A reasonable checklist to make sure that you get the most out of your time, and are not being carrying out empty tasks to fill your life in the vapid enterprise of being *busy*.

By the very nature of a self-improvement book its author is opinionated and wishes to put over his/her concepts fairly forcibly. Whether we, as the reader of that book, takes those on board is subjective and varies perhaps quite extensively between us. I'm sorry to say that in this case this reader was not convinced.
I found the book very repetitive and at times I felt like I was being forced fed a sales line, "What if I was to tell you...." The writing style did not impress neither did the many anecdotes of little interest and the much over use of 'name dropping'.
However, thank you NetGalley/Penquin/Ebury for the chance to review.

Every now and then I like to read some non-fiction and that time had come. Title and description sounded good. An interesting read with, clearly, a lot of research papers and books read and digested. The first quite large chunk of the book dealt with happiness and the human state from beginnings in Africa through a little bit of Christian religion to the more philosophical stuff of the last couple of centuries or so. I was beginning to wonder where the time came in, apart from the obvious thread. We moved into details of stories and I've already forgotten what the S, T, O, R etc acronyms meant as 'stories' to the author seemed to infer that only activity, sky diving and other similar events, could count. I did agree with his 'get out in the fresh air more' although not necessarily the mud wallowing and other activities; he mentioned a country walk but it felt rather with an "if you must" attitude.. We got some rather jaded ideas about quiet time, leave the phone/TV off, internet is bad which I passed over (no TV, phone often somewhere else and internet - well I use that quite a lot for family history and keeping in touch with children/grandchildren scattered far and wide) but they formed only a small part of the book.. There was a lot of complex text and argument which could have been more clearly written I think - you don't need long words to impress! I liked the summary at the end of each section and could well revisit some of those. Less convinced about the little drawings but can see how that might appeal to a different generation. Obviously it was written from his perspective, I'm guessing a 30/40 something (perhaps I should check?!) but for "an older" person quiet time by oneself or with family/friends doing things you know you like has rather more appeal than rushing off to experience other stuff. Not that I'm against spontaneity, it can be fun. The little quizzes for reflecting upon your various experiences got a bit repetitive. and it started to feel that you had to justify what you were doing all of the time. Overall, for me there was too much time spent debating and evaluating what you were thinking about doing. At times it felt rather like some of the "Corporate Crap" meetings I had to go to but I'm sure that my former Line Manager would just love it. Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House UK/Ebury Publishing for an advance copy in return for my honest review.

I am not a fan of self-improvement books but against my better judgement I do buy them now and again, only to be disappointed. This one is no different. The author advises people to use their spare time to go out and get experiences, mostly at an extreme sport challenge level instead of catching up on the chores or resting. I did not buy into this at all. I do believe that a quiet life is OK and that sitting reading a book instead of going ice skating is OK too. As well as not accepting the premise, I did not like the structure of the book - it is confusing, waffling and intespersed with irrelevant stories and name-dropping. Although he would perhaps disagree, I think he has written a book for corporate men betwen the ages of 30 and 50. Like himself, I guess.

Making the most of our time is something we all wrestle with. There is much useful information in this book to help with this, backed by research. However it could be so much more succinct. There is so much flab - overblown stories that get in the way of navigating the book and absorbing what is valuable.

I feel obliged to give 4 stars because its useful content is to be recommended. It could be so much better presented though.

This is the sort of book I love to have in a hard copy, I do think these are better to have to highlight passages with stickers and it’s easy to look back on.

However I’m very grateful to netgalley for sending me the ARC and while I haven’t read it all, it’s something to keep for future reference and to refer back to.