18 Minutes - Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done

 

 

Having just finished reading Peter Bregman's new book, "18 Minutes," I am simultaneously invigorated and exhausted.

(Actually, "read" is not the right word - "devoured" is more like it.)

I am INVIGORATED in that this combination business book and self-help book has inspired me to start looking at, thinking about, and doing some things differently...starting with the simple reminder that we need to regularly stop -- to pause, reflect, recharge, recalibrate, and refocus - for just 18 minutes a day (5 minutes at the beginning; eight 1-minute check-ins during the day; and 5 minutes at the end).

Leveraging his engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking talent for storytelling (as exhibited regularly in his HBR blog posts), Bregman provides readers with a variety of tools, tips, and techniques intended to help us enhance our productivity and maximize our potential.

And why am I "EXHAUSTED"? Because, in addition to my head spinning from the numerous impactful and memorable stories that I want to remember, the refreshing new insights I gained, and a short list of simple-but-meaningful actions I now plan to take, I started reading the book around midnight last night and couldn't put it down until I finished the entire thing, in one sitting, at four a.m. this morning (luckily it's a Saturday).

Seriously, reading this book is like having a personal and professional life coach standing right beside you -- providing success tips, keeping you focused, and cheering you on along the way.

UPDATE: I just re-read this book in greater detail (as mentioned above, the first time I read it I whipped through it in four hours because I couldn't put it down due to the great storytelling). But this time I focused not just on the INSIGHTS I gained, but on the ACTIONS I want, and need, and plan to take -- both personally and professionally, including the creation of my own personalized/customized version of the Bregman "Six Box Planning Tool" (page 118). If you take nothing else from this book (and I doubt that would happen), this tool alone will help you organize your to-do list, focus, and get things (the right things!) done. But like any tool, it's all about the using. Good intentions and proper planning will get you started; dedication, execution, follow-through, resilience, and a commitment to excellence is what gets results. I just upgraded my rating from 4-stars to 5-stars for this terrific book.

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The title of this book and most discussions I've seen are about chapters 22 - 28. These 24 pages (in the electronic edition I read) have some great tips on time and goal management and the relationship between these. The 21 chapters before and the 18 chapters afterwards are fairly standard business/self-help pep talks. The "Where we are" and "Where we've landed" sections try to make the padding relevant to the book's core, but they seem a bit retrofitted to justify those other parts.

Here's a time management tip: The content of chapters 1 - 21 and 29 - 46 could each be summed up on a post-it note, and if you go to the end of each of those chapters, you'll see a box around the post-it note version, so just read that.

(Also, unless he's trying to create some cute coinage, "overwhelm" is not a noun. It's always a verb.)