"Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play"

Get Everything Done was my first book and was published in 2000. The ideas in it were developed for a very successful series of seminars which I had been running.

It was one of the first books on the subject of “time boxing”, although no one to my knowledge had thought up the term in those days. The time-boxing system which I describe in it is still extremely effective. It also goes very well with Dynamic Lists.

As a bonus, it also contains a no-list system called the “Resistance Principle”. I still use this on occasions, especially when I am confronted with a situation in which I’m uncertain how to proceed.

When I wrote this book I was still working full-time as an employee. My ambition was to become a full-time life coach and I’d been working at it in my spare time for several years. I felt I was ready to become full-time from the life-coaching point of view, but I knew I needed to be a lot better organized if I wanted to work for myself. I set about reading existing books on time management and didn’t find most of them to be much help. So I decided to see if I could develop my own time management methods.

The methods I developed allowed me to resign from my job and go full time. Almost immediately I was earning more than I had been paid by my employment.

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Some random quotes from the book:

p. 43. Everything she was doing was in competition for a share of her life. The only way one thing could get done properly was by another thing being neglected.

p. 54. If we start thinking that contacting clients is higher priority than paying attention to having a good filing system, we will end up by having our records in such chaos that we start losing clients.

p. 66. The problem with going with the flow is that most of us do not have a firm enough structure to make our lives flow properly.

p. 144. “I have kept kept the most important bit of advice till last,” said the wizard. “Whenever you sense that you are resisting something, treat that as a signpost to where you should be going.”

p. 154. One of the times we are most vulnerable to an impulse getting control of us is after an interruption.