Remodeling Your Day

Mark Richardson gets a lot done. He’s a sought-after industry consultant, prolific columnist, and author of three books. He travels around the country for speaking gigs, lectures at MBA programs, sits on numerous boards, and is a creative force for many well-known industry events. The sheer scale of Richardson’s productivity is inspiring, and a little mysterious. Does he only sleep every third night? Has he enslaved a replicant to do his bidding? 

No. The key to getting a lot of stuff done—as Richardson explains in his latest book—boils down to a combination of carefully planning out your day and committing the plan to writing. Control Your Day Before It Controls You breaks the process down into seven steps, and while some of the content may feel a little obsessive (Richardson insists you use an 8.5 x 11-inch, spiral-bound notebook), if you stick with it, you’ll find by the end of the book that his reasoning makes sense.

At 158 pages, Control Your Day is a quick read without a lot of fluff. Richardson’s helpful guidelines address systemic time management issues as well as smaller details that make people less efficient. His sidebar items, including “Top Ten Time Wasters” and “Common Mistakes People Make,” are especially insightful.