The Way we're working isn't working - Tony Schwartz

A thoughtful book encouraging us to take a step back from the 'more, bigger, faster' world we seem to inhabit today.  The book is written for individuals, leaders and organisations and develops ideas on how to improve the situation as well as uncovering the issues.

The main thrust of the book is that to operate at your very best you need periods of recovery in between bursts of high activity.  This is true for mental activity as well as physical.

The idea that we have a certain capacity for avoiding temptation (or delaying gratification) and that this is consumed by every little thing we resist.  So to help diet - hide the food, to avoid email interruptions turn off desktop alerts or flashing lights.

I actually tried out one idea - to turn off my email for a week whilst on holiday for 5 days.  I did succeed (helped by turning off the flashing light on my PDA which is still off by the way) but in the end I still had over 300 emails to deal with, although I was more effective and efficient in dealing with them in one go.

The final chapter of the book was an interesting idea a summary of the key messages from each of the preceding 20 chapters (one summary per page)