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change my life. This was a daft theory and one all too well understood by those who churn out work-out DVDs in January. Just as my wife purchasing Davina McCall’s Power of Three work-out DVD and leaving it gathering dust on the shelf didn’t help anyone but Davina McCall, buying Mark Forster’s book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time To Play , reading the first two chapters and then not going back to it because (irony of ironies) I couldn’t find the time, doesn’t help anyone but Mark Forster.
            Luckily I didn’t take Forster’s book to Oxfam along with Claire’s Davina DVDs and her Mr Motivator box set, but retained it for use in possible future emergencies just like this one. But of course I had to find it first.
            I began the search in the living room because that’s where we keep most of our books. Like many young couples who prefer people not to think they spend their evenings watching property programmes or yelling at the characters on EastEnders , we owned a lot of books that we liked to keep on display. There were upwards of a couple of hundred of them in the living room alone and others scattered at various locations around the house. The clever-clever stuff (Zola, Dickens, Carver, etc.) and feminist stuff belonged solely to Claire; the occasional smart modern stuff (Smith, Amis, Eggers, etc.) along with the stuff that seemed more than a little bit random (an original copy of Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask , The Collected Andy Capp and Gary Wilmot’s Guide to Doing Impressions ) were mine; and finally the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides that gave the impression we were a well-travelled cosmopolitan couple (South Africa, Russia, Crete, Thailand and the USA) were jointly ours.
            The problem with this many books was that if you wanted a specific tome and hadn’t organised them into some kind of order (Item 818. ‘Organise book shelves so that you can find a specific book without looking through everything’) you were pretty much stuffed.
            I started with the main shelf above the stereo but it wasn’t there nor on the ones by the French doors; I checked the three IKEA shelves in our bedroom but it wasn’t there nor in Lydia’s room (she had been known to pluck a random book off the shelf in order to spend an entire afternoon pretending that she was reading The Collected Works of Aphra Behn ); finally I headed up to the office/spare room and checked out the books stacked against the wall by the sofa bed and the ones piled on the wonky IKEA Lack shelving. No luck. About to give up, I racked my brains to remember where I’d had it last and began to see disconnected images of me in a tidying frenzy some months earlier when I’d grabbed a bunch of stuff that had been sitting on the floor at my feet and tossed it into a box before ceremonially dumping it in . . . the under-eaves storage space .
            Twenty minutes later with half of the contents of the storage cupboard once again strewn around the room, I finally found what I was looking for.
            ‘Time is what our lives are made of’, said the blurb on the back of the book, ‘and yet our failure to use time properly can have disastrous effects on our happiness and sense of well-being. This book is written for everyone who has to juggle different demands in a busy schedule, including advice on finding an effective system while making allowances for human psychology and the unexpected.’
            It was hard to believe how right this book was for me given my situation. I called Claire upstairs and read her the blurb.
            ‘ Get Everything Done is a book written for everyone who has to juggle different demands in a busy schedule,’ I said pointing to the relevant part of the blurb. ‘See that? A book for me.’
            ‘That’s great,’ said Claire. ‘Now all you have to do is read it.’
            Good point. This book was only