Best Time Management Books

The most successful people pride themselves on their ability to manage their time wisely. Your skills and talents alone may allow you to progress to a certain point, but never all the way. Only when combined with exceptional time management skills will you be able to achieve everything you want in life.

Balancing your career and personal life remains one of the most difficult challenges in today’s modern society. A successful job is so often a demanding one that robs you of your time with friends and family members.

At a certain point in life, this can make you regret some of the decisions you’ve made. In the same way, putting your career on hold to spend time with family can also have its negative effects, and sometimes ends up with you resenting someone you love dearly.

How do you start addressing this problem? At the end of the day, it is just about time management. When you know how to manage your time, you can make anything a possibility.

One thing that plays a huge part in time management is knowing what’s important. You should organize your priorities and find out which among them, in the long run, will benefit you most.

Of course, there are a ton of other factors to keep in mind, all of which will be discussed in my compilation of the best time management books. It’s time for you to stop wondering whether to put more time on your family or your business. It’s also time for you to know how important self-care is and why it’s crucial to give yourself a break now and then.

While you will never be able to completely break free of the hold time, give yourself some form of control over it and of your life. You can do all that and more with the help of the following books:

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

It's always interesting just to learn different perspectives, but to be careful of not trying to just say, 'Oh this book is the Bible, and we should copy that,' [...] Instead, I want us t0 take the parts that make sense for Zappos and try to incorporate them."

Tony Hsieh

CEO/Zappos

Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors

In addition to walking you through, in great detail, how a board functions, Brad has adopted many of the Lean Startup approaches to building, operating, and managing your board in a way that resembles continuous deployments. Any practitioner of Lean Startup would do well to use this approach to building their board.

Eric Ries

Founder/Long-Term Stock Exchange

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies

In Search of Excellence focused my daydreaming mind into what it takes to build truly great companies.

Alden Mills

CEO/Perfect Fitness, Navy SEAL, Author

Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)

Fast-growing companies - not small ones or big ones - create almost all the jobs and innovation in our economy, and Verne has been an invaluable guide to leaders of such companies, like me. Scaling Up helps us put in place the disciplines critical to building a significant business.

Graham Weston

CEO/Rackspace

Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down

As a marketing & strategy addict, I'll go beside all the books mentioned above with Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down by John P. Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead, The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber.

Irina Botnari

Managing Partner & Co-Founder/Bucur's Shelter Hostel

Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

It’s a very simple & interesting read. It takes a different approach about reaching your goals and dreams it pushes you to not just prepare & work on yourself but to put yourself out there & interact with leaders to learn from them & to figure out what kind of leader you are.

Nadia Al Sheikh

Founder/Deal’n

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

I still use some of the methods this book teaches around productivity. It also teaches some very important lessons around how to break out of 'analysis paralysis' and actually execute on ideas.

Andreas Zhou

Co-Founder/Askable

The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor

This is that rarity, a useful book.

Warren Buffett

CEO/Berkshire Hathaway

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

I've seen so many people thrust into management in high-growth companies with so little guidance. From now on, I will hand them this book. Its practical wisdom is immediately useful for the newly minted manager — and us old ones.

Ev Williams

Co-Founder/Twitter, CEO/Medium

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

I read this book at a time when Udemy was rapidly growing—over the 18 months where we went from 30 to 200 people. It was helpful to read about Horowitz's challenges, worries, and triumphs when addressing the same types of issues at a similar stage of growth. There are so many big decisions you need to make where there's just no clear-cut, right or wrong answer. There are a lot of gray areas. You gather information from your team, but the hard decisions rest with you. This book helped me realize that while I needed to carefully and objectively consider feedback, I was responsible for making a decision in the end—even when it was an unpopular one.

Dennis Yang

CEO/Udemy

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.

One of the best 3 books I've read in 2019

The CEO Library Community (through anonymous form)

Reader

Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur

For a long time, I didn't see myself as an entrepreneur. I worked for an organization where I felt fulfilled, loved the work I got to do, and was amazed by who I got to do it with. Then five years ago, my husband started our first gym and I began to see behind the curtain of entrepreneurship. I stumbled upon Startup Life by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor, it gave me great perspective on how to support my husband, how business affects a couple on multiple levels, and how we could evolve our roles and relationship.

AnneMarie Schindler

Founder/Small Wins Consulting

Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

Favorite business or leadership book in a long time.

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check

Man’s Search for Meaning – The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust

Frankl is one of the most profound modern thinkers on meaning and purpose. His contribution was to change the question from the vague philosophy of “What is the meaning of life?” to man being asked and forced to answer with his actions. He looks at how we find purpose by dedicating ourselves to a cause, learning to love and finding a meaning to our suffering. His other two books on the topic, Will To Meaning and Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning have gems in them as well.

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check

Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas

I thought I might put my money where my mouth is. I keep whining that young people are not in touch with some essential books on advertising that have helped me shape the way I practise my trade today, but I never did anything about it. So I am starting here the ultimate books to read list. I will add to it as I get suggestions and as more good books get written.

Bogdana Butnar

Head of Strategy/Poke

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

I would say is the book that had the biggest impact on me and showed my life path. The amazing thing about this coaching book, that I did not find in any other book so far, is that it does not try to give you a certain path that you need to follow, quite the opposite. This book gives you the “tools” in order to find by yourself what you are looking for. Each and every person can interpret the information in the own way and adapt it to their own needs at the time being. Whether you want to find your path (which was my case), want to grow your business, develop yourself in your personal life, professional life or both, this book gives you the necessary tools to do so.

Tudor Teodorescu

Founder/Transylvania Uncharted

Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production

Perhaps the only business book I’ve read and truly loved is Taiichi Ohno’s “The Toyota Production System”. It’s referenced a lot as the origin of the “Lean” movement, but it’s a much more enjoyable read than that makes it sound. Rather than management guru speak, it’s a wonderful book about the hard-won lessons Taiichi Ohno learned on the factory floor at Toyota. It won’t teach you what kanban means in modern management, but learning about Ohno’s desire to build an information nervous system for Toyota’s plants is so much more interesting!

Grey Baker

Co-Founder/Dependabot

The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works

Ricardo Semler took over his father's business, Semco, in 1980 under the condition that he could change it completely. On his first day as CEO, he fired 60% of all top managers. Since then he has introduced a wide range of unconventional practices, such as having no official working hours, employees choosing their own salaries, and having no vision (instead wanting employees to find the way using their instinct).

For me, The Seven-Day Weekend opened my eyes and helped me to question every business practice that exists today. Semler aimed to operate as a 'sevant leader' and made a conscious effort to make zero decisions himself.

Joel Gascoigne

Co-founder/Buffer

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

I promote range and diversity. Thus, I recommend readers to expose themselves to as many different topics as possible. I usually have 2-4 books I refer back to at any given time. They range in topics from management, art, spirituality and philosophy. Trying to get the engineering thing going but don't much of a mind for science.

Henry Medine

Co-Founder/Space Jam Data

Shantaram

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime.

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

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