Great Books on Time Management For New Year’s Resolutions

Who has made a New Year’s resolution to be more organized?  I know that a little more organization would go a long way to making my home and life run more smoothly.  My biggest problem is trying to do too many things in too little time, so I am focusing on time management.  Here are some of my favorite time management books.

Getting Things Done by David Allen : This book is a classic, and is one of the most recommended time management books around.  Allen shows you how to set up a simple system that will allow you to track your time and be more efficient.  It is geared more towards someone working in an office, but I found it still works well for my homeschooling and blogging tasks.  There are also lots of websites to help you implement the system and make it even more usable.  I have been integrating the principles with Evernote as described in The Secret Weapon website.

21 Days to a More Disciplined Life by Crystal Paine: I like this book because it is short and breaks things down into easily manageable chunks.  It can be too overwhelming to try to make a lot of changes at once, and this book doesn’t expect that.  Each day you make a few small steps towards organization, and by the end of three weeks you have made real and noticeable progress.  This book will be on sale at Amazon for only .99 from Thursday through Saturday, so this is a good time to get a copy!

Eat That Frog!  21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy: The title is a little strange, but there are lots of great tips and techniques in this book.  This book gives you 21 techniques to overcome procrastination.  This is another book that breaks things down so it is easy to make the changes.  It is easy to read and easy to follow.  If only I could figure out how to get my 19 year old daughter who is a major procrastinator to actually read this!

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey: This book is  classic for a reason.  A wonderful guide for making sure that your life is going where you want it to go, and being proactive about how you spend your time.  The concepts sound simple but are very powerful.  Another great advantage this book has is that it is easy to find a copy in any library in the country, so you don’t have to spend anything to read a copy.

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman: This book is more centered on finding focus for your life and setting goals.  So this book has lots of big picture advice on organization and less specific formulas to implement.  This book is inspiring and really makes the great point that sometimes the most important thing to figure out is what you don’t have to do!