The book is also subtitled "Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done".
You can now understand why I decided to just leave the title as "18 Minutes". The author, Peter Bregman (not to be confused with the American soap opera actor, Jack Abbot, in "The Young and the Restless") also writes a weekly column, "How We Work" for the Harvard Business Review Blog. He is also the CEO of Bregman Partners Inc., a company that helps individuals and teams become more effective.
The book is divided into 4 major parts to progress the reader along the message of pausing, taking stock and aligning their actions to their plan.
Part 1: Pause - Hover Above Your World
Part 2: What Is This Year About? - Find Your Focus
Part 3: What Is This Day About? - Get the Right Things Done
Part 4: What Is This Moment About? - Mastering Distractions
Hover Above Your World highlights the importance of "pausing" to take stock of what you’re doing and to reflect on it before proceeding. Essentially the idea is to "Pause and reflect, then act. Don’t react".
Find Your Focus talks about finding and differentiating yourself through 4 key elements:
1. Leveraging Off Your Strengths
2. Embrace Your Weaknesses
3. Assert Your Differences
4. Pursue Your Passion - Desire, Persistence, Ease & Meaning
Once that's done, you should detail out the 3 to 5 things you want to achieve for the year. The idea is that a year is long enough to achieve meaningful outcomes but not too long that you loose momentum.
Get the Right Things Done - This is the section where he talks about his popular 18 minutes “ritual” to Plan (5 mins), Review (8 x 1 min) & Reflect (5 min) to ensure each day is aligned to your 3 to 5 things you want to achieve for the year (which you developed in the previous section).
What Is This Moment About? is talks about strategies to not be distracted by everyday “time-sucks”.
Personally, I enjoyed the book given that it had a lot of anecdotes to bring home his point. I suppose that is needed in all self-improvement books, else it would really be as short as my blog. The book is an easy read although I think that you need more than 18 minutes when you are first implement the ritual since it takes me a lot longer than 5 minutes to plan my day. Nonetheless, I am still finding myself falling off the "wagon" on this.
There are quite a few tips that I found useful. Like all self-improvement books, much of what is in there, you already know. The challenge is in applying it diligently and consistently.
One thing I found interesting was asking the question, “What is this Moment About?” (Note: the question, not the chapter in the book). If the moment is filled with what you have chosen to do (whether willingly or reluctantly), then just focus on the task with mind, body and soul. Let nothing else matter for that moment. To often, our body is there but our minds are already thinking what to do next or worse still, what else can I do. As such, we end up not "being there". I found this happens all too easily when you're at home and doing house chores.
Anyways, hope you have a read and enjoy the book.
Useful links if you want to know more:
Regards,
-pshasi
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