By Allen Cardoza
As a talk show host on L.A. Talk radio, I recently had the pleasure of talking to Peter Bregman, about his latest book, “In 18 MINUTES: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right Things Done.”
Bregman is the CEO of Bregman Partners, a global management consultancy that advises top management on leadership issues in the workplace. Bregman is also a popular online columnist for Harvard Business Review. In addition, he has appeared on CNN and PBS, spoken on TEDx, written articles for popular online magazines like Psychology Today and Forbes, and regularly contributed to WNYC Radio.
During the hour-long discussion, Bregman discussed numerous ideas on how to manage our time better to achieve our goals in life.
Bregman wrote 18 MINUTES because he needed 18 MINUTES to figure out how to cut through all the daily clutter and distractions in his own life. This new method helped him to finally find a way to focus on those key items that added to the quality of his life.
After reading all the time management books he could lay his hands on, he was still overwhelmed at spending most of his time on things that were not moving his life forward. He came to realize that most time management books had made a fundamental mistake—they were showing us how to get it everything done. But, based on his own experiments, he found that we had to do just the opposite–do less to achieve more. By only focusing on those things that mattered, we could finally achieve success by completing important tasks that made a significant difference to our lives.
As an exercise in the futility of multi-tasking, one of the key disciplines of most time management books, he asked me to count from 1 to 10, then recite the alphabet from A to J. After this, he asked me to do them both at the same time, saying “A1, B2, C3,” etc. He timed me doing all three drills and we discovered that it took me longer to do the alphanumeric list. When we do two tasks at the same time, we take longer than if we did each task separately.
The process he shared with me to organize a day consisted of the following steps: plan your day, refocus every hour on what you should be doing, and review how you spent your time. He also talked about focusing on only five important goals a year, replacing your “to-do” list with a 6-box system of priorities, and replacing unproductive distractions by productive distractions like asking yourself if you were staying on task.
In our busy, frantic high-tech world of endless tasking, this brilliant author may have just found a way for all of us to be productive and fulfilled instead of distracted and frustrated.
