Fred's Book Club: Get 'Er Done!

Welcome to another Wednesday Hump Day meeting of the Humpback Writers, thus the stupid name. No one has humps, although some may have lumps. We all take our lumps in life. Anyway, you could call it Fred's Book Club, but that might be even dumber. I don't mind either way.

I was barely able to get a post together today because Tuesday was nutty, with work coming in and the router acting up and a dog needing to go to the vet (Tralfaz got a hot spot from the injury I mentioned on Monday, but he'll be all right after pills pills pills). Anyway, it was a good excuse to look at time management, which brings us to:

Alan Lakein is no slouch when it comes to time management -- which, for that matter, is not a field that really rewards slouches. How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, first published in 1973, is a plan for the scatterbrained to do exactly as the title says. In 160 pages, Lakein gives a brisk run-down of all the principles one really needs to decide on priorities and goals and give them the one thing that cannot be bought or sold: time.

"Time is life," he writes right up front. "It is irreversible and irreplaceable. To waste your time is to waste your life, but to master your time is to master your life and make the most of it." He goes on to outline his plan in a way any writer could envy, with powerful, economic words.

I'm not a "time and motion" organizer, trying to get everything done in the shortest time with the fewest waster motions. That kind of efficiency means taking the thinking out of an activity and reducing it to a series of mechanical routines. There is no attempt to keep it fun or interesting, so you might even say that such extreme clockwatching takes the life right out of an activity, along with the thought.

Lakein is all about deciding what your priorities are and planning your time to push those first. "Control starts with planning," he writes. "Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now." He is impressively quotable.

Of course he is aware that plans go awry, just as I didn't intend to spend an hour and a half at the vet yesterday. That's not what this is book about. This is planning over the long haul. Know your goals, resolve their conflicts. set lifetime priorities.

Take your Lifetime Goals list in hand and spend one minute selecting your top three goals. Label the most important of these A-1. The second most important is A-2. The third is A-3. Do the same for your three-years list, and your six-months list.
     At this point you have nine goals culled from the three lists. To pick out the three most important long-term goals of this nine, write on a fresh piece of paper, "My three most important long-term goals are..." Then write them in order: A-1, A-2, A-3. You have now finished a preliminary Lifetime Goals Statement. You have zeroed in on just what it is you want to do with your life as you see it at this time.

It doesn't get much more complex than that.

I don't think there has been a single book on organizing for success that really had more to say than Lakein has here, but most authors pad their books with cute names for complex tasks, endless anecdotes and testimonials, and misattributed quotations swiped from the Internet. If you just want to get your life in order, I say, stick to Lakein.

And there is the rub. I bought this book more than twenty years ago, when I had a demanding job and a scattered personal life and was trying to get things in order. The problem is, like any good program, it only works if you put it into action. I don't know what became of the notebook I was using to work out my life plan back then, but it is gone. It may be in my desk. The fact that I have no idea tells you how well I practiced the program.

In fact, one glance at my desk (which I shall spare you) is enough to prove that I have never followed any advice on organization for long. I won't say that my desk looks like you took a bunch of books and papers and pens and things, stuffed them in a huge ballpark T-shirt cannon, and blew them at it. I will say that if you did such a thing, the results would be indistinguishable from the current condition.

Perhaps I ought to give this book a second glance. If I can find the time.