What you'll gain

from owning the digital, paperback, audio, Spanish, French or Portuguese or audio versions

Your personal history

You’ll learn the reasons why people manage their tasks the way they do, according to academic research. This information will help you understand how you you developed your task management skills over time and why. You’ll never under-estimate your power to make similar changes in the future.

A new paradigm

Gone will be the notion that there is a single combination of habits, practices, apps and devices that suits everyone. Instead, you’ll see that your chosen blend only needs to fit your current task volume at any moment in time. With this knowledge, you can relax without worrying that you aren’t optimizing your system or might be doing something “wrong”.

An in-depth evaluation

You’ll complete the book with an in-depth, 13-point self-evaluation of your current setup of behaviors and technologies. This knowledge will help you appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of the system you have developed and currently use. This deep appreciation is key to making improvement. All this means that you won’t waste time comparing your setup with someone else’s.

A plan of steady changes

You’ll learn how to craft a plan based on slow, but steady improvements. When you take these baby-steps you’ll expand the capacity of your current system, so you can handle more tasks. You’ll prepare yourself for an inevitable future of increased demands on your time and never be unprepared for a major uptick in your commitments, obligations or ambitions.

A support strategy

We know that habits, practices and routines don’t change immediately. The best change plans have lots of support and you’ll create your own set safeguards so that your personal transformation doesn’t fail or fall into disuse.

A community

From the onset, you’ll be invited to join an online community and attend the Task Management and and Time Blocking Virtual Summit. You won’t be alone in learning this new way of thinking and applying it to your life.

What our readers said

Many books on time management just focus on a simple process that will supposedly make everything better — just follow these steps and you change years of ingrained habits! Well, it turns out that people are much more complicated than that. Francis…focuses on the core behaviors and lays out a process for working towards these behaviors. His rubrics allow you to see and measure progress as you develop new and crucial time management habits. I haven’t seen this kind of thoughtful road map anywhere else.

Julie Dirksen

Author, Design for How People Learn

Francis Wade is one of the few productivity experts out there who “gets it.” His compelling, insightful, and actionable book provides a unique set of productivity-oriented skills that can be assessed, developed, and customized to meet the unique needs of the individual. 

These skills are supported by a very comprehensive list of academic resources, empirical research, thousands of hours of training experience and helpful anecdotes.

He also explain why much of the “time management” advice…fails to achieve its desired results.

Dr. Michael Einstein

Data technologist

A Video Book Summary (1st edition)

What does the book cover?

Why a Second Edition?

“The second edition was written to bring readers up to date: shortly after the first edition was published, I adopted an auto-scheduler – SkedPal – which dramatically improved my task management.” by Francis Wade

Free Samples

First Edition

Frequently Asked Questions: Start Here

This book is about bringing peace of mind to your life. But first, you need to be at peace with this book. Let’s take a look at some of the questions you might be asking.

Why do I need this?

Not everyone needs the principles in this book. However, if you wish you had more time to complete your commitments, you’ll benefit from the steps I lay out in the chapters that follow.

You’re about to find the gaps in your current habits. You’ll be able to compare what you’re doing now with the best-in-class practices uncovered in the latest research. Plus, in the workplace of the future, it’s safe to expect increased demands on your time and even higher expectations. I will show you how to expand your capacity to meet these challenges and prepare yourself for a continued information explosion being driven by ever-changing technology.

Where do these ideas come from? Can I trust you?

While I have been working on these ideas for the better part of a decade, you’ll be able to separate my opinions from the findings of experts who have gathered empirical evidence from studies involving thousands of participants. While you read, spend time in the Lab Notes at the end to see how I arrived at key conclusions. You may even want to read articles, posts and studies from the references as you make up your own mind based on the evidence.

Can I benefit if I’m a novice (or even an expert)?

The reason everyone can follow the steps I’m about to share is that I will start with an assumption: you already know a lot about “time management,” and your knowledge is embedded in the methods you employ today. Perfect Time-Based Productivity will uncover this knowledge, giving you a unique, in-depth understanding of the “system” you use right now. You’ll measure your skills against world-class standards and develop a new improved approach that works to meet your needs, regardless of your current performance. Plus, near the end of the book, you will have the unique opportunity to compare your skills with participants from my live programs, providing you with a fact-based reality check.

Do I have to be a professional?

Not necessarily. This book is written for the knowledge worker who wants to use a “professional approach,” which I define as the use of research and science as a starting point, rather than individual stories, examples or anecdotes. Many of these findings are recent, so you’ll be exposed to the latest thinking from hundreds of studies. So, before you make any changes, I will show you the foundational reasoning behind them, giving you some confidence based on your knowledge of the facts.

Is this time management?

You may already know or suspect that time itself cannot be managed. The solution isn’t “self-management,” either, because managing yourself is an activity that’s inherent in all forms of management. Instead, it’s about managing tasks, commitments and priorities through the lens of a new construct we’ll study: a “time demand.” Using this idea will remove the frustration of trying to do the impossible – manage time – and the feeling of failure many have experienced.

How is this book different from other books?

This is one of the few books in the genre to rely heavily on recent academic research in multiple fields. Prepare to be informed by the collective wisdom of brain scientists, psychologists, industrial engineers, management theorists and adult learning experts. I also include a wide variety of stories that illustrate their findings. This diverse body of work has never been brought together into a single tapestry of knowledge, making the message of this book unique.

Prepare, therefore, to challenge the conventional wisdom. The end result will not be a new list of rules to follow, but a fresh appreciation of your available options and their consequences.

How can this book promise perfection?

It offers a breakthrough definition: being “perfect” does not mean following a particular set of habits, practices, rituals and routines flawlessly. Instead, it means playing the game of continuous improvement. You will learn to relentlessly change and tweak your habits to fit the increasing volume of demands you need to process and complete each day. This kind of perfection is tough, because most knowledge workers face changing circumstances: doing the work of more than one person, handling modern technology and dealing with more information than ever before. Perfection, in keeping with the Winston Churchill quote in the opening pages, is a dynamic balancing act requiring permanent vigilance. I’ll show you that some professionals are already there.

Is this complicated, and does it take a long time?

It’s not complicated, but it does take some time. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned a lot, and you will also have created a simple plan of improvement. This will help you take small steps to whatever destination you desire, helped along by your very own support system. While your improvement starts immediately, don’t expect overnight success. The methods you currently use to manage your commitments were developed over several years in fits and starts. Unraveling and replacing what you already do is not a matter of magic – it’s about applied knowledge (which saves time) and perseverance (which keeps you going). If you put in the effort as you read these pages, your reward will follow.

What can I use this for?

You can start by tackling immediate time-management problems or removing unwanted symptoms of time stress: both require skillful, self-diagnostic methods. On the other hand, you may want to accomplish a new target, goal or vision as you stretch your current capacity beyond today’s limits. However, if you are someone who is just curious about the very latest thinking, you’ll learn a lot about that, and also about yourself.

In all cases, you will discover there are physical, psychological and philosophical limits to accomplishing your daily goals while, at the same time, maintaining peace of mind. Unfortunately, the field of time management has experienced a growing trend of “I-do-it-this-way-and-so-should-you” thinking that oversimplifies the challenge of being productive. This book reverses that trend.

About Author

Francis Wade

Francis Wade

Author/Consultant
Francis Wade is the author of 2 books: Perfect Time-Based Productivity and Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure.
He’s the founder of 2Time Labs which he leads from his home in Kingston, Jamaica where he’s resided since 2005. A graduate of Cornell University with BS and M.Eng degrees in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, he uses the latest research to pioneer new concepts in task management – a crucial part of personal productivity.
In his consulting work with companies,  he helps leaders remove the obstacles to employee productivity and greater profitability. He also works extensively with coaches, professional organizers, trainers and consultants to apply the best thinking available to their client engagements.
An Amazon top-10 author in the time management category, he taught for several years at the University of Phoenix, and also appears regularly in conferences, podcasts and in print. Francis is the host of the Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2021.