Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free

I am a passionate reader of books about time management, but even more passionate to practice various recipes - personal or borrowed - of how to efficiently use my time. In the middle of writing a new book - about communications and customers service a project I have in mind for at least 5 months, but wasn't a pro manager of my writing time - I decided to have a look in my Kindle for useful resources.

Amy Lynn Andrews' book: Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free helped me to better organize the coming weeks of writing when I need to juggle with the housework obligations, a very challenging new job where I need to be very active and an impressive amount of social obligations. Add to this some other equally important spiritual requirements and you have an impressive mosaique of a hectic life. 

My lessons learned from the book:

- planning, planning and planning

- The confirmation of my old feeling I live with since early childhood: 'Any significant change in our lives will require patience and sacrifice'.

- When you have your priorities set, you can enjoy the freedom of organizing the daily and weekly blocks of time in a flexible way. For instance, if today the domestic chores can be finished in 10 minutes, you dedicate the rest of the time assigned for such activities for writing or volunteering. 

- We are always in control of our own time, and we should make the right choices for a balanced time schedule. But in order to achieve this, we should establish what our roles are - wife, mother, businesswoman, consultant, teacher, writer etc. - what are our main objectives in each case and what are our daily tasks. 

- Write down your objectives and set up the Excel/Google doc with your set-up activities: both the negotiable and non-negotiable ones. 

The conclusion: you have a dream? Work for it punctiliously, hard, with a bit of sacrifice but at the end of your journey, most likely it will turn into reality. 

Book review: How to produce successful advertising

Anyone with an interest in the domain of advertising and communication at the beginning of their career should carefully read this book about How to produce successful advertising. It was updated permanently and this third edition includes a lot of references of the domain of online communication.

The main advantages: there is a lot of information, organized in a very practical way. You can find almost everything you need and want to know about advertising, from the basic definitions, to the planning and media buying details. Most information are about 'how to' and thus, if you have some small questions about the actions and type of approach of various domains, you need to read this book. Also, if you are a student taking a class in advertising, this book will bring you all the volume of information that will help you to have a better perspective on this domain. 

The main disadvantage: someone with a basic knowledge of the domain and a minimal experience in this domain will expect more analysis of specific cases. There were included a couple of examples but not enough to help the practitioner to behave in various situations.

Anyway, if you are looking for something useful to read over the week-end, you can give a try to this book.