I finished up 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman a few weeks ago. I actually listened to it on Audible. I’ll get into it more in another post, but listening to books rather than reading neither saves time or effort.
The book was so so. I guess because it came at a point where I was looking internally to begin with, I didn’t think any of ideas were revolutionary. And like I find with many other similar books, the multi-step (with multiple steps in each step, and steps within those sub steps), it’s not very simple to follow.
The premise is you spend 18 minutes a day making sure you are doing the right things. 5 minutes in the morning to decide what will make the day successful. 1 minute every hour to pause and to access. Then 5 minutes at night to review.
To make a long story short. Be mindful. Are you wasting time? Is what you are doing now (and perhaps later) contributing to your life goals? Do your goals align with your values? And what are your goals? Are the goals meaningful?
There were some valuable takeaways and action items for me specifically that I am going to work on, which are:
- Pursue my passions.
- Use spare time to support my passions.
- Focus on what I want to achieve, believe I can achieve, and enjoy trying to achieve.
- Be more involved in group activities to build engagement with others.
- Experience more than mundane day to day.
- Stop thinking so much and put things into motion.
Most importantly I need to deliberately take myself out of my comfort zone at times and not be afraid to fail. So long as I can learn from mistakes and failures.
Overall the book was ok. There were valuable takeaways. A lot were known to me, but did take the book to jog them back into focus.