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

by Peter Bregman

“Establishing your identity through work alone can restrict your sense of self, and make you vulnerable to depression, loss of self-worth, and loss of purpose when the work is threatened,”

Knowing what outcome you want will enable you to focus on what matters and escape the whirlwind of activity that too often leads nowhere fast.

The first element is your strengths. Over the coming year, play the game that is perfectly suited to your strengths.

Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand your obsessions and you will understand your natural motivation—the thing for which you would walk to the end of the earth.

You want to achieve it. You believe you can achieve it. You enjoy trying to achieve it.

But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mind-set feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Failure is inevitable, useful, and educational. Just don’t give up—stay focused over the year—and it will pay off.

1. Achievement (the desire to compete against increasingly challenging goals) 2. Affiliation (the desire to be liked/loved)

3. Power, expressed in one of two ways: Personalized (the desire for influence and respect for yourself) Socialized (the desire to empower others; to offer them influence and respect)

Are you working on something meaningful and challenging—something for which you have about a 50 percent chance of succeeding? Are you relating to other people at work or socially—people you like and to whom you feel close? Do you feel recognized for the work you are doing—paid or unpaid? Can you influence decisions and outcomes?

As long as you create the right environment—one in which you feel challenged, loved, and respected—then you’ll be motivated enough to keep moving in the right

Don’t be paralyzed by an uncertain future. Just keep moving.

While I might not have been happy about it at the time, each turn of luck was a catalyst that brought me closer to the life I’m happily living now.

“When we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes… [but] an uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.”

But if someone believes his talent grows with persistence and effort, he’ll work to master the challenge. He’ll view adversity as an opportunity to get better.

Make sure that your list leverages your strengths, embraces your weaknesses, asserts your differences, and reflects your passions. It’s also important that it includes opportunities to be challenged, opportunities to work with others, and opportunities to be recognized.

doing work that matters is much harder than doing work that doesn’t.

If you really want to get something done, decide when and where you are going to do it.

I take one minute to ask myself if the last hour has been productive.

The right kind of interruption can help you master your time and yourself. Keep yourself focused and steady by interrupting yourself hourly.

have happen. Then ask yourself three sets of questions: How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure? What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do—differently or the same—tomorrow? Whom did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question of? Share feedback with? This last set of questions is invaluable in terms of maintaining and growing relationships. It takes just a few short minutes to shoot off an email—or three—to share your appreciation for a kindness extended or to ask someone a question or keep them in the loop on a project.

Spend a few minutes at the end of each day thinking about what you learned and with whom you should connect. These minutes are the key to making tomorrow even better than today.

That ritual should take a total of 18 minutes a day: STEP 1 (5 Minutes): Your Morning Minutes. This is your opportunity to plan ahead. Before turning on your

computer, sit down with the to-do list you created in chapter 22, “Bird by Bird,” and decide what will make this day highly successful. What can you realistically accomplish that will further your focus for the year and allow you to leave at the end of the day feeling that you’ve been productive and successful? Then take those things off your to-do list and schedule them into your calendar, as we discussed in chapter 24, “When Tomorrow?” And don’t neglect chapter 25, “The Three-Day Rule”: Make sure that anything that’s been on your list for three days gets a slot somewhere in your calendar or move it off the list.

STEP 2 (1 Minute Every Hour): Refocus. Now, remember chapter 26, “Who Are You?” Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour and start the work that’s listed on your calendar. When you hear the beep, take a deep breath and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively. Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour. Manage your day hour by hour. Don’t let the hours manage you. STEP 3 (5 Minutes): Your Evening Minutes. At the end of your day, shut off your computer and review how the day went, asking yourself the three sets of questions listed in chapter 27, “It’s Amazing What You Find When You Look.” Questions like: How did the ...

Follow-through may seem easy, but it’s not. It’s where most of us fail. And yet it’s the lone bridge across which ideas become accomplishments. We need to follow through, to strongly and diplomatically manage ourselves and other people, so nothing prevents us from accomplishing and becoming all that we can.

So you’ve gotten started on your worthwhile, important work. You know it’s worthwhile and important because it was on your to-do list under one of your areas of focus for the year. Then, during your morning minutes, you moved it from your to-do list to your calendar. And now you’re working on it.

And if you’re in a position to help others through a transition? Here are three steps that may quicken the transition: 1. Listen fully to their concerns. Repeat back what you hear them saying and ask if you got it right. Once they agree that you understand their issues, move to step 2. 2. Share your perspective. Once. Check for their understanding, not their agreement. You want to make sure they hear your view. 3. Don’t repeat. This is the critical step to moving them through the transition to the other side. If you’ve performed steps 1 and 2 effectively, you’re done. Any more just lengthens the transition—and the dread.

When you want to do something, focus. When you don’t want to do something, distract.

Only by wading through the imperfect can we begin to achieve glimpses of the perfect.

The world doesn’t reward perfection. It rewards productivity.