Be smart

Loved it! Getting this book is one of the smartest things anyone interested in being successful can do.

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A great recap of everything important to succeed

If you want to succeed in personal life and business you must focus. In this book Dan Kennedy remind us of every possible reason to focus and to avoid multi tasking. He's honestly referencing other authors and adding his value and his own point of view and unique considerations as well.

Worthy of listening several times!

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Buy the book; listen and read at the same time

Great book. some old ideas but all worth listening to again and again.
if you're struggling to fit in everything you need in your diary then this is a great book. I dont agree with everything the author says but you can't fail to see the logic of Kennedy's points and the success in his life as a result.

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More important than ever

Read a second time. As someone who is already pretty organised with lists, knowing my priorities and linking those back to me goals, the biggest issue remains time vampires. People asking for 5 minutes to ask me something they don’t want to check for themselves, asking me to fix their messes, meetings with no clear agenda or plans and calls and emails where people the temptation is to prioritise other peoples todo/admin items rather than our own Income generating tasks, long term goals and other priorities.

Note that several multi million and billionaires highly recommend this book vs the reviews from others shunning this in favour of having a better todo list, such as David Allen’s GTD.

I’m all for a good list and executing things in the right order but if you can’t control the constant influx of distractions and use your own intelligence to replace “fax machine” with something that works for you then you aren’t really an entrepreneur - your are a conformist and merely doing a lot of things well that need not be done at all with at best 50% effectiveness after bombardment from constant distraction.

Do Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett or the President stop work each time they get an email, answer calls when no meeting has been scheduled…? I’m sure their shareholders and voters would prefer their focused on more important tasks and picked up other matters their staff determined genuinely required their attention at a time to suit them. A time when both parties could discuss the matter with a suitable time frame, no distractions and after being appropriately briefed on the situation.

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Original review

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I bought this book after it was recommended by several people in Tools of Titans.

For me the key takeaway of the book is that in order to ruthlessly achieve things you need to:
1) Focus ruthlessly on getting the most important things done
2) Ruthlessly stop all distractions, this means having a door closed policy, not answering the phone to unscheduled calls, not spending all day on email working on other people's priorities. Don't get Dan started on social media....

Intuitively we all know those distractions that constantly prevent us from getting anything done. You've got to switch them all off.

Yet I’ve learned you can’t actually manage time; you can only manage yourself and those around you.

For most people, these minutes don’t matter. But they can. In a sense, this is the penny argument. It’s only a penny. A lot of people won’t even pick one up if they drop it. But if you ask Warren Buffett if he pays attention to pennies, you’ll get a different answer. When you say to yourself, “It’s only ten minutes,” you miss the entire point of time. You either take it seriously or you don’t.

Think and Grow Rich, researched from 1917 to publication in 1937, which is still a strong seller today—almost entirely by word of mouth. It, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and the Christian Bible are the three books most frequently referenced as life-altering works by top CEOs and entrepreneurs in surveys year after year.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

What am I going to implement after reading this book:

1) Pushing back on meetings without a clear purpose and agenda. Send me a summary in advance of what is required otherwise I'm not attending. True in all cases exceptions only where this would be career suicide.
2) Keep earphones on in the open plan office to both avoid getting involved in conversations and also make people think twice about interrupting my work
3) Turned off 99.9% of notifications on my phone. The only exceptions are health related apps encouraging me to track my food and water intakes and messages and calls from a small number of hand selected individuals
4) Deleted facebook app, use screen time to set time limits for many others making my e-mail processing a lot faster and more disciplined, moved the majority of apps to folders
5) Mainly now use the phone for audiobooks, kindle books, music, work timer, calendar and health
6) Track my progress to see how things change now I've implemented the above

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The author, Dan Kennedy, is a powerhouse...

Dan Kennedy is a powerhouse of practical, easy to implement advice for any entrepreneur.

I wish I had this book at the beginning of my career.

Already, whilst listening to No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs I have implemented three pieces of his advice and saved myself and hour and 20 minutes out of my day.

I'm actively looking at other time and energy suckers that distract me, and eliminating them from my life!

One piece of advice not covered in this book that I used to save time whilst going through the book was to listen to the book at 1.90 x the normal speed. I got through this pragmatic guide to productivity in less time.

Dan Kennedy is a treasure!

I'm off to implement...

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Unlistenable

Couldn't finish due to the nausea inducing narration. Bloke sounds like he's dropped 3 tabs of acid and has convinced himself he's in a kids story book.

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2 people found this helpful