The Pledge by Michael Masterson

The Pledge is a self help book by Michael Masterson of Early to Rise.  The first two chapters of this book were the most useful to me and the last ones not as helpful.  Overall, this book was worth reading.  I don’t subscribe to Early to Rise although I have added their blog feed since reading the book.  I bought and read this book on the recommendation of Gary North.

The first part of the book gives information about setting goals and organizing your day to make it more productive.  The latter part of the book gives advice about increasing your productivity, avoiding depression, getting out of a rut, getting away from being an information junkie, etc.  The first part helped me a lot.  The second part had some useful information but I don’t think will be too helpful.

In the beginning of the book Masterson describes how he makes and breaks down his goals into shorter tasks.  He also shows how he plans his day and organizes it to be the most productive.  The transition from a long term goals to daily tasks and minute to minute actions is hard to make, but his method has worked for me so far.  You start with life goals, break these into seven year goals, make these into one year goal which then in turn is translated into monthly, weekly, and daily objectives.

Further more you classify your tasks as being urgent or not and whether they are important to your longer term goals.  If you aren’t careful, you will get bogged down by a lot of “urgent” stuff which doesn’t advance your longer term goals.  His solution is to start each day by doing things which are important but not urgent.

The problem I had with the last part of the book is that it includes lots 3 to 10 point plans buried amongst the text.  To add something to your life, you need to make it a habit as he proposed with goal making earlier in the book.  Unless you can recall something and find it easily most of these lists (supposing they actually work) will be forgotten when needed.  The whole concept of “seven ways to get out of depression” sounds like your cliche internet marketer writing a SEO optimized blog post in order to generate hits.  I’m not going to remember a seven point list even if they do actually work.