Most time management books (in fact, all the ones I have read) offer one-size fits all solutions to their readers. The author has clearly found a set of habits, practices and rituals that work for him/her, and their book offers a detailed prescription.
Unfortunately, their coaching from that point on often becomes simplistic: “follow me.” In other words, “just do what I did and everything will work out for you, the way it did for me.”
If you believe the author completely, all your effort is consumed in attempts to follow their lead more closely over time, in the hope that their promise does indeed come true.
Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure starts from a very different paradigm – that there is no perfect, cookie-cutter solution that fits us all, and there never will be. Our lives are individual, unique combinations of the methods we currently use and the goals we have set for ourselves. We require, and deserve to have, a solution that works for our peculiar circumstances and idiosyncrasies.
If this idea resonates with you at all, then the story described in The Bill Book will probably match your intuition. In the fable, the protagonist discovers that the members of his project team are quite unlike each other, and that it’s a mistake to try to get them to follow a single set of practices. Instead, he finds a powerful alternative that allows each person to pursue their own path of learning and improvement, at a speed that works for each one.
The further There question is: if we each require an approach to time management and personal productivity that’s unique, how do we go about finding it or developing it? Do we need to acquire guru status in order to reach that point? Or are there simple ways to achieve our own individual perfection that may not match the writings of an expert, but work perfectly for us?