The results-driven manager: Taking control of your time.

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PRESS. (2005). BOSTON: AUTHOR.

This first book offers practical strategies for time management that can be applied to all aspects of your life not just to work-related time management needs. A variety of authors present short, focused, and easy to read chapters addressing a range of time-management challenges. Although the book uses examples from corporate America, the examples are easily translated into nursing and the time-management challenges nurses face. There are four major divisions that are further subdivided into brief (15 pp. or less) chapters.

In the first division, Fundamental Strategies for Managing Your Time, one of the chapters is "Be sure You're Spending Your Time in the Right Places," which lays out a three-part approach to determining where you should spend your time and how to audit yourself to ensure you are doing so. Another chapter with excellent tips is "Timeless Insights on How to Manage Your Time." The author of this chapter discusses how to move away from only working on urgent matters. Now, certainly, in nurs-ing we have urgent matters we have to address regularly, but we don't need to let these matters consume our time. As this author says, "Fighting fires, fielding calls, firing off memos, attending irrelevant meetings-all can consume a manager's day but add little lasting value" (p. 42).

Perhaps the section of the book I found most useful was the second section titled Tackling Specific Time-Management Challenges. Each chapter in this section offers practical ways to make the most of activities nurses encounter routinely. Meetings are addressed first through the question of whether a meeting is always necessary. Ideas such as "don't discuss, but discuss and decide" or dealing with off-topic ideas by use of a "parking lot" are but two of several good ideas. E-mail message overload is discussed in another chapter, as well as info-glut and multitasking.

In the third section, Making Smarter Decisions Faster, an interesting chapter is titled "Don't Throw Good Money (or Time) After Bad." Once a decision is made, what should you do if it turns out to be a bad decision? This chapter author offers ideas that are somewhat different than normally seen and gives you something to ponder.

When you read this book, parts of it will directly relate to patient care management issues and other parts offer more general management ideas. In either case, the time you spend reading this book will offer you new ideas that you may not have encountered before or have forgotten or not implemented in the past. It is an easy and quick read offering good ideas.