Time Mastery: How Temporal Intelligence Will Make You a Stronger, More Effective Leader

Efficiency vs. effectiveness. The authors give a good balancing perspective to the hundreds of conventional "time management" books that purport to give ways to do more in less time. Those books and their techniques have a place and function. This book offers a "macro" approach to time management in tempering the obsession with efficiency through a focus on effectiveness, slowing down the pace and sensing when it is appropriate to throw away the calendar, to-do list and stopwatch. A thought-provoking strategic view of time management for either the business person or one's own personal life.

There are tonnes of book on this topic. After reading books such as First Thing First, Getting Things Done, Flow and others, I had been only been partially solving my clutters. It seems that this book was the final piece that links all the pieces together. However, this effect although work for me, may not work for others as all of us have different experiences that may have different missing pieces to put the whole picture together. For me, somehow it was this book. Books like "First Thing First" and the like focus on the big helicopter/Hubble-telescope view. I was not fortunate enough to transform the high-level visions, aspirations and life goals that I've derived from putting the things proposed in the books, into concrete results. The difference between reality and the visions were still distant. Then books that focus more on where the rubber hits the road (e.g. "Getting Things Done") were able to help me to reduce my clutters. Although things were more manageable, I still needed a lot of time doing the nitty-gritty of time management work. I was getting more efficient, but the degree of improvement in my overall effectiveness were not what I desired for. "Time Mastery" made me to infer that in order move ahead in the midst of abundant things to complete, one needs to think strategically. One needs to think in another plain. In our ever fast-pace society, there are too many people in the hurry. Yet, success may not pay justice to the effort and sacrifices that they put in in their lives. Ask anyone and he will tell you that there are many intances of CEOs of big companies who are calm and seem to be living in an unhurried world. They brought their companies to the finishing line first. However, they do it in a way akin that beats convention wisdom that is in an unhurried manner. In my work as a software development consultant, I have been plagued with overtime work. Many things that I had wanted to do have escape my clasps. After thinking strategically in my time management, not only my productivity in my work has increased, but I found that suddenly there is now actually time for me to do things that I had been wanted to do and still have time to spend with my 1-year old son. I just hope that this book could be the missing piece that gels all the others in your time management the way it did for me.