Great ideas to Get Your Life Back
Fergus O’Connell
Headline Publishing Group 2010
Rs.225 Pp 228
In Stephen Covey’s book entitled First Things First (1997) the Introduction says that no one at his death bed would say that he should have spent more time in the office, and then goes on to speak of the need to manage our life rather than just indulge in what popularly goes under the name of Time Management. Several thousand books later comes Fergus O’Connell with this book. ‘If you are not happy with the way your life is at the moment, if you want to make a major change in the amount of time you spend at work, readjust your work/life balance or reshape your entire life, this book will give you the tools to do exactly that,’ says the Introduction.
There is however a subtle twist here. The emphasis in not on ‘Work Less’ – for no one has yet come with a perpetual-free-lunch sort of activity, just as none could in the pre-medieval search for ‘perpetual motion’. The focus is on ‘Achieve More’. But again, this ‘Achievement’ is not as the world knows but as Fergus O’Connell intends but does not care to define. It is a vague kind of whittled-down level of achievement in careers and personal wealth which one should decide upon without placing too much stress on the health of one’s mind or body or both.
Therefore one of the major exercises stressed upon in the book is that of eliminating stuff that you don’t really want to do. That ‘really’ is a matter of personal definition and understanding. According to that definition and understanding, the reader needs to decide how many days or hours he has available over a fixed period of time (6 months/1year or whatever) and determine the ‘things’ he wants to accomplish during that given period. On analysing the ‘supply and demand’ of time available versus things to be done, one then has to decide which of the things he will defer or delete. The author thus speaks of Extreme time management, which the author says, goes beyond conventional Time Management in that “we’re not going to do lots of things.”
Divided into five parts, the book starts with description of the basic philosophy and key concepts of the book, along with some tools to get started. The subsequent parts initially focus on the concept of extreme time management at work which can then be translated to our ‘whole life’. Can we draw a list of all the things we ever wanted to do? That’s to be done immediately. Can we then (assuming we are successful with the list) drop out things that need not be done, or cannot be done? Will our ego allow it? Will the circumstances which brought about the conditions which led to the making of that list allow the dropping of any of the items?
Maybe it is possible to make a list of the twenty odd items one always wanted to do but never got around to doing anything about. Maybe. But Anthony Robbins (“Awaken the Giant Within You”1991) says that one need not drop anything from the list. It’s the list that matters. From the list springs eternal hope and the spirit to accomplish. If one makes a list with the intention of dropping a few of the items, then it is already a foregone conclusion that the list is not of things that one really wanted to do. One is then making a list of things one may want to eliminate from one’s dreams or plans or whatever the list consists of. There is also a belief that we generally try to cut down the size of our dreams to match the size of our income – and that this should be avoided. One should rather try to make the size of our income large enough to cater to our dreams. The fact that dreams grow larger with the size of our income is another matter to be tackled – when we have that extra money! But here comes O’Connell saying that we should cut down our dreams to the size of the time available with us. Following the old adage to cut the coat according to our cloth – which always results in an ill-fitting coat, surely! Also a contradiction of Parkinson’s Law which says that work expands to fill the time available for dong it. It follows therefore also that work contracts where necessary!
The central question on reading such books (some called Positive Mental Attitude books, some Self-Help books) is whether we really do need such publications. All one has to do is to get down to it, decide that one is going to lead one’s own life with confidence and self-esteem and decide what things we are going to accomplish in the ‘time’ given us by Whoever-It-Is that decides these things. And if the writer is only going to tell us that we should cut down our dreams ‘according to the cloth’ then perhaps we could look elsewhere for the fulfilment of our dreams. Perhaps deep within us.
No comments:
Post a Comment