Editor’s Rating: 8.2

Editor’s Notes: Here is a second entry in a series of e-book reviews.  This is a guest post by Thursday Bram of ThursdayBram.com.

Leo Babauta, author of the Zen Habits blog, seems to have the knack for writing effective material.

His e-book, Zen to Done, is no different. In 83 pages, Babauta distills hundreds of his own blog posts, the 267 pages in David Allen’s Getting Things Done and the 384 pages of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Babauta took his own mantra of a simple system to heart when writing this e-book. Despite the sheer quantity of information that could have overwhelmed a reader, Babauta managed to avoid the avalanche and provide readers with something that they could actually read one sitting or refer back to as needed. To put it simply, not only was I able to make my way through Zen to Done but it was also an enjoyable experience.

Despite my enthusiasm about the book, there are a couple of points that made me pause. Babauta seems to unconsciously assume that his readers are extremely familiar with his blog and reference materials, leaving what seem to be crucial explanations of terms until the middle of the book. It is as if he, at first, assumed that everyone would know phrases like “Big Rock,” but I’m sure plenty of people with no familiarity with Covey (“Big Rock” comes straight out of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) will be at least glancing through this e-book. Rather than pushing off definitions until the middle of the book, I think it would have been more worthwhile to place them with the first mention of the phrase.

It was more than the quiet sense of whimsy that crept into the text around Chapter 10 that kept me interested: Babauta ‘complaining’ that his wife and kids didn’t let him label them when he was labeling his file folders especially sticks in my mind. The sheer practicality of Babauta’s approach to the material kept me going.

The description that Babauta gave of the tough love aspects of Getting Things Done — not flaws, necessarily, but the spots that people are most likely to slip up — was like reading my own experiences with Allen’s system. I’d get excited about Getting Things Done from a post on Lifehacker and jump straight into reorganizing my entire life, trying to implement all steps at once. Inevitably, I’d slip up after a week or two and wander back to my less-than-organized life, like a dieter yo-yo-ing whenever she sees a buffet.

Instead of advocating the Superman approach practically required by Getting Things Done, Zen to Den takes a much more realistic approach to the situation. Babauta tells his readers that it’s okay if a person can’t fix everything in one day. He draws the key ingredients from both Allen and Covey’s ideas and offer up a simple solution of working on only one or two habits at a time.

There are other key differences — the focus on goals rather than tasks, the implementation of structure — that really moves Zen to Done beyond a personalized version of Getting Things Done into a valid system in its own right. Unlike many of the ‘Getting Things Done-plus’ options available online, Babauta’s approach focuses on creating a system that can be customized to a user’s needs — just like the iconic books he uses as a starting point.

~Thursday

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