Product Description

Unrelenting e-mail. Conflicting commitments. Endless interruptions. In Take Back Your Life! Special Edition, productivity expert Sally McGhee shows you how to take control and reclaim something that you thought you'd lost forever--your work-life balance. Now you can benefit from Sally's popular and highly-regarded corporate education programs, learning simple but powerful techniques for rebalancing your personal and professional commitments using the productivity features in Outlook. Learn the proven methods that will empower you to:

*Clear away distractions and loose ends and focus on what's really important to you and your business. *Take charge of your productivity using techniques and processes designed by McGhee Productivity Solutions and implemented in numerous Fortune 500 companies. *Customize and exploit the productivity features iOutlook to help you create balance at home and on the job. *Special Edition features: Get even more on-the-job resources with an easy tear-out card of Sally's workflow diagram, a quick guide to key Outlook tasks, and great articles on the CD to help you save even more time.

When you change your approach, you can change your results. So learn what thousands of Sally's clients worldwide have discovered about taking control of their everyday productivity--and start transforming your own life today!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40884 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 316 pages

About the Author
A recognized thought leader and innovator in the field of productivity management, Sally McGhee has trained thousands of people in the corporate environment. She has 25 years' experience as a consultant and an executive coach, and is the founder and managing partner of McGhee Productivity Solutions.

Customer Reviews

Take Back Your Time
To summarize, Take Back Your Life (TBYL) is a derivative work - basically a loosely-gathered compilation of ideas and techniques ranging from the David Allen to the Stephen Covey. It may be useful for people looking for a friendly, lightweight, introductory text to personal information management (PIM) centered on Outlook. Check it out at a library or bookstore first to avoid disappointment. One bright spot is that is does have a CD with an digital version of OneNote 2003 Step-by-Step, links to web resources, and chapters from other books on things like managing contacts, calendar, and email.

If you are serious about PIM or are a businessperson, I think the source material would serve you better. Start with Getting Things Done (GTD) to get a brilliant overview of how to address the overload in your life, followed by Total Workday Control 2nd edition (for Outlook 2007; use the 1st edition for earlier incarnations of Outlook) to fine tune that understanding. Finally, pick up 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to get the big picture, or as Allen calls it the "50,000 foot view level."

Basically, TBYL is a chatty volume on PIM with a low signal-to-noise ratio, filled with a variety of vignettes designed to "humanize" the material. More often, they come across like testimonials and contribute more to padding the book than illustrating the point. TBYL also has the irritating habit of taking simple, workable terms (like those from GTD) and renaming them as part of the author's proprietary system. Contexts become Planning and Action Categories, Next Actions become Strategic Next Actions (SNAs) with no real advantage to the reader.

One of the largest flaws in TBYL is the handling of Meaningful Objectives, which the author states several times is the "North Star and guiding light" of the system. I felt this was a useful addition to the GTD model but it is poorly handled, providing no useful organizational power to the reader. For example, the Workflow Model is introduced on p. 113, but there is no direct connection between Meaningful Objectives and SNAs. This error is corrected in the newer, 2007 version. Likewise, on p. 21, the author promises that this topic will be addressed in chapter 10 which it is not - apparently it was completely forgotten. But even if it was, why wait until the last chapter to introduce the core of the system? In fact, while Ms. McGhee spends a whole chapter kibitzing about "Approved Collecting Points," maybe 5 pages is spent on Meaningful Objectives. This glaring oversight is addressed in the in the 2007 edition, but not to any satisfying effect. To really provide Meaningful Objectives to this system, you would need something like Zen and the Art of Making a Living or the Stephen Covey materials.

Another large flaw is that the author's grasp of using Outlook seems mediocre, especially in comparison to Micheal Linenberger (the author of Total Workday Control - the real Outlook on Steroids). As another reader pointed out, Ms. McGhee uses the Note's field to link projects and next actions, instead of the more powerful Task Folder's hierarchical capabilities. Another solution, which I prefer, is to link Outlook 2007 tasks to "project pages" prepared in OneNote 2007 - the two programs have options that make this linking fairly easy. Many observers have noted the inherent weakness of Outlook's project management abilities and the author offers little to address these.

One last example of how concepts are gathered together but poorly organized to perform together. The author makes a good case for including metrics as part of one's PIM. She then spends only two pages on this topic, most of which is a discussion on how to link to an already prepared metrics document.

I bought this book (fortunately used) at the recommendation of an Amazon reader. Hopefully this review will help you avoid a similar fate.

Taking Back My Life
Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized

This is a great buy (either edition)

Author completely misses Outlook's powerful heirarchical capabilities.
The result of using Outlook the way this author recommends is that you'll essentially have two separate lists: one list of all your projects and another list of all your "next actions". Since you'll be able to sort your next-action list according to the context in which each action will be done, this arrangement is better than nothing. But the problem with this arrangement is that with it, Outlook maintains neither project-to-next-actions connections nor next-actions-to-project connections. The author would have you list "next actions" within each project's Notes field to link the project to its next actions, and the author offers no link of each next action back to its project.

The author has missed a simple, powerful solution to this problem. When using Tasks in Outlook, the Tasks folder offers a heirarchical directory structure in which it's very easy to add folders and subfolders, just as one might do in Windows Explorer. Each of these folders that you create can be named to represent a project, and the next actions for each of these projects can be stored within the project's folder. Then all you have to do to see a list of all your next actions (across all projects) is to run a quick "Advanced Find" on your Outlook Tasks folder. Once you get the criteria of your search the way you want them, your search criteria can easily be saved, allowing you to recreate your "next actions" list with current data whenever you want it. If you include the "In Folder" field to display in your search results, then this field provides your next-action-to-project connection; and when you're reviewing your Outlook Tasks folder, the directory list of folders is essentially your project list, and within each project you see only the next actions associated with that project, so it's easy to maintain a project focus when planning your projects. Also, when using Outlook this way, many additional Outlook features can be used as well.

This book offers a few good ideas, but by failing to describe a simple and powerful way to have Outlook itself maintain the association of each project to its next actions, this book cannot be strongly recommended.