Time Management - a look at the best books on the subject

The discipline of Time Management was invented in Denmark to try to ensure expensive executives were getting the most out of their day. Since then it has spread across the world with most businesses and a lot of individuals applying it to their lives.

I've been reading a lot of time management books over the years, and here are my thoughts on some of them:

The 80 - 20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch

The 80-20 principle is sometimes known as the Pareto Principle and is based around a known mathematical relationship that applies to most aspects of business and life. For example, 80% of a firm's profits come from 20% of the products they sell. Or 20% of the work you do generates 80% of your income.

Many people know this already - but continue to try to give all the tasks before them equal time and effort. Richard Koch's insight is to identify the 20% of tasks that generate 80% of profits, and then give them priority.

This book is split in two with the first part applying the Pareto principle to business and the second part to personal time management.

My verdict: He had some thought-provoking things to say about being "intelligently lazy". The ideas are really good - but I found it a colossal struggle to put them into practice.

The difficulty is that if you are a perfectionist, you will spend a lot of time fighting your instinct to spend time on unimportant things you think you should do merely for completeness - it's hard to admit that perfectionism is the enemy of productivity. Also, sometimes it's easier to coast doing the unproductive but easy tasks, because it still looks like you are working! It's a hard habit to break, but profitable.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

It may seem counter-intuitive to have a book on habits on a page about time management. However, most of our time is wasted due to bad habits. Spending hours mindlessly surfing online or watching television. And even if you have a plan for how to spend your time productively, you will probably deviate from it, due to the power of old bad habits.

This book looks at how habits form, and how to break habits and make new more productive habits. It also looks at how the advertising industry uses our habits against us to persuade us to buy stuff we don't need. Therefore if you are trying to break destructive financial habits, this book may help, in addition to helping with time management.

My verdict: It definitely opened my mind as to what was governing my day to day behavior and helped me break a few habits that were unproductive.

Time Management: Proven Techniques for Making Every Minute Count by Richard Walsh

Though this book has many traditional techniques for managing the flow of work (lists, how to schedule etc), the author spends a lot of the book trying to get the reader to become aware of how time passes, and in particular how much time is wasted on emotional episodes such as worry and procrastination.

It's a useful book because it addresses the psychological aspect of how we govern our lives, and explores how our emotional lives literally take up time, with tips on how to handle this.

My verdict: This was a traditional time management book, but with a new twist in that it tried to bring some psychological insight into the traditional lists and schedules.

If you've got a time management book to recommend, please post in the comments - I'd love to hear your thoughts about what works.