'Help! – How to become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done' by Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Burkeman is a feature writer for the Guardian and has won the Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year Award. He writes a weekly column on psychology called 'This Column will Change Your Life'.
This book was recommended to me, as was last month’s, by Jenny Eaton, a friend and associate, and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Burkeman is, like me, a positively healthy sceptic when it comes to the ‘self-help’ industry. He is by no means negative about the subject of personal development, but finds that there is a fair amount of material about which he feels less than enthusiastic, as does Mancroft.
He has obviously spent a great deal of time researching the subject and provides a huge number of references to back up his viewpoint or reasons why his research changed his opinion; there are over two hundred books referenced as well as many, many websites and blogs that give even more background.
The author’s style is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and he has a great sense of humour which is frequently laced with a dose of irony and fair amount of iconoclasm, at least in terms of the self-help industry.
The book is easy to read and it would be tempting to dismiss it as a light-hearted treatise on what is a fairly serious subject, but that would be a mistake.
There is a great deal of wisdom in this book and many helpful ‘tips’ on how to enjoy life more which are not limited to personal development in the strictest meaning of the word.
It deals with emails and lists; the author is an inveterate list-maker and has a self-confessed obsession with index cards, getting more done, how to rule the office, how to use your brain and so on. He also has some novel uses for kitchen timers!
I can enthusiastically recommend this book; it’s practical and many of the ideas can be implemented quickly and easily.
There were times when the author disagreed with elements of the Winning Edge, sometimes based on research, which gives me a good reason to re-visit some stuff for Mancroft, so for this reason, as well as numerous others, it has been extremely useful for me.
Another ‘buy it’ or get it from a library while we still have them.
This will be last book review until the October edition of the Monthly Reminder.
Richard Jackson, co-founder of Mancroft