Book Review “Do it tomorrow”

April 25, 2011

by marcus

This is my first live book review and I hope it will give you some ideas for yourself if you want to read this book!

“Do it tomorrow” is a follow up book by Mark Forster to his previous book Get Everything Done And Still Have Time To Play and How To Make Your Dreams Come True. In the first book he looked at the general problems of traditional time management strategies to find some better ways; his second book concentrated on a different approach, namely to get away from the concept of time management and rather concentrating on ones goals.
With this book now Mark Forster wants to get the reader 100% creative, ordered and effective.

Being well ordered has little to do with character; it has everything to do with how your life is structured.

Effectiveness = Creativity x Order

These three qualities are strongly linked together. Being creative but not being ordered will results in being less effective. None of these three concepts exists on its own and the formula above gives a good simplified relationship.
His book is not a guide to being creative but rather a” step-by-step guide to liberating your creativity fZhe rom the shackles of being disordered”.

The main problem with time management is threefold:

We are all working inefficiently.
We have to much work to do.
We have not enough time to do all the work we are supposed to do.

As a result our aim must be:

to increase our efficiency (up to a certain limit);
to reduce the amount of work we have;
to increase the amount of time we have to do all of our work.

Many believe that looking at your important tasks is the solution. Let’s look at this….

Some Myths about Prioritizing!

One risk of becoming more efficient is to take on more work as a result. Be aware of it!
Also, getting more efficient by prioritizing by importance does not work here. Doing the more important things first does not make your system more efficient. If you are doing your tasks badly in general, you will be doing the important staff badly too.

Prioritizing by importance will not help you either when you have too much work to do. It will not reduce the amount of work you have and it will not increase the amount of work you get done either. You will end up with some tasks not being done.

If you are overscheduled already, prioritizing by importance cannot help here. It rather gives us the illusion that “we can prioritize ourselves out of trouble”, on the other hand it might encourage us to take on more work ….

For most people, falling being work is a combination of these three factors. It is the author’s believe that all the work we have is a result of commitments we have; some we brought on, some we have chosen ourselves. When we do not control our commitments and allow them to “grow unchecked and undefined”, we end up overwhelmed. Work starts to feel unpleasant, we are stressed out and come up with all sorts of excuses for being behind our work.

Mark Forster’s Truth about Prioritizing.

Prioritizing his tasks is prioritizing at the wrong level, Mark Forster says. As all our work comes out of our commitments, prioritizing of our goals and commitments is the correct approach. Even before taking on new commitments, we have to ask ourselves and decide if this new commitment is important for our life and work.

Once you have made a commitment, all the work relevant to it needs to be done. Questions of importance and non-importance become irrelevant.

Therefore when you want to cut down the amount of work you should not look at the individual tasks but rather the commitments you have. Be aware though that just cutting the time we allow for a commitment is not the same than cutting the complete commitment!

This summarizes the first 4 chapters and If you want to read and learn more about this book, I recommend to buy it. Amazon offers it for a great price.

I think it is a good additional read to Getting Things Done by David Allen; some of the concept are similar and can be linked.