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

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.

What are you willing not to achieve? What doesn’t make you happy? What’s not important to you? What gets in the way?

But the joke is on us late people. Because being late causes the exact things we’re trying to avoid: inefficiency and counterproductivity. Not just for the people who are waiting, but for the people who are late. Because nothing is more productive and efficient than transition time. It’s not just our time to travel. It’s our time to think and to pl

We need a discipline—a ritual—that can help us stay centered and grounded throughout the day. We need something to remind us who we really are. Who we want to be. For me, that something is a beep. Each morning, I set my watch—you can also use a phone, computer, or timer—to beep every hour. At the sound of the chime, I take one minute to ask myself

Delegating work to someone? Give him the task and then ask: Why won’t this work for you? When he answers, you respond: That’s a good point. So how can you change it to make it work?

Welcome to life. The conditions are constantly shifting—almost as fast and frequently as the weather—and if you keep doing the same things in the rain that you did when it was nice and sunny, you’ll crash. You need to change your approach. Change doesn’t mean doing more of the same: selling harder, working longer hours, being more aggressive. That

Never leave things on your to-do list for more than three days. They’ll just get in the way of what you really need to get done.

But I wasn’t the person who needed to use it. Here’s what I figured out: My perfect is not their perfect. They don’t have a perfect. In fact, there is no they. There are two thousand individuals, each of whom wants something a little different. The more perfect I think it is, the less willing I’ll be to let anyone change it. The only way to make it

Each morning, I ask myself some questions: Am I prepared for this day? Prepared to make it a successful, productive day? Have I thought about it? Planned for it? Anticipated the risks that might take me off track? Will my plan for this day keep me focused on what my year is about?