresses she gets into how time is wasted and how to avoid the things and people that waste your time. Lets start with the bad. When you say something like, "meetings can be a large waste of time," we understand what you mean.
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. She also tells you to let others know your schedule so they'll be more accommodating. 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). 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. 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. Again, not a very profound message and not one that should take 272 pages to explain.Now on to the slightly more positive.
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.
Her strategies are so practical and address all the problems of working in a 24/7 global market. We were drowning in in our crazy workloads, and struggling under the pressure of always being available to our clients. Nearly a year ago, I bought Never Check E-mail in the Morning and implemented the practices prescribed throughout the book into our busy real estate office. With e-mail and BBs you can never turn off, especially in real estate where it's completely client-based. I definitely recommend it. Morgenstern's techniques really revolutionized the way we did business and helped us to better manage clients' needs and our own sanity.
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