We get plenty of emails in Microsoft. Without a sys­tem to man­age them you are dead. Or bet­ter, your mind plays strange tricks on you mak­ing you think that you still have work to do. You need to con­vince your mind that you are done for the day and to stop bug­ging you, please.

Almost every­one has a sys­tem. Some are bet­ter than oth­ers. My cur­rent sys­tem is Getting things done and it does achieve its goal of free­ing my mind (mostly) with­out im­pos­ing too much over­head. But I’m al­ways look­ing for some­thing bet­ter. That’s why I checked out Total Workday Control.

The ti­tle con­jures in my mind all sort of scary im­ages of con­trol freaks go­ing through their days try­ing to achieve op­ti­miza­tion of every sin­gle ac­tion. In re­al­ity the book is just a light up­date of David Allen method­ol­ogy. The most in­ter­est­ing thing I picked out is the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion be­tween a Master Task List and a Daily List. The for­mer con­tains pro­jects or de­layed tasks while the lat­ter con­tains tasks (typically taken from the Master List) that you want to per­form to­day. It also has a sys­tem of pri­or­i­tiz­ing such tasks and give good rules of thumbs on how many you should have on each list and so on.

My rule of thumb is that if I learn one use­ful thing by read­ing a book, then it is a fan­tas­tic book. This book qual­i­fies. If you are cur­rently us­ing Getting things done, this book con­sti­tutes a nice up­grade. If you aren’t, I sug­gest you read David Allen first, as it gives you the rea­sons for the sys­tem, be­fore you move to the more tech­ni­cal Total Workday Control.