Time Management

February is National Time Management Month!  Here are ten books on time management and related topics.

The Best Yes: Making Wise Decisions in the Midst of Endless Demands by Lysa Terkeurst - Are you living with the stress of an overwhelmed schedule and aching with the sadness of an underwhelmed soul?
Lysa TerKeurst is learning that there is a big difference between saying yes to everyone and saying yes to God. In The Best Yes she will help you:
Cure the disease to please with a biblical understanding of the command to love.
Escape the guilt of disappointing others by learning the secret of the small no.
Overcome the agony of hard choices by embracing a wisdom based decision-making process.
Rise above the rush of endless demands and discover your best yes today.

Doing Busy Better: Enjoying God's Gifts of Work and Rest by Glynnis Whitwer - So many women are living overcommitted lives and buckling under the nagging guilt. When they are busy, they feel guilty for not playing with their kids or having a quiet time of prayer and Bible study. When they try to rest, they feel guilty because there's so much left to do. It's an endless cycle of overwork and exhaustion. Yet inside every woman's heart is a longing for true rest. It's there because God designed us that way--but it seems out of reach. Enough is enough. Our lives probably aren't going to get less busy, especially if we're in a demanding season of life, but we can do busy better. In this burden-lifting book, Glynnis Whitwer helps women examine their hearts and their schedules in order to seek a healthy and holy balance between--and enjoyment of--both work and rest. She shows readers how to prioritize their goals and their time, how to be present in the moment as Jesus was, and how to find the freedom of true soul rest. Most importantly, she shows women that their worth is found not in their accomplishments but in the love of the One who made them for work and for rest.

I Don't Have Time: 15-Minute Ways to Shape a Life You Love by Emma Grey - We live in a time of "hurry sickness". "Busy" has become a competitive sport, and it's a sport with no winners. Somewhere underneath all of this hard slog there are the things we really want to do; the things that bring us joy! And most of the time, the only thing standing between us doing we want want, is us. Through stories, theories, and practical exercises, I Don't Have Time explores 50 excuses we make that keep us from getting on with the things that really matter to us. These are the excuses that hold us back in our health and well-being, our careers, relationships, finances, home environments, personal development and recreation. With humor, anecdotes, research on productivity and Emma and Audrey's proven "My 15 Minutes" approach, this is a practical guide for ditching being overwhelmed, and making progress in all the areas that matter most. It flips the notion that we need great swathes of time to get ahead with things, instead encouraging us to use the nooks and crannies in our day to achieve big things over time.

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky - As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.  A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day, Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.

Master Your Time, Master Your Life: The Breakthrough System to Get More Results, Fast, in Every Area of Your Life by Brian Tracy - This life-changing book from the bestselling author ofEat That Frog! provides a unique program for determining WHAT to do WHEN, and managing all of the many details of our lives. We may feel stuck and unable to take certain items off our "To Do" lists for one simple reason: the timing isn't right. InMaster Your Time, Master Your Life, international speaker, productivity expert, and bestselling author Brian Tracy explains why tackling the right project at the right time is of the utmost importance. By using our time in the appropriate way in the most important areas of our lives we will accomplish much more, faster and more easily than we ever thought possible! Based on the most recent research in the field of productivity, as well as the author's personal experiences and those of his clients, Tracy's method involves identifying the ten different "times" in which we operate, and the unique approach required for each of these in order to perform at our very best. Master Your Time, Master Your Life provides simple steps we can use to figure out when we will be most productive for a specific task and when we should move on to the next item on our list, outlining a framework for optimal productivity that will change lives forever!

Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families by Ann Kroeker - We're raising our kids in a high-speed, high-pressured, 24/7 world. Pushing children to get ahead, we cram everything possible into our days to maximize their chance at success. We're overloaded, overextended, overcommitted, and over-caffeinated. And we're paying a price: Our relationships are anemic; our health, in jeopardy.  Half-awake and half-hearted, we can't sustain this pace. But how can we possibly downshift without missing out?
Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families explores the jarring effects of our over committed culture and offers refreshing alternatives. Author Ann Kroeker relates her own story of how embracing a slower everyday pace resulted in a more meaningful family and spiritual life. Practical ideas and insight will spark creativity and personal reflection. Plus, ponder real-life stories from parents who chucked the high-speed lifestyle and reaped the rewards of richer relationships. Not So Fast offers hope that families struggling with hurried hearts and frantic souls can discover the rejuvenating power of an unrushed life.

Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam - In order to get more done, we must first feel like we have all the time in the world. Think about it: why haven't you trained for that 5K or read War and Peace? Probably because you feel beaten down by all the time you don't seem to have... In this book, Vanderkam reveals the seven counter-intuitive principles the most time-free people have adopted. She teaches mindset shifts to help you feel calm on the busiest days and tools to help you get more done without feeling overwhelmed... The strategies in this book can help if your life feels out of control, but they can also help if you want to take your career, your relationships, and your personal happiness to the next level. Vanderkam has packed this book with insights from busy yet relaxed professionals, including "time makeovers" of people who are learning how to use these tools.

The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy by Chris Bailey - Chris Bailey has been fascinated with the subject of productivity since he was a teenager. While pursuing his business degree in college, he researched every paper and read every book available on the topic. After graduation, he embarked on a year long productivity project, interviewing many of the world's foremost gurus in the field, from Charles Duhigg to David Allen, while conducting a series of productivity experiements on himself, from getting by on little sleep, to waking up at 5:30 every morning for a month, from avoiding caffeine and sugar to working 90 hours a week, and monitoring the impact of each experiment on his productivity. He created a blog at the beginning of the project, with exactly zero followers. But as people heard about his project, and read his blog, his traffic grew exponentially, so that by the end of the year he had over 250,000 unique visitors a month. This book and the lessons and insights Chris discovered is the result of that year long journey. Among the many counterintuitive insights Chris writes about in the book are removing or shrinking the unimportant;the rule of three; striving for imperfection; scheduling less time for important tasks; the 20 second rule to distract yourself from distractions, and the concept of productive procrastination. He offers over 30 best practices that will help every one of us to accomplish more.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland - If you've ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there's no more lucid - or compelling - explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago.
The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars.
Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, Scrum is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable - whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.

Time in a Bottle: Mastering the Experience of Life by Howard Falco - Are you ready to put the power of time on your side?
Time is perhaps the most precious and highly coveted resource at our disposal. Yet spiritual teacher Howard Falco has encountered hundreds of people whose limited notions of time have been the primary cause of suffering and disempowerment in their lives. This book shows readers how adjusting their perspective on time will empower them to realize their greatest hopes and dreams.
Whether you desire greater abundance, better health, or more meaningful relationships, you have the power to collapse time, thereby actualizing your intentions faster than you ever imagined possible. Falco shows how personal awareness, thought patterns, feelings, and actions affect when our dreams become a reality. By broadening our understanding of time, we open the doors to an ocean of possibility.