As a deep student of time and change, as well as how productivity culture creates roadblocks to our goals, I was unsurprisingly intrigued by the title of this book! Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I was looking for, and among all the books coming out recently on this subject I’d place it at the more traditional “productivity nerd” end of the spectrum: geared towards entrepreneurs, especially, with fairly mainstream values and goals, who are looking to optimize their time. Author Richie Norton preaches Anti-Time Management in the sense of escaping direct hierarchical control of your time in a 9-to-5 work environment, but not in the sense of abandoning the productivity trap altogether.

That said, I can see some folks finding the techniques in this book supportive. If you fall into the common category of someone who feels a little trapped in the corporate rat race, if your primary dream is around travel and spending more time with family, if you have at least a little access to money and/or privilege, if you’re neurotypical, and if you’re an ambivert or extrovert, you’re likely to get the most mileage out of Norton’s techniques. The key premise is aligning your values with how you spend your time, but the method seems particularly keyed to those who would specifically identify “freedom” as a core value.

Norton has designed his Time Tipping framework around relatively simple exercises, provided in the book, that are intended to get you out of a mindset of working in one particular way and doing things that don’t really matter. Folks who are newer to productivity will learn the most, as a lot of the pieces of this framework are familiar from other authors—you’ll find echos of the Pareto principle, big rocks, time batching, and the Eisenhower Matrix, for example. If like me you got a little sucked in by the promise of new terms like time tipping, project stacking, and work syncing, you can rest assured that they’re generally just different names for familiar concepts.

While I didn’t find the content particularly original, I can see the exercises being fairly straightforward for some to implement, and the principles are clearly organized at a high level so that you can work through them in your own context. The core of Time Tipping is identifying a single priority in each of four life areas: Personal, Professional, Play, and People. I appreciate that this is somewhat generic, so for example “people” might be family, friends, community and personal could be spiritual, health, etc. But you’re still going to want to already agree with this basic balance to get the most out of it.

From there, there’s a major focus on optimizing your time and making your projects overlap so that you’re getting the most bang for your buck in all four areas. This is going to work for some, but not necessarily all readers. There’s a strong emphasis, as you’ll find in many entrepreneurial spaces, on moving from doing the work to teaching or facilitating the work. And there’s an assumption that overlap will work for you, that your goals in each area are general enough to support pivoting to an overlapping model and that you have control over them.

For example, if you’re a photographer and your family wants to travel, then you might decide to earn money on a family road trip where you write a blog about travel photography that gets you clients for photography coaching while also advertising your services in the cities you visit. But not everyone is going to have this kind of obvious alignment between goal areas. There’s also an assumption that you’re willing to do some selling in exchange for work-life flexibility, and that you’re willing to sell to people who have an ability to pay what you need for that freedom. (Rather than, for example, choosing to get paid an hourly wage to enable working with folks who don’t have that ability as one of your projects.) I do appreciate the way Norton gets readers out of either/or thinking and considering the possibilities for life design, but this model won’t work for everyone.

Some of the bigger principles I do find important and valuable regardless of your context: acting from who you want to be today, for example, is a powerful trick, and I’ve certainly found in my own entrepreneurship experience that you do need to get out of your own head a lot and focus on doing the core of your work, delegating other pieces. I also very much resonate with what Norton calls “Final Cause” and what I would call ultimate purpose or in Sinek’s terms the “why” behind it all. Ultimately, Norton wants folks to be more present in the here and now and stop delaying their dreams. But his specific language is going to resonate the most and be most powerful for those in a similar position to his.

Unfortunately, the writing itself is also pretty jumbled and repetitive. The introduction takes up more than 20% of the book, and reads like a sales pitch. You’re going to get a lot of visuals that don’t really make sense, and a lot of success stories missing the core details of how that success actually happened. I think a few deeper case studies with honesty about the concessions made would be more inspiring and illustrative for most readers. There’s a lot of “time tippers do X” that starts to sound like corporate jargon run amok. The exercises are pretty simple and clear, but you may want to skip some of the writing once you have the jist of each principle. In fact, the 60-page PDF workbook offered as a bonus might be a better way to experience the method, skipping the book altogether!

I’m sure this book will appeal to some as we transition into a world that normalizes remote work, especially those who are able to access energy consistently and like the idea of optimizing and minimizing their time spent “working” with a flexible location. That said, holding the method out as revolutionary and unique is mostly just a sales pitch. And if your dreams don’t tend in this direction, or if you’re more interested in putting down productivity entirely in favor of a more loving approach, I’d skip this one.