I’ve received the following testimonial from a reader of Secrets of Productive People who wishes to remain anonymous:
I would like to express appreciation for the very simple and effective time-management technique in chapter 9 of your book “Secrets of Productive People.”
At the end of last week, my work was in a mess. For several weeks I had been overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to do, and most days I had been doing very little real work at all. I didn’t know where to start.
My office was untidy and I had a mountain of jobs to do, stacks of papers, unanswered emails, and unfinished projects, with no idea of what I had done and what still remained to do.
I read your five-task system over the weekend and started using it on Monday morning. I can honestly say that I have had one of the most productive weeks of my life. Not only that, but I enjoyed every minute of it!
The time flew by. I could see I was making progress constantly. A lot of the jobs I had been frightened of actually took very little time. Some didn’t actually need to be done at all!
I enjoyed the fact that I always had a choice about what job I wanted to do next. I had time to prepare myself mentally for some of the more challenging tasks, seeing them there on the list. I was easily able to cope when unexpected extra jobs came along. And at the end of each day, I could see exactly what I had achieved, with the satisfaction of a list of tasks crossed off.
I cleared my entire backlog, set up some new systems, and even took some new initiatives. All this in between meetings, despite fairly regular interruptions from colleagues as well as the fact that I was suffering from insomnia for most of the week!
So thank you very much for what is a very powerful productivity system. I thoroughly recommend it and am looking forward to trying some of your other suggestions.