Attention Management

Graham Alcott's Productivity Ninja (Penguin) focuses primarily on clearing the clutter in our life.

 

Alcott, a productivity trainer in the UK, advises his clients and, through this book, readers on ways to make professional life more productive and get the inbox, unread mails, messages to-do lists “down to zero”, which, in turn, will allow you to focus on the core issues at work.

 

Apart from focusing on how to manage chores such as answering the phone, managing social media (essentially Facebook and Twitter), lunch hours at work (crunch them), Alcott also suggests ideas that will help minimise multi tasking and effectively manage the to-do lists in an era of information overload.

 

What makes Alcott’s book interesting is its layout that throw up little ninja caricatures, graphics such as the productivity model and (the to-do) nuggets across the pages. However, despite addressing an important yet often overlooked topic of filtering tasks, Alcott’s advice tends to get repetitive across 300-odd pages in the book.

 

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 12-01-2015)