time management ebooks

The UK Guide to Prioritisation: Decide What to Do Next, and What to Refuse

Most small businesses do not have a prioritisation problem. They have a subtraction problem — the list is too long and most of it has neither a date nor a consequence. This guide opens with the fact nobody wants to hear: the average UK full-time week is 36.5 hours, not 40, and once the legal rest break, the switches between kinds of work and the admin nobody sees are taken out, a small business owner is choosing between things in roughly 22 to 28 usable hours a week. It then gives you the method that fits inside those hours — and it handles the part of your list that is not a priority at all but a legal deadline with a penalty attached. Nine chapters, eight named frameworks: the Three Columns, the Four Buckets, the UK floor in current rates, the Twelve-Month Backbone, the Real Week, the Six-Question Triage, First-Next-Later and the Four Scripts. You will find out why sorting before ranking matters, what you may not deprioritise — from the Working Time Regulations to Statutory Sick Pay at £123.25 a week since 6 April 2026 — why there is still no statutory right to disconnect, which deadlines you already owe and have never written down, how much time you actually have, how to rank work using facts instead of estimates, and how to say no without burning a bridge. Ends with a day-by-day 30-day plan and a one-page Priority Sheet. Every figure was checked against its original source on the day of publication: ONS, HMRC, Companies House, the Pensions Regulator and legislation.gov.uk. Written for UK business owners, in plain English, by PracticaleBooks.com.