If you feel like you are always running behind, deadlines are staring you in the face and life overall seems to be pressing on you from all sides, you’re not alone! The key to conquering these issues is time management. As easy as that term sounds, it actually encompasses a skill set that can take some time and guidance to fine tune. However, the end result is worth it!
General Books on Time Management
These books can help you become a master of your schedule, alleviating the feelings of being overwhelmed and rewarding you with the all important gift of free time.
1. 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs
When looking for answers to a situation, it’s always good to see what the experts have to say! New York Times bestselling author, Kevin Kruse, presents the remarkable findings of his study of ultra-productive people. Based on survey research and interviews with billionaires, Olympic athletes, straight-A students, and over 200 entrepreneurs—including Mark Cuban, Kevin Harrington, James Altucher, John Lee Dumas, Pat Flynn, Grant Cardone, and Lewis Howes—Kruse answers the question: what are the secrets to extreme productivity?
By identifying what really needs our precious time and focus, Kruse helps guide people away from situations that rob us of our most valuable asset: our time.
“Kevin Kruse has written one of the best books I’ve ever read on scaling up time management. In this book, 15 Secrets Successful People Know about Time Management, Author Kruse starts off with introducing the idea of ‘1440,’ and the importance of keeping an eye on our 1440 minutes of the day. As Kevin states: ‘We can never get time back again. Unlike money, it is irreplaceable. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.’ By learning how successful people use their time, we can model what works for them and instead of wasting our time and invariably our lives, we can gain a greater stake in our most valuable resource.” -Amazon Review
2. The Ultimate Time Management Toolkit by Risa Williams
If you, like most of us, fall under the umbrella of a chronically busy person, this book is just the ticket. Written by a clinical therapist and author of The Ultimate Anxiety Toolkit, this book focuses on practical methods and strategies, including creative worksheets and easy-to-use techniques, to help you find your motivation, achieve your goals, and feel less stressed about organizing your time.
With 25 different techniques based on CBT, mindfulness, and narrative therapy, you can find out which strategies work best for you to help transform how you use your time and learn how to feel empowered to make positive changes to habits in your daily life.
3. Make Time: How to focus on what matters every day
The modern world is clamoring for our time and attention every hour of every day. It can become overwhelming, consuming, and downright exhausting. Making time for what really matters often gets lost in the shuffle. Bestselling authors John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work.
Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now, they’ve packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.
“There’s a real line between being a productive person, and being a productive person. Someone who focuses on so many ’hacks’ or ways to get more out of every second, that efficiency in and of itself becomes the goal to the expense of everything else. That may be useful in a manufacturing job, but in our daily lives, there is surely more. This is where Make Time really shines. Far from being a mad dash to some invisible finish line, Make Time provides simple, easy-to-read tools that can be used to refocus on what truly makes you happy. The book is written as a bit of a toolbox, meant to allow you to take pieces that work for you, and leave the ones that don’t. Using that approach has massively improved my lifestyle.” – Amazon Review
4. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals
The Wall Street Journal calls Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals “provocative and appealing… well worth your extremely limited time.” Author Oliver Burkeman says that some of the most well-known “hacks” for time management don’t work; instead, they may even make things worse. Drawing on wisdom and insight from ancient and modern philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Burkeman provides a profound guide to time and time management.
5. Time Magic: Reclaim Your Time, Reclaim Your Life
Reclaim your time with Time Magic by Melissa Ambrosini and Nick Broadhurst. This revolutionary book describes a variety of ways to create a more spacious life, unpacking specific strategies to transform your relationship with time management. Readers will learn tactics to free up hours, weeks, and years of their lives, as well as tips and tricks to skyrocket their creativity. The health and mindset hacks in this book will help you get the most out of the time you have.
6. The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
The 80/20 Principle is all about being more effective with less effort. It promotes the principle that 80 percent of all our results in life and business stem from a mere 20 percent of our efforts. Reviewers call this idea one of the “great secrets of highly effective people.” Although the principle has been around for quite some time, author Richard Koch breaks everything down and shows how to use the principle in a systematic and practical way.
7. 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
After interviewing dozens of highly successful people, author Laura Vanderkam realized that there was a common thread that connected them – they all managed and allocated their time differently than the average person. 168 Hours shows that with examination, reflection, and re-prioritization, people can find the time to sleep eight hours a night, exercise, pursue hobbies, and grow professionally… all without giving up time with family and friends.
Time Management Books for Parents
Parenting is the ultimate time management juggling act. Not only are you in charge of yourself, being a parent throws quite the curveball when it comes to time management and structure. As important as a parent’s daily schedule is, a child’s schedule and keeping it consistent is vital to their wellbeing.
The following books are aimed at helping parents learn how to set and keep a successful schedule for the entire family and avoid parental burnout.
8. Time to Parent: Organizing Your Life to Bring Out the Best in Your Child and You
Would you ever take a job without a job description, let alone one that requires a lifetime contract? Parents do this every day, and yet there is no instruction manual that offers achievable methods for containing and organizing the seemingly endless job of parenting. Finding a healthy balance between mindfully raising a human and being a human often feels impossible, but Julie Morgenstern shows you how to harness your own strengths and weaknesses to make the job your own.
One review raves, “This book served as a great outline for me to immediately implement a few of your strategies. Keeping all the balls in the air in my home is a really demanding endeavor, which leaves very little time to have fun, relax, rest and have downtime. The importance of being present and able to relate to my child are areas that I knew I needed to work on. Julie’s parenting time matrix made this instantly feel doable.”
9. 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families
Author Stephen R. Covey brings his practical and philosophical guide to solving the problems—large and small, mundane and extraordinary—that confront all families and strong communities. The seven steps are broken down in a usable format for families with the goal of being more successful in the everyday.
Every chapter contains numerous real-life examples of how these habits work and the results produced. What makes this book particularly effective is the helpful list of ideas at the end of each chapter that makes sharing the ideas and concepts with teens and children easy and enjoyable. Covey obviously has practiced what he preaches and knows what it takes to build a strong family.
10. 10 Time-Saving Tips for Busy Parents
Who of us hasn’t wasted time searching for lost items, scrolling through social media, nagging our children to do their chores, or wandering the grocery store in search of items we should have put on a list? The regret and stress caused by squandered time is a burden for many families, but it doesn’t have to plague yours any longer. With the advice and wisdom of Dr. Battles, you can streamline your schedule, stop wasting precious time, and start seizing every moment with energy and joy.
“I am incredibly organized and detail-oriented and yet I was surprised how much I learned from this book. I’m excited to implement several of these ideas!”- Amazon reviewer
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Time Management Books Specifically for Women
Who runs the world? According to Beyonce, it’s girls! But all that running the world takes extreme focus and attention to details. The following books are designed for women and their unique challenges and schedules.
11. Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Ambitious Women
Working mothers rejoice! In Do Less, author Kate Northrup has provided a clearly written guide on how to balance life, work, and everything in between. Do Less offers the reader a series of 14 experiments to try to see what would happen if she did less in one specific way. So, rather than approaching doing less as an entire life overhaul (which is overwhelming in and of itself), this book gives the reader bite-sized steps to try incorporating over 2 weeks.
The addiction to busyness and the obsession with always trying to do more leads women, especially working mothers, to feel like they’re always failing their families, their careers, their spouses, and themselves (aka mom guilt). This book will give women the permission and tools to change the way they approach their lives and allow them to cut out the extraneous busyness from their lives so they have more satisfaction and joy.
12. I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time
“Having it all” has become the subject of countless books, articles, debates, and social media commentary, with passions running high in all directions. Instead of relying on scattered stories, time management expert Laura Vanderkam set out to add hard data to the debate. She collected hour-by-hour time logs from 1,001 days in the lives of women who make at least $100,000 a year. And she found some surprising patterns in how these women spend the 168 hours that every one of us has each week.
Chock full of inspiration and the data to back up how this method works, Author Laura Vanderkam has helped countless women manage their time more effectively, resulting in more quality time and less burnout.
“When I first started this book, I wasn’t sure it was for me. My profession has strict hours and overtime and I felt a lot of the examples early in the book were of women who had much more flexibility. I didn’t feel like having it all would ever be possible for me, but by the end this book completely changed my thinking. There are so many great tools, ideas and general mythbusting on how successful working women with families live their lives. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is struggling with the idea of having a career and a family.” – Amazon Reviewer
13. The Art of Self-Discipline: Beat Procrastination, Break Bad Habits, and Achieve Your Goals
Let’s face it, time management is the ultimate form of self-discipline. The Art of Self-Discipline can show you how to find focus, overcome obstacles, and ultimately, attain the lasting success you’re searching for.
“The author covers many important areas in this book… personal health, emotional regulation, time management, personal relationships, career growth, money management, learning, creativity, and spirituality. You can pick any chapter to start that is a topic of high-priority for you, but I suggest a quick read through (only took me two different reading sessions, and I’m a slow reader) then go back with a highlighter and pen to dig into those areas that might possibly need more urgent attention. This book is a great springboard to taking a look at issues and going in for a deeper dive.” – Amazon review
Time Management Books for Students
Whether you are a college student or a high school student, managing your time is a vital key to a successful scholastic career. Below are some great guides on how to come out on top during your pursuit of wisdom.
14. Time Management for College Students: How to Create Systems for Success, Exceed Your Goals, and Balance College Life
Discover Press brings to the table this guide on how to tidy up messy scheduling habits, leading to a more successful outcome in your college career.
“This book covers a huge variety of aspects of not only time management but goal-setting and employment to name a few. What I enjoyed most about the book were the practical applications that the author included and their own experiences. Storytelling is vital to help students to get an understanding that they can relate to and this was a clever way of bringing in the elements into the book/content.” -Amazon Review
15. Time Management Secrets for College Students: The Underground Playbook for Managing School, Work, and Fun (College Success)
Hailed as the ultimate guide on how to maximize productivity in college, this book is a must read for those entering into higher education. Author Dennis Stemmle’s book has been ranked in the top 20 of the Best College Books of All Time according to Forbes. And users are raving!
“Thinking of my situation in college, I feel like giving up. After reading this book, I have faith in myself and my ability to receive my degree. I just need to adjust to this environment. This was such a great book and is a great resource for all college students.” – Candice Young, a student at Coastal Carolina University
“This book spoke volumes to me. I needed this book at the beginning of the semester. The learning pyramid in college did change, and it took me a while to adjust. Phenomenal book overall.” – Amber Jenerette, a student at Francis Marion University
“This is the playbook for how to make yourself successful in college. Time Management Secrets for College Students is useful, practical, and vital. Highly Recommended!” – Dennis Coe, a student at the University of South Carolina.
16. The Perfect College Student Planner: Achieve Goals & Increase Productivity & Time Management – Daily Weekly Monthly Planner with Motivational Quotes and Tip Sheets, Undated
Balance is the keyword with this fun college planner. Having a system in place to make sure everything gets taken care of, especially making time for the all-important self care, is often a daunting task. However, the Perfect College Planner has got you covered!
Designed for students, by students, the Perfect College Student Planner provides you with the freedom to achieve your personal, professional, and academic goals on a daily and weekly basis. You now have the time to study and complete your assignments while scheduling time to hit the gym. Become the best version of yourself.
17. Getting Things Done For Teens: Take Control of Your Life in a Distracting World
In this adaptation for teenagers, authors David Allen, Mike Williams, and Mark Wallace provide a strategic, step-by-step playbook for how to manage your time and energy in a world that is constantly taking both. Getting Things Done For Teens is all about helping the younger generation – overloaded and distracted as they are – deal with the complexity of their lives and gain momentum and confidence to achieve their goals. In general, it offers a fresh perspective on time management, framing life as a game to play and a system to hack.
Getting Professional Help for Time Management
While these books are a wonderful starting point for time management and increasing productivity, they do not take the place of a trained professional. If you find yourself overwhelmed or unable to recover from burnout, you can visit an online therapist directory to find a therapist in your area who can help you learn coping skills that will help.
