As the officially coronated Spreadsheet Queen (with the recently bestowed adjunct title of Micro-Managing Brand Freak), I thought I would really like the system set out in Getting Things Done by David Allen. But in short, I hated it because it is so prescriptive.

Rather than teaching a man to fish, it tells him exactly which pole to buy in which colour and the time of day (down to the second) when the fishing must be done. I agree with some of the basic principles like ‘delete, defer or delegate’ and I do love having an empty inbox. However this book is only for Virgos, whether you believe in astrology or not!

One valuable takeaway is to put everything you need to do on a single list, rather than having items scattered everywhere. I have at least consolidated my lists and it does help.

Never Check E-mail in the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work by Julie Morgenstern.

The title of this book shows the clear mark of a publisher trying to increase sales. The former title was Making Work Work. The drawback of the new, catchier and curiosity-provoking title is that it doesn’t exactly reflect the actual advice, which is to limit your email-checking time, but in a way that suits you, whether that means only after one hour of work has been accomplished – or every other hour throughout the day.

The email-checking limit is part of an approach of classifying work tasks as Morse-code-like ‘dots’ or ‘dashes’. The dots are the emails, phone calls and even unscheduled interruptions which take a short attention span. Tasks which require longer periods of focus are the dashes. Morgenstern provides a strategy for organising the day in dots and dashes, showing examples of what could work for different people.

Personally I have shifted my working day so I prioritise the day’s projects at the beginning of the day, which only takes a few minutes, and then I try to do some ‘dash’ work for an hour before checking my emails and getting into the many other distracting (and often enticing) ‘dots’. It is amazing both how much I can get done in that ‘dash’ time and also the feeling of accomplishment of completing something that does not take very long but that I probably wouldn’t get to at all later in the day.

The dots and dashes are only one method introduced in Never Check E-mail in The Morning. Another technique Morgenstern shares for prioritising tasks is to evaluate them using three criteria: steps from the revenue line, value and time. One step from revenue includes customer service and product design; two steps are proposals, conferences and meetings and three steps include paperwork, reading and updating files.

We probably all use a similar process, even if only intuitively, when choosing among too many tasks to do in a limited amount of time (that pretty much describes every working day, doesn’t it?). Applying Morgenstern’s criteria helps clarify the process, putting it into sharper focus.

There is a wonderful proverb: Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for life. This is a ‘teach a man to fish’ book, which offers a variety of powerful strategies for improving productivity and effectiveness at work. Highly recommended!