Book review: The Time Trap
 Book author: Alec Mackenzie and Pat Nickerson
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Australia
Since its first publication in 1975, The Time Trap has earned its title as both a best-seller and a classic.
Indeed, if any of the advice in the book doesn’t seem particularly new, then it’s likely because most of the ideas have been in print for over 30 years now.
Further, the book’s advice has become the staple of countless more recent titles on managing one’s time.
Alec Mackenzie’s original book was based on the theory that self-management is instrumental to combating that ubiquitous feeling of being ‘time poor’.
The book focuses primarily on the 20 biggest time wasters, altered and refined over the four editions. These range from everything from poor communication to the untamed telephone, from time-wasting visitors to attempting too much.
Like the earlier editions, the fourth edition of The Time Trap is an extraordinary achievement. If one single book could be defined as a golden handbook – the book of choice if you could only have one book on time management – then I would certainly place my vote for this one.
The fourth edition offers some profound new features, and presents the findings of recent research.
In this edition, the authors conducted a reader survey to ascertain feedback on the relevance of the original list of 20 time traps.
The revised list includes some of the very modern time traps that most of us can relate to – the internet, email and mobile phones.
Other top time traps have risen in the list, indicating their higher importance to people today. Interestingly, ‘poor communication’ and ‘poorly run meetings’ have moved up as more irritating time-wasters than they were previously.
Also, ‘travel’ is no longer seen as such a time-waster as to make it to the top 20. The authors reason that with mobile offices – largely a function of electronic gadgets – wasting time ‘on the road’ is no longer a real concern.
With strong contribution from Pat Nickerson, the fourth edition also includes anecdotes – both humourous and enriching – from managers and others who the authors have spoken with over the years.
On the subject of managing time-wasters who drop into one’s office for visits, the authors describe one person who keeps a drawer filled with tedious sorting and collating tasks to be done. When a visitor drops by and he feels his time is being wasted, he cajoles them to help with a task. Not only does he get the tasks done quicker, but these sorts of intruders stop visiting so often.
The Time Trap is not the kind of book to offer a few soft-option tips, padded out with chapters of rhetoric and good will. Rather, it’s replete with nitty-gritty details on solving just about every major time-wasting hurdle.
If you’re at all serious about crunching down the time you waste doing the things you’d rather not be doing, then you would do well to ‘waste’ a few hours digesting The Time Trap.
Our rating: 10/10
By Ben Zipper, Co-editor, Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter
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