Guilford Publications The Smart but Scattered Guide to Success: How to Use Your Brain's Executive Skills to Keep Up, Stay Calm, and Get Organized at Work and at Home

El pedido llegó en el tiempo estimado por Amazon. Lo compré como complemento para el máster que estaba realizando, para afianzar conocimientos; y no me defraudó. Es interesante el contenido, por lo aclaratorio que es así como la sencillez de su formato que lo hace accesible. Eso sí, en inglés.

Looks at what psychologists call executive skills and how you can improve yours to be more effective and get more out of life. The writers' style is friendly and does not overload you with tons of unnecessary information.

BEST THING: This is a great way to see your executive functioning issues split out clearly, with corresponding chapters to help you improve how you manage each of them. EFFORT: The improvement work does require a reasonably high level of self reflection and self awareness. STAND OUT CONTENT: What's nice is that there is a small part speaking to your executive functioning strengths. Quite a few books will point out weaknesses but this gives you a glimpse of how your strengths have helped compensate. What I was left wanting: I wanted a full chapter (or three) about really digging into strengths. Then I thought about the other books I have in the same topic and they REALLY need the same thing; so, this book is the best of the lot so far.

I’ve had this book on my book shelf since January of 2019 and just got around to reading it. What a mistake. I wish I would have started it right away. I’m just glad I finally read it. Don’t hesitate. This books highlights the main 12 skills that we use in everyday home and work life. It’s starts with a questionnaire that (if you are honest with yourself while completing the questionnaire) will tell you what skills are your strengths and which are your weaknesses. It also directs you to do one for work and one for home. Most of us react differently to situations at work than we would at home. Let me start by saying that before reading this book, I couldn’t figure out why I was struggling with time management despite all the systems I had in place and other things that I tried to improve it to no avail. It turned out it was task initiation (procrastination on a particular task) I was struggling with not time management. I was working on improving the wrong skill. Some skills are even have multiple skills embodied in them. A few are even split in two areas where a different set of skills are used for each. Organization for example, has two areas. Creating systems and maintaining them. I’ve always been great at creating organization but not so good at maintaining them. Creating systems uses three skills that are my strengths while the maintenance portion uses skills that are my weaknesses. It was a complete eye-opening read for me. I learned a lot about myself (and other people) and why I was struggling in certain areas and was so good in other areas. So make sure you read/listen to every chapter. Even if you aren’t struggling with that particular skill, there are things to learn about it. You will also learn a lot about other people, be able to identify skills they might be struggling in and adjust how you react to them. But with that being said, the book gave great explanation and lots of strategies and implementation steps to help create plans to improve in all the skills. There are action plan forms in the book that you can download from their website so you can print them as needed. Each chapter is laid out in the same order and gives real world examples to connect the information provided in the chapter. There are lots of additional resources listed like books, websites and apps to assist with that skill. The Smart But Scattered Guide to Success version is for adults. However, they have written other smart but scattered books specifically for school aged children and teens. I would have loved to have these books when I was raising my kids to be adults. A must for every person/family.

My intern therapist had me started on Mind Over Mood which I am working on in conjunction with this. But prior to finding this book, I was feeling frustrated with my therapists methods and I started searching for other help. I have yet to get an official diagnosis, but from my own research, I am an inattentive ADHD woman. From a brief phone interview with an ADHD coach, I was directed to this book. I'm still working on it, but I'm finding it helpful. It's bringing up a lot of other insights I've come across in other self help books such as The Power of Habit and Deep Work (if you're into reading more I highly recommend those books as well!). I like how this book is laid out so far and that I can easily refer back to other chapters as I do my work. Hoping this will help in the long run, although much of it is just as much the work and effort one puts into it. And i have let myself go with bad habits and cycles of depression. This is my uphill battle. I hope this review helps others navigate and keep on doing the work! Whatever it is, it is enough.