Can You Read Your Way to Continuous Improvement? Yes!

As a teacher, I find my greatest joy when somebody “gets it.” That moment when the lesson I’ve been propounding suddenly breaks through in all clarity, and my students or audience realizes how the newly absorbed lesson can change their lives for the better. It’s like, Click! the light goes on, and we all win.

libroI had one of those moments recently when I was notified about a prize awarded to my book, The Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had. Because it wasn’t just any prize – it was a prize in the coveted category of Operations Management/Lean/Continuous Improvement. Click! That is precisely the business category that has the most to gain from the book’s lessons. But sometimes books about time management get pegged as “soft”, not serious enough for operations types, as though time were not one of the most valuable commodities we have (and waste).

So when Axiom Business Books recognized that my book, The Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had, can help managers run lean, optimized operations– and help employees enjoy more productive workdays and careers – it was one of the most gratifying moments of my own consulting, writing, and teaching career.

Are you challenged with improving the operation of your company? Do you feel like you always have too much to do and not enough time to do it? Then check out what a few reviewers had to say about how the book can help you:

 

  • “There are only two ways to get more time: Live longer, or recover time stolen from you. The Time Bandit Solution teaches the latter!”
  •  “Brown’s sharp insights are offered in easily digestible lessons, and in a familiar, down-to-earth tone. Each chapter provides clear goals and practical methods for improving time management, while case studies and quantitative data demonstrate that our drive to do more with less is built on faulty assumptions, and enabled by a ‘culture of interruption.’ Brown’s advice on the behavioral change needed to challenge this will help readers to reclaim quality, productivity, and sanity.”
  •  “While reading the book you’re encouraged to do some practical exercises to reveal just how much of your time is squandered away to unnecessary interruptions, and to see how much time you could get back.”
  •  “I would recommend this book to practically anyone who regularly feels they have more to do than time to do it.  As a business executive, I would read and recommend to staff, and also to my college-age children who are a new category of time bandit victims.”
  •  “This is one of the rare non-fiction books that I actually didn’t skim through to just get highlights when I first start reading as it grabbed my attention and kept it. There is a lot of useful information that can help both the business person, a company, or an enterprising, entrepreneur who is just getting started.”

What are all those tips and practical advice the reviewers so admired? Here is a sampler:

Time Locking: Setting aside blocks of time during which you can work uninterrupted.

Focal Locking: Teaches many useful techniques for how to concentrate on the task at hand and avoid the compulsion to distract yourself.

Communication Arts & Skills: Teaches the art of saying the right thing the right way, focusing on the style of communication, an etiquette protocol, and world-standard, best-practice consultative selling and relationship management techniques.

Mutual Time Lock Agreement: Describes how you and your colleague(s) can enter into an agreement that allows each to Time Lock in exchange for mutual performance commitments and cooperation.

Critical Few vs. the Minor Many / Batch Processing: Teaches the use of the 20/80 Rule as the compass and the roadmap for knowing what activities are critical and what are not and how to treat them differently.

Important vs. Urgent: Teaches how to distinguish what is truly urgent and takes top priority, and what is merely important and can be done after the urgent matters are taken care of.

Hard vs. Easy: Helps you determine when to do certain types of work depending on when you have the requisite energy and how to plan around your biorhythmic cycles.

Please, don’t suffer along with inefficient operations, or with a workday so filled with interruptions you can’t perform well. Read The Time Bandit Solution and do what the subtitle promises: Recover stolen time you never knew you had!