The Ultimate Productivity Handbook

Do you struggle with how to be efficient and productive at work? Do you dread meetings because they're torturously long and nothing ever gets accomplished?

My colleague, Maryann Murphy, has written a fantastic book to help you with these common dilemmas: Stop Wasting Your Precious Time. This book should be required reading for any workplace or organization (Hello, schools and nonprofit boards!) that needs to get more done in less time and with less aggravation.

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of the book and I loved it! I started implementing some of her suggestions right away and was able to clear my “Action” file in record time.

This is definitely not one of those organizing books that I’m going to find among your piles of clutter, where I usually find the Marie Kondo book or another comprehensive “this-will-change-your-life” organizing book. Maybe you had high hopes when you bought those books, but I think they are overwhelming for most people.

Why will Stop Wasting Your Precious Time not get buried on your bookshelf? Because this book is really a handbook or instruction manual that is packed with actionable strategies. You’ll want to keep this out on your desk so you can refer to it whenever you find yourself stuck and unable to overcome a productivity obstacle.
 
What I love about the book is that Maryann gets right down to business without wasting the reader’s time with a lot of filler and background information. She doesn’t over-philosophize about why you waste time; she just outlines effective solutions that you can implement today to see immediate results.
 
The best way to use this book is to turn to the table of contents and select the chapter that relates to your worst time-wasting challenge. Are you in information overload, are you forced to sit through unproductive meetings, or do you procrastinate? There’s a chapter for each of those problems and several more. So choose a chapter, select one or two of Maryann’s strategies that you think will best help you, and work on putting them into practice. She guides you every step of the way, making it really easy to develop new, anti-time-wasting habits.
 
Although subtitle of the book “60 Easy Strategies for Eliminating Your Biggest Time Wasters at Work,” this book would be useful to just about anyone who’d like to be more productive: students, stay-at-home parents, retirees, or volunteers.
 
So go and grab a copy of Stop Wasting Your Precious Time by Maryann Murphy and then let me know:

• What was your favorite strategy?
• What strategy or idea surprised you?
• What was the result of implementing one or more of the strategies?