Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who started his autobiography, My Life, with a reference to the book: When I was a young man just out of law school and eager to get on with my life, on a whim I briefly put aside my reading preference for fiction and history and bought one of those how-to books: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. The book’s main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, and long-term life goals, then categorizing them in order of their importance, with the A group being the most important, the B group next, and the C the last, then listing under each goal specific activities designed to achieve them.

The message is simple. List what you need to do and prioritise it. While that is the core message of the book, it also covers what to do in various situations. What to do when you perhaps feel like you don’t have enough time to complete an A task, or find yourself procrastinating but always doing B or C tasks instead of the more important A ones. The main thing I took away from the book though was to always ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I could be doing right now?”. It’s surprising how asking such a simple question of yourself can have such a huge impact on what it is you actually spend your time doing.