Book Review: TIME SMART

B

Time Smart: How to Reclaim your time and live a happier life by Ashley Whillans

What is it about?

I would say “How to value time?” would be the question this book is trying to answer. Ashley says that people who feel that they don’t have enough time to do everything they want are poor – time-poor. The book contains many facts on how we actually think about our time and how we behave in situations when we have to make a trade-off between money and time. The author also suggests that we need to analyze our time and should leave enough time for leisure activities and randomness to be happier in our life.

What did I like?

  • Great content – The content covers a lot of ground on why people usually feel overwhelmed by work and gives a lot of opportunities to reflect on how we are spending our time. While reading, you will find a lot of things which we do every day but we will simply ignore them. 
  • Practical approach – Every chapter comes with a toolkit at the end of the chapter which contains a summary of all the important points covered in the chapter and also some tasks for the reader to reflect more on the time usage and improve the time affluence. It’s the readers’ responsibility to complete these tasks in order to actually get any benefit from the book.

What I didn’t like?

Nothing! There is nothing I disliked about the content in the book. The book is only targeted to the people who are working adults and usually feel overwhelmed by the work or constantly feel that they don’t have enough time to do everything they want to do. This book is not going to be a panacea but definitely can be a turning point but providing some great tools and food for thought.

The only reason I gave a rating of 4.5 is that I felt the book could have been written slightly differently to reach a wider audience. Especially, students who struggle with too many assignments and tasks and are in constant stress could really benefit from the content.

Final words

As already mentioned, do read this book if you feel that you have too much work and too little time or you feel that you are unhappy because you are not getting enough time to relax.

Thank you for reading 🙂

About the author

Akshay Jain

I am passionate about programming and feel amazing when I see people using the software I have contributed in. I believe it is essential to write high quality code, which is easy to understand and test. I am still a work in progress and decided to document and share some of my learnings with everyone. Apart from that, I like to read books, and so you might find a lot of book reviews on my blog. I am working as a Software Engineer at Oracle since post-graduation from IISc Bangalore, and happily married :)

Add Comment

Akshay Jain

I am passionate about programming and feel amazing when I see people using the software I have contributed in. I believe it is essential to write high quality code, which is easy to understand and test. I am still a work in progress and decided to document and share some of my learnings with everyone. Apart from that, I like to read books, and so you might find a lot of book reviews on my blog. I am working as a Software Engineer at Oracle since post-graduation from IISc Bangalore, and happily married :)

Get in touch