Book Review: Tell Your Time

One of the perpetual struggles for bloggers, writers, parents, spouses, and everyone else is finding enough time.  Amy Lynn Andrews, from Blogging With Amy, has solid ideas and techniques in her book, Tell Your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free.  The book only has 30 pages, making it a fast read so that I could start using her steps immediately.

In the preface, Amy states clearly the purpose of her book:

In a straightforward, easy-to-follow way, this book will help you:

1. Identify the most important things in your life.
2. Set long-term goals for each.
3. Determine how you can reach those goals in doable, bite-sized steps.
4. Manage your time efficiently so the important things don’t fall through the cracks.

Best of all, you will learn how to do it all in a fraction of the time.

Amy’s  website has free printable tools to help you with these four steps (look for the link all the way at the bottom).  My semi-annual goal setting process gave me a good starting point already.  I am pretty efficient with my time, but using the weekly schedule helped me see better where my time was going.

I realized as I worked through the schedule that as much as I like to swim, I do not have two hours several times a week to do it.  I have 60 minutes during lunch at work to exercise and I have to make it happen then.  I also need downtime on the weekend.  I can’t ignore or put it off if I want to be at my best during the workweek.

Amy gives sound advice how to prioritize your day with scheduling, yet not make yourself miserable with scheduling too tightly.  She makes time with God and her husband a priority as she lays out her typical week, both of which I appreciated.

Whether you’re having problems with time management or just need some tweaking of a system that works pretty well, the suggestions offered in this book are solid, down-to-earth, and doable.

Interestingly, Amy writes in her blog about how Thomas Nelson Publishing (yes, the big Christian publishing house) approached her to publish this book under their imprint and why she turned them down.  Her lessons learned are of interest to anyone who is self-publishing.