Reviews and Comments

This book challenges many of my views on efficiency, getting things done, distraction, etc. Besides offering a philosophical, historical, and down-to-earth perspective on life, it has solid advice.

About increasing the quality of the time you spend: 1) "cut out time for yourself first", 2) limit work in progress, 3) resist the allure of seductive but not essential priorities.

About patience: 1) develop a taste for having problems (it will always be that we have problems); 2) embrace radical incrementalism (small, constant work VS. big-bang work); 3) originality lies on the far side of unoriginality (the metaphor is those of busses leaving from a train station, that follow the same route initially, only to diverge later).

Five questions to contemplate in order to get closer to living more: 1) Where in your life or your work are you pursuing comfort when what's called for is discomfort? Does this choice diminish me or enlarge me? 2) Are you judging yourself by standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? 3) In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you're who you are and not the person you think you ought to be? 4) In which areas of your life are you still handling back until you feel like you know what you're doing? 5) How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions seeing fruition?

spoiler alert I read this book because it was presented to me as an updated and easier to read version of "The Goal". I can relate a big part of it with "The phoenix Project" which is more comprehensive, but admittedly a longer read. The Phoenix Project includes concepts from devops and lean manufacturing.

Back to the review: It was funny to see that all the problems Steve had were solved at the managerial level and the culture change was so easy and straightforward (basically everyone started working in "the new way" immediately and there were no problems there). There were a couple of arguments here and there, but all the stakeholders were more than happy to listen to Steve's orders. I wonder if it is the same in reality. But it's a novel and the author wanted to explain the principles behind "The goal" and that purpose was definitely achieved. It became very clear to me how every process can be improved by breaking it down into parts and looking for the bottlenecks. This was a major takeaway for me.

To sum up, the book is easy to read, ITers will relate to it easily and it explains well the bottleneck theory. But don't expect to get a lot more than that.