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Have you ever wondered if there is a better way to manage your actions and control your To Do list? If you have, this book from Maura Nevel Thomas will give you the tools to evaluate how you organize and track tasks efficiently. Like, super-efficiently.

From To Do to Done : How to go from busy to productive by mastering your to-do list, is part of the Empowered Productivity series from Ignite Reads.

It’s a short, colorful, nicely laid out and giftable book, designed to be impactful in just an hour.

The book guides you through the following six steps:

  1. Managing your actions
  2. Organizing your time
  3. Organizing your task list
  4. Making things easy for you to do them
  5. Choosing productivity tools
  6. Working with your system.

The author takes the premise that productivity can be defined as doing what’s important to you: what life do you want? Work towards that. As with many modern productivity books, including Getting It All Done , there’s a focus on understanding what you want to get out of life and what ‘counts’ for you. Then building the rest of your time and activities around that.

Thomas provides detailed instructions on action management: the process of collating, tracking, managing, and crucially, doing tasks. I love the terminology ‘action management’ instead of what I usually use: task management. Action management implies that there is some movement, something happening, some work being completed. Task management implies you’ve made a list. You can see the difference.

I took away some tips from this book – and I consider myself to already be pretty good at task management. Being a project manager, organizing my tasks and those of other people come with the territory. 

There were some ideas that challenged my way of thinking, such as her view on how to categorize tasks. Her take on time blocking – reserving time in your calendar for focused work on a particular topic – also goes against what I personally do, but that’s not a criticism. Other people will have different needs and different approaches to doing their work and it’s refreshing to read something new.

I’ve read a lot of productivity and time management books recently – there seems to be a glut of them, maybe as a result of COVID-19 and the move to more virtual working where tech seems to be both a help and a hindrance due to the culture in some places of being ‘always on’.

This one is a pleasant read. It won’t take you long to read and feels manageable, practical and with task management strategies you can start using straight away. Oops. I mean ‘action management’ strategies. I need to start adopting that shift in my own language to focus my mind and make better use of the time I spend organizing my own work.

From To Do to Done would make a great gift for your team or the busy person in your life. I don’t think they’d take it the wrong way…


From To-Do to Done: How to Go from Busy to Productive by Mastering Your To-Do List: 2 (Empowered Productivity, 2)

£12.27

This book from Maura Nevel Thomas will give you the tools to evaluate how you organize and track tasks efficiently. Like, super-efficiently.


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07/13/2021 07:38 pm GMT

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From To Do to Done

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