In the first part of the book, the author spends time justifying why you need to improve your time management skills: work/life balance, why being a workaholic is a bad thing, nobody works well under pressure. It’s good stuff.

Next, he suggests a framework for recording where you’re spending your time relative to your priorities. This is actually the most essential part of the book as it will become self-evident where you’re being inefficient.

The second part of the book lists the top twenty time-wasters (list below), ways of identifying subissues within them, and suggestions for dealing with them. Working through the time spent/priorities exercise may be all the self-correcting behavior you’ll need. However, if you’re like me and identify more than one time-waster, Mackenzie recommends you focus on reducing the effects of only the most egregious each month.

1. Management by Crisis
2. Telephone Interrupts
3. Inadequate planning
4. Attempting too much
5. Drop-in visitors
6. Ineffective delegation
7. Personal disorganization
8. Lack of self-discipline
9. Inability to say No
10. Procrastination
11. Meetings
12. Paper work
13. Leaving tasks unfinished
14. Inadequate staff
15. Socializing
16. Confused responsibility or authority
17. Poor communication
18. Inadequate controls and progress reports
19. Incomplete information
20. Travel

I found enlightening the notion that posted milestones and quantifiable job objectives are a good thing because they free you from undertaking things that are not priorities.