TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

Making Work Work
by Julie Morgenstern
249 pages; hardcover; $22.00
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004

Has your day at the office extended to twelve or fourteen hours? Is your time filled with meetings run amuck, countless interruptions and chronically over-deadline projects? Then you may find help in Making Work Work.

Just be warned: You’ll have to read past the hype to get to the useful material. Despite the cover claim that the book contains new strategies for surviving and thriving at the office, most of the suggestions are unoriginal. Make lists. Get organized. Prioritize. Delegate. Yeah, yeah. We know already.

The question is how. How to carve time out of an already hectic day to learn how to carve time out of a hectic day. How to figure out the best way to apply what’s undoubtedly good advice. That’s where Making Work Work takes a step beyond the standard fare.

Instead of expecting you to replace all your counter-productive habits with more useful ones immediately, author Julie Morgenstern breaks the concepts into manageable pieces. Even better, this is what she does in her career as a professional organizer, so many of the suggestions have been tested on real people in real-life work situations. The outcome: Tips practical enough to actually produce results, always a pleasant surprise in a management book.

Naturally you’ll have to motivate yourself to get started, and then persevere until the changes you make become habit. But you may find concentrating on one area of improvement at a time is an approach that makes you successful at Making Work Work.

 

Review originally published November 2004.