Time Management Magic

Time Management Magic – by Lee Cockerell

This really wasn’t so much a book as it was an annoying infomercial. I lost track of how many times within this short ‘book’ where the author places links to external sites where you can buy more of his books, buy tools he recommends, or refers you to external sites that can ‘help’ you with your time management  skills (for a fee, of course).

Now, to be fair, Time Management is not an easy concept to master.  Few can learn it, but most cannot. As a professional trainer, I’ve taught seminars on time management for over 25 years, and I’ve sadly learned that it’s more of a behavior trait that one must have in their genes. This is where this book fails.  The author is simply peddling easy answers and throwing his advice against a wall in the hopes that some things will stick.  Imagine if you went for professional counseling for chronic depression and the therapist just yelled at you to “cheer up!” That’s what reading this book felt like.  Yes, we ALL know that to improve our time management skills we need to do things like have a “to do” list, but if it was THAT simple, why is it that most still can’t, nor won’t do it?

There are a few times when the author really does have solid, professional recommendations and advice, but rather than devoting page space to helping his readers accomplish what he’s suggesting, he simply throws his bullet points out, and then quickly moves on.  Not very helpful.  I felt like I bought a dieting book that “guaranteed I would lose weight if I followed the books instructions”, yet after I bought the book, I realized the book had only one sentence in the entire book that said “Eat a better diet and exercise”.  

At one point, he briefly says something like “Start your day early. I start mine at 6:15 a.m.” Again, this is GOOD advice, but I can tell you from 25 years of professional experience that 99.9999% of the workforce population will not start their day at 6:15 a.m. unless someone is holding a gun (along with a bucket of cold water) over their head.  What the author should do is take a point such as this, and craft an entire chapter around this concept with ideas, statistics, anecdotes, stories, and case studies.  Had he taken this route, he just might make a convert out of the 99.9999% of his readers who struggle with repeatedly hitting the snooze button on their alarm clock.

Another great example that he doesn’t expand on:  He states to “Surround yourself with great people”.  Now, this really IS great time management advise (assuming those great people have great time management skills), but the author doesn’t expand on the concept. He only devotes one paragraph to this thought (again, along with a link to a website where you have to pay for additional training materials), whereas he should have spent an entire chapter on this concept.  As short as this book is, I seriously doubt someone can remember a helpful point such as this once they’ve completed the book since the point was delivered in such a haphazard fashion.

Then we come to the author’s love of “The Daytimer”.  If you’re unfamiliar with a Daytimer, it’s probably because most people stopped using Daytimers right around the time they bought Windows 95.  The author arrogantly proclaims that the Daytimer is better than any of the modern, electronic means people use nowadays because electronics ‘causes one to be distracted’.  Now, I have nothing against a person who still uses a Daytimer (nor do I have a problem with a person who still watches movies on a Betamax), but it seems pretty pointless to offer this as a suggestion as we’re starting the second decade of the twenty-first century.  He even provides pictures of entries in his Daytimer.  Oy.

The author also tends to ramble on and brag quite a bit about what he did as an executive at Disney.  Again, more detailed (chapter long) examples would have helped.  When I finished this book (after only two sittings) I was tempted to want to ask the author:

“If you’re so gifted at Time Management, how come you haven’t figured out a way to not have people pay $100 a ticket to enter DisneyWorld and have to wait 120 minutes to ride The Haunted Mansion?”

Sorry, but “Just Do It” might be a good slogan if you’re selling lumpy athletic shoes, but not if you’re trying to radically change someone’s behavior and drastically alter how they run their day-to-day life.