ForumsTime ManagementBook about time management
Book about time management
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lornfate |
Hi everyone,
I just want to share a book entitled "The Roman Timetable" by Simon Young that I have just read that shows how the roman civilization been able to manage their time properly and achieve high progress. It is a brilliant combination of history, biology and a logical method of improving your productivity and increasing clarity. I would recommend it to everyone. |
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Salgud |
As I remember, this system was replaced because it's hard to multiply XVII by MCMXIII.
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andrew_1306330566 |
Posted by moriene09:
[quote]First Start with managing little things like your daily task then try to manage bigger one time management is not a difficult task just need patience and self control to follow yourself] That's the thing I always overlook about managing my time - it needs time :-) |
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lornfate |
Just to add some details about the book, did you know that?
Next Southern Hemisphere Festival: The Festival for Mars 29/8/11 Find out why the Romans believed that this day to be especially good to dance the night away. |
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haritosn |
Hey All,
Another great book is Steven Covey's "First Things First". For those that haven't read this book, it takes your traditional way of doing things such as making a list, prioritising and doing, to a whole new level. Its a practical book,that teaches you to plan your tasks around the things that are important in your life("big rocks"), and to learn how to empower other people to help you accomplish those tasks. For me this book and his "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" which is also a must read, changed my life. I now spend more time planning ahead which gives me more time to spend with the people that are important in my life. Cheers NH |
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Salgud |
Posted by haritosn:
Hey All, Another great book is Steven Covey's "First Things First". For those that haven't read this book, it takes your traditional way of doing things such as making a list, prioritising and doing, to a whole new level. Its a practical book,that teaches you to plan your tasks around the things that are important in your life("big rocks"), and to learn how to empower other people to help you accomplish those tasks. For me this book and his "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" which is also a must read, changed my life. I now spend more time planning ahead which gives me more time to spend with the people that are important in my life. Cheers NH I've read both of those, and found them very helpful. If anyone ever gets a chance to hear Covey speak, jump on it. He is an incredibly dynamic speaker and can motivate granite rocks! |
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mco |
Covey's books were worth reading, but I found that his ideas were just too top-down for daily task management. I struggled for many years to make Franklin-Covey ideas work; it turns out motivating speaker plus failure to achieve goals leads to feelings of failure. I found David Allen's bottom-up approach to be more workable. Less emphasis on motivation, more on empirical principles works better for me.
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kimstark64 |
Posted by lornfate:
Hi everyone, I just want to share a book entitled "The Roman Timetable" by Simon Young that I have just read that shows how the roman civilization been able to manage their time properly and achieve high progress. It is a brilliant combination of history, biology and a logical method of improving your productivity and increasing clarity. I would recommend it to everyone. I never knew about it before. Does the Roman timetable have a chart accompanying it. Would be interesting to learn how History and Biology can be used for time management. Because the only application we use for managing time at our office is Microsoft's project management software. It has a centralized time capture device, which strealines and automates processes. Would like to know how the Roman timetable can help drive efficiency. http://www.microsoft.com/project/en-us/project-management.aspx This message was edited Jan 04, 2012. |
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NoHypeTimeManagement |
Posted: Jan 05, 2012
Score: 1
Reference
I haven't read Roman Timetable but agree with mco that I really like David Allen's GTD system. Prioritizing on the fly based on context works much better for me. I do incorporate some of Covey's ideas like his urgency table that tells you to consider whether something is urgent and important.
He reminds you that if you let the "tyranny of the urgent" trample your long term goals you won't achieve them because you will spend too much time putting out fires and not enough planning and executing higher-value tasks. |
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fantasticate |
Posted by Salgud:
Posted by haritosn: Hey All, Another great book is Steven Covey's "First Things First". For those that haven't read this book, it takes your traditional way of doing things such as making a list, prioritising and doing, to a whole new level. Its a practical book,that teaches you to plan your tasks around the things that are important in your life("big rocks"), and to learn how to empower other people to help you accomplish those tasks. For me this book and his "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" which is also a must read, changed my life. I now spend more time planning ahead which gives me more time to spend with the people that are important in my life. Cheers NH I've read both of those, and found them very helpful. If anyone ever gets a chance to hear Covey speak, jump on it. He is an incredibly dynamic speaker and can motivate granite rocks! Hi All, Steven Covey's "First Things First" is quite a great book. I'v just read a brief article about time management called"A Good Method for Time Management--CRITICAL PATH METHOD" that is interesting and worth reading. http://www.tabb.ca/blogitem_26.php |
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Salgud |
@fantasticate
Having used, consulted on and taught Project Scheduling and M$ Project for many years, I'm very familiar with CPM. As to applying it to daily tasks, it would be a nightmare for me. It takes a lot of effort to create and maintain a proper (keyword) CPM schedule, and most of it's benefits in an individual's daily schedule can be gleaned just by common sense. But the time and energy it would take to plan each day in that kind of detail, durations and dependencies and all, certainly wouldn't pay off in my job, or in any job I've ever had. One of the basic guidelines of using CPM correctly is that the task durations should be no smaller than a half day, and no larger than 10 days (I won't bore you with the reasoning behind this here). And each of those tasks can usually be broken down into a task list such as we might keep in TD. At that level, dependencies are hard to determine, and durations are so short they are easily and all to frequently changed by daily circumstances like the usual office interruptions we all suffer with. So for me at least, applying CPM in my daily routine would be an exercise in frustration. I would only apply it on projects of 30 tasks or more, and involving more than one resource. That's where the real value of CPM comes in to play, managing and properly distributing multiple resources across multiple tasks to get the work done in the shortest time. Trying to manage that on a daily basis for just one resource, myself, would just make me crazier than I already am! Kind of like using an atomic bomb to remove a tree stump. YMMV. This message was edited Jan 19, 2012. |
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fantasticate |
Posted by Salgud:
@fantasticate Having used, consulted on and taught Project Scheduling and M$ Project for many years, I'm very familiar with CPM. As to applying it to daily tasks, it would be a nightmare for me. It takes a lot of effort to create and maintain a proper (keyword) CPM schedule, and most of it's benefits in an individual's daily schedule can be gleaned just by common sense. But the time and energy it would take to plan each day in that kind of detail, durations and dependencies and all, certainly wouldn't pay off in my job, or in any job I've ever had. One of the basic guidelines of using CPM correctly is that the task durations should be no smaller than a half day, and no larger than 10 days (I won't bore you with the reasoning behind this here). And each of those tasks can usually be broken down into a task list such as we might keep in TD. At that level, dependencies are hard to determine, and durations are so short they are easily and all to frequently changed by daily circumstances like the usual office interruptions we all suffer with. So for me at least, applying CPM in my daily routine would be an exercise in frustration. I would only apply it on projects of 30 tasks or more, and involving more than one resource. That's where the real value of CPM comes in to play, managing and properly distributing multiple resources across multiple tasks to get the work done in the shortest time. Trying to manage that on a daily basis for just one resource, myself, would just make me crazier than I already am! Kind of like using an atomic bomb to remove a tree stump. YMMV. Hi Salgud, I agree with you that the creation of a proper CPM schedule for a big project is not easy.However, it seems that the application of it in daily lifeis not so complex, as it is said in this article. For example, one can use as little time as he can to make a dinner ready if each small tasks of this cooking can be arranged well. This is also the application of CPM. |
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Salgud |
Ok, I went back and looked at the article in more detail. This isn't really CPM. He's just sequenced the tasks to get them all completed in the shortest amount of time. I do this most every day, so do a lot of others. CPM is more complex, and involves creating your list of tasks, then determining the dependencies between those tasks, then taking the summary of the dependencies along each path to get the total durations along each path, determining which it the longest path, which is the Critical Path. But you're still not done. In most instances, you then do a process called "Attacking the CP" to shorten the Critical Path, which is usually, in the real world, longer than you want it to be. This is best done by software, like M$ Project, though I was doing on paper before there was software.
What he is describing is not truly CPM, but a sort of shortened and simplified version. Nothing wrong with that, except calling it CPM shows he doesn't really know what CPM is. It is, however, and effective way to get more things done in less time. |
| luckyday1266 | Post deleted |
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aarendavid90 |
Hi there, I'd just like to say that I've read the Roman Timetable book and I think it's great. It looks fabulous on the iPad with all those colour pictures and the author's style is funny but also quite intelligent. Good read!
This message was edited Apr 03, 2012. |
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rose_bannerman |
Effective time management certainly is the process or even procedure for planning and working out conscious control over the times of day allocated to certain workouts, specifically to raise usefulness, proficiency or efficiency. Time management could possibly be assisted by a selection of knowledge, resources, and methods utilized to manage time whenever completing specific responsibilities, projects and desired goals complying with a due date. Regularly time management is usually a necessity in different job advancement since it determines the particular project achievement time and chance.
http://www.worrylessenjoymore.com/ |
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Allan Donsig |
Here are three books I quite like. The first two are old:
1) How to get control of your time and your life, by Alan Lakein 2) The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker 3) Time Management from the Inside out by Julie Morgenstern If you're looking for strategic advice, rather than tactics, Lakein and Drucker's books are quite good. Their tactics sometimes apply to the 21st century and sometimes don't. |
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Salgud |
Lakien's book was the first I read, many years ago, about time management. Was a great start then, and I imagine would be ok now. The basic concepts still work, but, of course, there's no reference to electronic task managers.
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