 Get most out of your Time.
"The Time Trap" is a bestselling book from 1972. This edition is an update, which takes into account time consuming items which were not important in 1972, e.g. mobile phone and internet. However, surprisingly not much has changed in the last 40 years:
Todays top 5 list of time traps are:
1. Management by Crisis
2. Inadequate Planning
3. Inability to say No
4. Miscommunication
5. Poorly Run Meetings
The author advises, that the reader should make his own list of time traps and then deal with it accordingly. The book correctly says that Time Management is part of Priority Management: Do not just organize your time so that you can finish all items, but first think about which items are important and bring you closer to your goals.
To be efficient, the author advises for example the following: List your top three actions for the day and schedule them into your best time of the day.
The book gives many good ideas about priority and time management. But I cannot give five stars, since the author himself has told Fortune Magazine that managing time is a lot more difficult than what he imagined, since the techniques go against human nature, like doing sports. - Advice which goes against my nature might not be very helpful in the long-run.
 This book will benefit you, your clients, and save your company $$
This practical (and often funny) book handles prioritizing (task triage) in realistic new ways.
For people like me in affordable property management who must handle random interrupters while wrestling with multiple priorities, the ideas are solid and logical.
This book rewards serious reading: it's not a "quickie hints" book, though its closing chapter does summarize ten quick reminder-solutions for each major "time trap".
The opening chapters tackle Multiple Priorities. The vital advice here is:"De-randomize" the most important tasks in your business day so that random interruptions or small jobs cannot jeopardize major tasks.
The Daily Plan is key: you reserve specific priority spots on your schedule for your top 20% of tasks. You choose times when you can guarantee focused treatment. Color these brief reserved spaces "red" on your schedule so they are highly visible: then, let nothing interfere with them.
The Details:
Start your day listing your top three priorities--the most valued tasks you MUST complete today.
Then, slot those tasks into your "red zone" times of day--not necessarily your "earliest" times--but definitely your "best" times: when you have the three essentials--energy, access and privacy--to handle challenging or confidential issues successfully. With your top tasks thus safeguarded, it's probably
OK to "wing- it" on tasks outside the red zones. On such lower-impact work, the damage of delay is slight.
As for interrupters:
You can de-randomize interruptions, too. Make a specific deal with your best clients, customers or colleagues---those who tend to contact you urgently, yet unexpectedly. If they contact you, blindly, at a time when your general phone and walk-in traffic is heaviest, they have to fight their way past less-deserving cases. Why should they?
So the advice is:
Tell your best clients that while you'll willingly "bump" other traffic where possible, you wonder why your top client should "take their chances" at all. Pick a good moment to sit down with a top client or colleague: display a graphic rendering of unavoidable peak traffic. Offer a deal. Suggest they find their most convenient times of day (out of peak traffic time) to contact you. They can gather all their needs--put all their pins in a row, then expect a guaranteed "e-mail or phone appointment" when you'll deal resolutely with all their issues--with only their data in front of you, and only their needs paramount. Of course, while you're creating such privileged "red zone" for your best clients--you're also giving them a clue about planning-- a long-term benefit for your relationship.
Sounds like a solution to me! The wide coverage of this book helped me see where I am already
strong at time management. But I'm newly resolved to reserve the best 20% of my day (my red zones) for problem-solving appointments with those few clients or colleagues whose issues give me and my company 80% of our income potential.
 Professional consultants do not understand time pressure
I have read perhaps a dozen books on time management and I consider The Time Trap, Fourth Edition, published in 2009, to be one of the least helpful. It does contain some useful ideas, especially for persons who have not thought seriously about time management before, who have not read other work, but it provides little additional insight from other available work.
My primary complaint with the book is a complaint that I have with the entire genre. The authors are professional consultants. It is apparent from the writing, that these author do not know from personal experience what it is like to face an avalanche of high-priority responsibility, the 150 e-mails that arrive overnight including the 20 of varying urgency hidden within the pile that directly impact one's long-term objective. The discussion of e-mail and virtual tools is particularly naïve. On page 154 when addressing important e-mail issue #1 "High Volume" the authors state "it's not the interruptions that all you; it's the randomness of the interruptions . . . ", and then proceeds to offer a number of suggestions on how to schedule when to check e-mail. The authors completely sidestep the number one problem with e-mail, that is high volume. Those of us with enormous responsibilities, connected to people all over the world, from different organizations, with different work weeks, different cultures, different time zones and different priorities are struggling with setting priorities and managing time amidst a constant inflow of new information and new requests that we need a sound strategy for. This book does not provide much help, not because the situation we face is beyond help, but because the authors do not genuinely understand our situation.
This book wastes my time
This book wastes my time and money. There's no solid ground. The chapters, "the world gone virtual", "E-mail mania" and "the untamed telephone" are too generic and out-dated. With this level of information provided in this book, I'd be better off google it.
 Pretty useless for anybody but managers
I found this book pretty useless. It contains a lot of commonplace hints how to organize your life better but doesn't offer many original ideas on how to implement them and help yourself in achieving results. I guess, most of us usually know WHAT our "time wasters" are and would rather need an advice HOW to change situation.
The book style if old-fashioned and many illustrations (especially tables) are impossible to read because of the author's scribble. It seems to be written by a manager for other managers ignoring the day-to-day needs and specifics of anybody else. Abundance of slang and "simple language" is another feature of this book.
I found David Allen's "Getting things done" a much more inspiring and useful.
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