Rating: 
Summary: Pretty useful for males too!
Review: This is a book written by two sisters who used to live in "pig-pens" and together developed a way to bring order into their lives. The targeted audience of the book are women with a family who are desperate to get their house-holds under control.Therefore, I'm probably the only male manager who's ever bought and read this book (actually I was looking for a time-management book and hadn't made a careful selection). Having accidentally bought the book, I decided 200 pages of large print in a small book wouldn't kill me and I might as well read it. I'm glad I did. My family (and especially my wife) doesn't really need the book, but we aren't perfect either and one can never have enough good ideas in this department. The book really assumes the worst about you (if you aren't, all the better) in terms of self-organization and house-keeping. The system that the "slob sisters" introduces is interspersed among a lot of real-life experiences and shared thoughts to show that you are NOT alone with this problem, that you ARE a loveable person, that you REALLY CAN change the mess and that an hours worth of work WILL make a difference (which does not mean that you can read the book, put it back on the shelf and assume that you life all of a sudden will become wonderful). Having read the first part, I wished I had read it as a single male student. Then again, in those days I wouldn't have been caught carrying a book with this kind of front cover out of a bookshop for my life! What really touched me were the latter chapters of the book (including a chapter called "can this marriage be saved") showing how topics like this can undermine family life, how the women of this world often are abused by the men in their lifes without the latter really knowing about it and how these sort of problems CAN be solved. Once again, I think that we as a family are far removed from the extremities described in this book, but it contains food for thought for males working outside the house.
Rating: 
Summary: What century is it?
Review: This is an interesting, even entertaining chronicle of how two first-class messies cleaned up their act. They describe how they gradually decided that their lifestyle was not working, and how they eventually reworked it to the point where they were giving advice to others. They show their very human side, as well as their basically warm personalities. They have a card system for getting chores done, which probably would work for a lot of people. I now use and prefer to-do lists, but the card method is flexible. I used to use a similar system with sticky notes (less durable than cards) before I read this book, and they proved that for them and many others, it works. As with a couple of other organizing books I've read, my main critique is that they don't allow sufficient time to do things. They apparently were stay-at-home moms who are not under the often stringent time constraints many others must deal with. If a job didn't get done one day, it could get done another. But the estimates for any task at any time, in my opinion, simply are too low. Can you clean a floor in 10 minutes? People are different, and have different sizes of homes and so forth, but I don't think I could do most chores (which also include errands to stores and so on) as fast as they can. Can you do a week's worth of grocery shopping, start to finish, in 45 minutes? Car to store to purchases to standing in line to loading to drive home to unload and put away? If one takes the time estimates with grains of salt, the rest of the book is helpful, and since most readers won't be starting from the extreme situation that these sisters did, they won't have to exert themselves as much to dig out. Certainly worth a try.
Rating: 
Summary: If they can do it, anyone can
Review: This is an interesting, even entertaining chronicle of how two first-class messies cleaned up their act. They describe how they gradually decided that their lifestyle was not working, and how they eventually reworked it to the point where they were giving advice to others. They show their very human side, as well as their basically warm personalities. They have a card system for getting chores done, which probably would work for a lot of people. I now use and prefer to-do lists, but the card method is flexible. I used to use a similar system with sticky notes (less durable than cards) before I read this book, and they proved that for them and many others, it works. As with a couple of other organizing books I've read, my main critique is that they don't allow sufficient time to do things. They apparently were stay-at-home moms who are not under the often stringent time constraints many others must deal with. If a job didn't get done one day, it could get done another. But the estimates for any task at any time, in my opinion, simply are too low. Can you clean a floor in 10 minutes? People are different, and have different sizes of homes and so forth, but I don't think I could do most chores (which also include errands to stores and so on) as fast as they can. Can you do a week's worth of grocery shopping, start to finish, in 45 minutes? Car to store to purchases to standing in line to loading to drive home to unload and put away? If one takes the time estimates with grains of salt, the rest of the book is helpful, and since most readers won't be starting from the extreme situation that these sisters did, they won't have to exert themselves as much to dig out. Certainly worth a try.
Rating: 
Summary: This book is really not that great
Review: Young and Jones goes through getting you organized in a sometimes funny fashion and they have a few good ideas but in its entirety, this book is very strange. As well as organizational tips, the book offers weight loss advice, bits of religion and seriously bad poetry. Give this one a miss.
| 
