How should the book be organized? My goals:
- Casual browsers should be able to pick up and find something useful.
- Keep people reading.
- Be intriguing enough that Ellen, Oprah, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Larry King, the Today Show, etc. are fighting over who gets to interview me first.
Organize by bio
Come meet Stever. My background is a tad unusual (grew up in a traveling New Age commune). Organize the tips around my personal bio, similar to Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. People love people stories…
Organize by tip: 101 tips
Chapter 1: Tips about organizing your office
Chapter 2: Tips about housecleaning
Chapter 3: Tips about handling mail
Organize by tool
Chapter 1: Here are the 10 Magic Productivity tools
Chapter 2: Tool #1 in depth, Tying the Goal to Daily Action, applied to work, home, etc.
Chapter 3: Tool #2 in depth, The 80/20 principle applied …
Organize by problem (framed as “eliminate problems”)
Chapter 1: Here are the 10 Magic Productivity tools
Chapter 2: Handling overload using tools #1, #5, and #9.
Chapter 3: Don’t be forgotten at a party, using tools #3, #7, #10
Organize by solution (framed as “create solutions”)
Chapter 1: Here are the 10 Magic Productivity tools
Chapter 2: Staying on top of all your work, using tools #1, #5, and #9.
Chapter 3: Be the most memorable person at the party, using tools #3, #7, #10
Organize by story (kind of Chicken Soup for the Get-it-Done Soul)
Chapter 1: Sue the Lawyer with no time
Chapter 2: Jim the Nurse who couldn’t say No
Chapter 3: Eloise the porpoise trainer who made the same mistakes over and over
7 responses so far ↓
1 BlaqueSaber // Apr 4, 2008 at 6:15 pm
A lot of “writing” books are set up so that every single page you turn to has one; “point”, “message”, or “lesson” on it. That way every page you turn to is a unique experience.
Your content will probably be to large for that but depending on your publisher, you can probably come up with something.
2 Dan // Apr 4, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Stever:
Great idea - my first thought here is that your reader will want to identify with the issue, so I tend toward the solution aspect, rather than the tools.
Hope this helps, if I think of more later I will re-comment.
3 Dan // Apr 4, 2008 at 6:41 pm
…and here it is - I think the story has a good place, but perhaps at end of a chapter to illustrate how it was successfully implemented.
As a reader, I would ask myself, “Self, what problem of mine will this solve, and how do I actually do this?”
-then-
“Self, what benefit can I get from doing this, and how do I actually do this? Oh, this person did THAT…great, then so can I. “
4 Paul Woods // Apr 4, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Hi Stever…
I think people will be buying this book to solve their problems when it comes to getting things done - so organisation by Problems would be best.
I would do that for the core of the book - then have two or so bonus chapters at the end which focus purely on lofty goals like being the most memroable person.
In some way it kinda follows maslow’s needs hierarchy (if you squint and go cross eyed a bit) - solve your problems that you need to get past in your day to day, then focus on the self actualisation stuff.
Cheers,
Paul W
5 Pewari // Apr 5, 2008 at 5:04 am
Personally, I’d like to have a book on tips - often I don’t particularly have a problem in mind with organisation, but if I read about how someone else goes about it I think “ah ha! That sounds more fun and efficient… I’ll try that”.
I also like the idea of BlaqueSaber’s - one tip per page to make it eminently browsable…
6 ZA // Apr 5, 2008 at 11:53 am
People picking this up will be looking to ‘get things done.’ As such, they’re looking for solutions. I’d go that route. People would be curious to be the most memorable guy - but they may not feel like they have the problem of being forgotten.
7 Michael J Purpura // Apr 6, 2008 at 1:31 am
Will organizing by tips keep people reading, or will they just use the Table of Contents to pick the ones that seem like they might be relevant?
If you organize by something other than Bio, can you restructure your Bio to fit your organizational theme, thus getting most of the advantages of the Bio even if something else is the theme by which your book is organized?
Similar to Bio, is organizing by story something you can do ‘on top’ of some other form of organizing? Make Your Own Luck (Shapiro and Stevenson) do a fair job of this, and it helps the reader to see how each story is connected to multiple of your tips and tools.
Would the problem of overload and your solutions for productivity be more intriguing framed by the larger problem: that we are only alive on this earth for a short amount of time before we die, and the larger solution: that being more productive is effectively like getting to add years, decades, centuries or more to our lives?
Cialdini’s book Influence is organized by tool, and while it’s a great book to read cover-to-cover and to go back to tool-by-tool, it’s not something that most readers can casually browse to find something useful. If you organize by tool, how will yours be different so as to allow casual browsing?
Also, if you organize by tool, what is your basis for selecting these particular tools and not others? Are there others? How do we know there are 10 Magic Productivity tools, and it’s not that you arbitrarily decided there should be ten, or that you only know ten? Is there some underlying basis, like in the Periodic Table, that tells us which ones we have not yet discovered?
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