18 Minutes

Peter Bregman: You know, most books about time management are actually about organizing work. They're very effective at making sure that nothing falls through the cracks because we have a filing system for everything and a way to process stuff and get them out, but the problem with that is that things should fall through the cracks. There's way too much to do than any of us have time to do, and the real challenge is to make discreet and intentional decisions about what to do and what not to do. The most strategic decision that we can make as people, as executives, this is more important the more senior you get up in an organization, is where we're spending our time.

You know, there are so many distractions, there are so many... not even distractions but good things to spend our time on, too many that we can't actually accomplish. So the real question that we have is "Where is the most effective place to use my time and how do I filter the other stuff out, how do I say no to the right things and yes to the right things so that I'm being effective, not just efficient?" I think most time management books are great at that, but "18 Minutes" is broken up into several pieces, and the first piece is to just slow down, because we can't change the tires of all the cars moving, we're moving so fast, getting everything done that we possibly can that we have no time to sort of pause or reflect. So the first part is just to pause a little bit, and then it's divided into "what is your year about," "what is your day about," and "what is your moment about," and decisions should really flow from that, meaning "what I do in each moment should be based on what I'm doing in my day, which really should be based on what it is that I want to focus on in my year," and I think that link is often lost, and that rather than let things fall through the cracks unintentionally we want to intentionally push things through the cracks that aren't going to help us focus on the things that we most want to focus on in the year.

Rachel Salaman: Your book is written in short chapters along the lines of the structure you've outlined. To set the scene, can you tell us about "hovering above your world," that's something you talk about at the beginning?

Peter Bregman: Yes. So I'm one of these people, right, that struggles with how I spend my time. I didn't write this book as an expert that's going to briefly come down to earth to share with you mere mortals all about how to manage time and then I'll go back up to my perch. I'm a mere mortal, I struggle with doing the wrong things, and in many ways in my whole life I was doing part right thing and part wrong thing, and I'd built my company, Bregman Partners, up into what was from the outside looked like a very successful company. We were millions of dollars of revenue, we had many employees, we had offices in lots of different places in the world, and yet I was having dreams about being underneath a car and turning screws. I'm from New York City, I've never been underneath a car in my life, which is evidenced by the fact that I think there are screws underneath a car and I would dream about them. I was spending all of my time managing people, what I really, really loved to do was consulting.

I talk in the book about operating 95 percent of your time in your sweet spot, and your sweet spot is the intersection of your strength, your weaknesses, your differences and your passions. So often we try to do the opposite, we minimize our strengths because we don't want to seem arrogant, we develop our weaknesses because we're embarrassed about them, we try to fit in rather than accentuate our differences, and we relegate our passions to hobbies because we don't feel that we have the right to spend our lives on them. The truth is the most successful people don't minimize their strengths but accentuate them, they really live in the area of their strengths. They don't try to fix their weaknesses, they accept them, and they work in an area where their weakness is actually a strength, they accentuate the ways in which they're different. If you're trying to fit in, all you're doing is you're multiplying your pool of competition. What you want to do is be different so that there are fewer people like you, so you're the more obvious choice. So you really want to stand out in that way, and if you work in your passions you will work tirelessly and become fantastic at them because you love them so much. So I was not working at the intersection of my strengths and weaknesses, passions and differences.

I love consulting, I love coming up with creative, innovative solutions for people's problems, I love thinking, you know, being a thought leader and thinking through things that other people haven't thought through. I love having the individual relationship with a client and really serving them. When I was running a consulting company I had to come up with solutions that I could replicate across 100 people who were working for me, I had to manage people rather than come up with independent solutions with clients. I was spending less time with clients and more time with my employees.

Pushing the reset button or the hover button is on Google Earth, there's a button where you press to locate yourself on an iPad or an iPhone application, and when you do that it literally sends you up in the air to a spinning earth and then slowly brings you back down to the continent and then the country and then the state and the city and eventually the street, the block that you're on right now, that you're standing on with your phone, and I had to hit that button, to say "I'm in the wrong place right now. I'm not completely in the wrong place, I'm still running the same company I was running beforehand, but doing it differently." I had to hit that button to hover above my world and to see things more clearly, and then to slowly emerge, to drop down gently back into the place that's the perfect fit for the intersection of my strengths and weaknesses, passions and differences.

Rachel Salaman: And how hard did you find that? Did it just happen naturally?

Peter Bregman: You know, it's hard because you have to change your identity in some ways. For me, not for everybody but for me, I believed that I was an entrepreneur that would run a big company, and that the idea of being an independent consultant, I thought they were losers for the most part. So I had to shift my identity and to say, "You know what? Yes, I believe that running a big company..." I mean, I have sort of associations of power and seductiveness and all these great things about that, but the truth is I don't love it, and so I have to shift and say "I have to change what I feel about myself and about independent consulting," and I grew a deeper respect for people that beforehand I didn't have as much respect for, and I became one of them. So in that way it was hard, but in another way it couldn't have been easier because I was doing what I loved doing in the way that I loved doing it, in a way that was receiving great feedback, because I really was at that intersection of my sweet spot. So in some ways I went from hard to easy, because it was much harder to run a company that wasn't a good fit for me than it was to run a company that's a perfect fit for me. So I had to change some things philosophically and self-concept and identity and deep emotional things, but in another way it just fit absolute perfectly and nothing's easier.

Rachel Salaman: One of the more unusual ideas in your book is that quirks and even what you call dysfunctions – I wonder if this is the weaknesses you were just mentioning – can end up being the secret of someone's success. So could you share some examples of what you mean by that?

Peter Bregman: Absolutely. You know, I was at lunch with a good friend of mine who's very, very wealthy, he's made a tremendous amount of money. In fact, he was giving away half a billion dollars, he's created a foundation of $500million. So a very wealthy guy, and I'm at lunch with him, and he orders the Caesar Salad with shrimp, and then he says to the waiter, "I hope you don't mind," he said "I'd like the salmon instead of the shrimp." The waiter said "It's not a problem, sir, it'll be an extra dollar." This is not a cheap meal we were at, he said it would be an extra dollar, and the man said "You know, forget it, I'm fine with just the shrimp." And I looked at him and I said "Look, I know you're taking me to lunch, let me at least buy you the difference between your shrimp and your salmon. You know, you've worked very hard, you have a lot of money, you deserve to have exactly what you want," and he said "No, I'm sorry, but it's not good value. I'm fine with the shrimp, it's not a big deal, I'm happy to have the shrimp, I don't want to pay the extra dollar." Now we could all look at that exactly as the word you used before, call it a dysfunction and kind of say "Is this a deep weakness that this man needs to work on," or we can look at his career and realize that that is the reason he made his money. He made all of his money investing in under-valued real estate, he would never put a dollar in unless he thought it was worth five dollars, and that dollar that he put in was almost immediately worth five dollars, and he did that over and over and over and over again. So he didn't fix himself, he didn't figure out he had this problem and he needed to go to psychologists for years and years and years to get him to spend more money more liberally, he sort of accepted that this was a part. The fact is, for him the dollar was not a good price to pay for the salmon, he was just as happy to have the shrimp. He's fine with it, I'm the one who had a problem with it. He didn't have a problem with it, and by doing that he was true to himself, and that is why he's been so successful. Nothing is easier and more productive and effective than accepting your weaknesses and working along with them rather than trying to fix them, which is the hardest thing of all.

Rachel Salaman: Now as you mentioned earlier, the book is structured around the idea of looking at the year and then the day and then the moment, and it's interesting that you talk about areas of focus rather than goals. I wonder if you could explain the difference between goals and areas of focus, and why you choose to plan the latter?

Peter Bregman: I'm trying to make this easy for people, including myself. I don't think we always know what our goals are, but we often know where we want to spend our time, and some things aren't goal-oriented. So one of my areas of focus is "nurture myself and my family." What's the goal there? I know people, friends of mine who have goals, who will say "I will spend 120 days with my family, not traveling, that's my goal." I mean, that's fine, I have no problem with that, I think that's a good goal, especially this person, who wasn't spending any time with his family before he set that goal, he'd spend time with his family, but for me nurturing myself and my family is the opposite of a goal in a sense, it's time I want to focus. I don't want to quantify that, I want to be with them and know that I'm doing things that deepen the nurturing of myself and my family. I want to speak and write about my ideas, that's another one of my areas of focus. I could absolutely have a goal, you know, I pretty much write an article a week so maybe I have a goal of saying, you know, 55 articles in a year, and then I reach that goal and I feel really great, but there's something sometimes about goals that take the pleasure of the action away. I really like writing, and you know what, if I write 50 articles instead of 60 articles I'm fine with that, I don't have a problem with that, I know that I'm going to speak and write about my ideas. So I would rather reduce the pressure of outcome and increase the focus of my time and my energy so that I'm not doing things for the sake of something else, but I'm doing them for the sake of them. We're too goal-oriented, we focus too much on the outcome and not enough on the pleasure of the thing that we're doing, and then we begin to lose pleasure, and then we become less productive and less effective in what we're doing. So I don't think goals are a problem, I think its fine to have goals, I just don't want to predicate my life on them.

Rachel Salaman: And you say that five things to focus on in the year is the right number for you, you say it varies for each person. How should someone go about selecting their areas of focus?

Peter Bregman: So I do always come up with five, and I do think it's open for each person, although I think probably seven is too many and three is too few, so I don't want to be too flexible about that. I think it's very dangerous to come up with 10 areas of focus because the answer is you won't actually focus on any of them. I come up with them in a very unscientific way in some ways but guided by process. So what I know is that I want to spend 95 percent of my time in my sweet spot, I want to spend as much time as possible doing the things that I love, that make me different, that I'm strong in and that I'm weak in. So I make sure that all of my five place me in that sweet spot, that's the first thing. And then the second is, I take a piece of paper and a pencil, or a pen, and I ask myself a question; "What's important for me to focus on this year? What's going to make this a great year?" Sometimes I write a really long list of things and then come back to it, you know, figure out what my five are, but the truth is almost always I come up with about five. They don't even change that much for me year to year, I think nurturing myself and my family, may it always be on my list. The tasks that go into that focus may be different, but I always advise people to just focus on a year, because if you try to figure out what is your life purpose, that's paralyzing, and often times people end up with nothing. If you know what your life purpose is, great, God bless you, but if you don't, don't wait to figure it out, just decide what you're going to focus on for your year, and after a couple of years you'll figure out what your life purpose is. And the truth is, that life purpose will change too, so allow it to change, allow yourself the flexibility to grow and be different, but I think it's mostly just sitting down and saying "What is it that I care most about focusing on," and certain things will rise to the surface and you'll know what those things are, and then you really want to look back and measure them against "Do these naturally or can I do them in such a way that they place me at the sweet spot of my strengths, weaknesses, passions and differences?"

Rachel Salaman: And how fixed should they be within the year? Is it okay to change them after a few months if they're not working out or you're just not spending time on them?

Peter Bregman: You know, I think it's worth introspection, it's absolutely worth that. So I'll share with you in my process for this year, I had five things. My five things were: focus on my current business, do great work for my current clients, is one. Second is to grow my business and continue to grow my client base. Third is to speak and write about my ideas, the fourth was to write a screenplay, and the fifth was nurture myself and my family. And my wife always complains, "Why is the fifth one last?" but I don't think of it last; nurture myself and my family is just as important as any of the other five. A few months into the year I really wasn't getting any traction to writing the screenplay, and my book was coming out, "18 Minutes" was coming out, and I was very, very busy with the other stuff. I tried to push myself, and I had a partner I was going to start writing with and I called him a couple of times and every time was sort of an apology, that I hadn't really been in touch and that we should... And somewhere in like month three I just sat down and said "You know what? The reality is these are not my top areas of focus," and that writing a screenplay was not going to happen this year and that keeping it on the list was just serving to make me feel guilty, and that it is absolutely something that I want to eventually do and maybe next year is the right year, but "18 Minutes" is coming out this year and it's going to take me much more time than I thought to really promote it. So I replaced "write a screenplay" with "promote '18 Minutes,'" and the truth is that's probably been one of the busiest areas of focus in my life over the past certainly three or four months. I didn't really know and I didn't really think about it, but that's what it takes, so I shifted mid-year to say "This isn't really working out." Now if I just wasn't spending time on it, I wasn't getting to it because I was procrastinating in it or I was afraid of failure or I thought I wasn't good enough to write a screenplay, all of those reasons, then I would have kept it on and I would have forced myself to engage in that conversation, to really look at "What am I afraid of? Why am I procrastinating, why am I not doing it?" But as I thought about it, it became clear to me that I'm not afraid of it. That's not true, I am a little afraid of it, and I do really want to do it and it will happen, and that's not the most important area of focus for me, it's not the most important priority for 2011.

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Rachel Salaman: And you say that people's daily to-do list should be structured around the annual areas of focus, and in the book you share one of your typical daily to-do list, and I was struck by how much you aim to pack in to one day. What advice do you have about how much to put on a to-do list?

Peter Bregman: I think this is one of the most important elements of "18 Minutes," which is it's the translation of your annual goals and daily goals. So you mentioned my to-do list, I call it my six-box to-do list, and in fact if you go to my website at peterbregman.com, on the right-hand side you can download, those are resources, you can click on "free resources" and you can download a template of the six-box to-do list. It's actually very simple; it's just six boxes on a page, and each box is labeled with one of my top five areas of focus, and the sixth box is for the other five percent and every day I put my tasks that I need to accomplish in the right box. At first, when I started keeping the six-box to-do list, the only box I could fill, and it was filled way beyond capacity, was the other five percent. I was somehow managing to do everything that was not in my top five areas of focus, because we procrastinate on those things because they're important to us and failure is scary, and it does become an identity issue. So we'd rather not even start, I'd rather just buy running sneakers, which is a task I can get my hands around, when I bought them I could check it off, it's short, it's simple and progress is clear, so that's where we spend our time, which is a bit mistake. So once I started keeping the six-box to-do list it was very clear to me how I was moving forward and the things that I was doing that were going to move me forward in the areas that I most wanted to focus on. Without that six-box to-do list your top five areas of focus are nothing but New Year's resolutions; you decide they're important to focus on, and three weeks after January you've forgotten all about them. The fact that I can easily recite to you by memory what my top five areas of focus are is because I look at them every single day, and I funnel all of my to-dos through them.

So your question of do I do too much? Absolutely, and I just wrote an article for Harvard Business Review about... it's the Jewish New Year and I'm Jewish, and Peter Bregman: I looked at my New Year to sort of ask myself "What is it that I want to do different, what do I want to change for the year?" I sort of take as many opportunities to do that as I can, and what I did was I looked for the underlying similarity between all the things that I wanted to change, and they could all be affected by one major theme, which is that I need to slow down. For me, my theme now is that I need to slow down, I'm doing too much, I'm being too frenetic, and what that requires is to be even more diligent about a process that I'm already passionate about, which is "What am I going to say no to? What am I going to not do? What am I going to admit won't get done because I don't want to run myself ragged?" So I would say that the amount of things that I put in my daily to-do list are ambitious, and the 18 minutes process is a process that helps me funnel those things into a more accurate depiction of my day, which is my calendar. So the first five minutes of every day I look at that to-do list and I decide what will make today most successful, and then I transfer those things into my calendar. There's a tremendous amount of evidence that points to the fact that if you decide when and where you're going to do something you'll do it, but if you don't decide when and where you won't do it. They asked drug addicts on withdrawal to write an essay before 5 p.m., how many of them do you think did it?

Rachel Salaman: None.

Peter Bregman: None is the correct answer. Then they said to them "Tell me when and where you're going to write that essay?" 80 percent of them did it. Women during breast cancer checks, "Sometime in the next month," 53 percent of them did it. "Tell me when and where you're going to do it?" 100 percent did it. So deciding when and where you're going to do something is critical. What's also critical about it is it forces you to be more realistic. If I've got 20 things that will each take an hour and I try to put it on my calendar, it's not going to fit, so I have to make these choices about what's going to fit, and that helps me to... it's a funnel to help me reduce the amount that I'm expecting myself to do to make it more realistic, so that I'm not overwhelming myself, because what happens then is that I'm always disappointed with how little I've accomplished in a day.

So I spend my first five minutes, this is the 18 minutes, this is how the 18 minutes are constructed, I spend the first five minutes of my day looking at that six-box to-do list, transferring the most important things into my calendar. Then I have something that beeps every hour, a timer, a watch, a computer, a phone, and on that hour I stop for one minute and I take a deep breath, and I ask myself two questions; am I doing what I most need to be doing right now, and am I being who I most want to be right now? I interrupt myself with those two questions, and those two questions do a tremendous amount to bring me back on track, those two; who I want to be and what it is that I want to accomplish. It makes a big, big difference. Then at the end of the day I take five minutes and I ask myself "What have I learnt? What do I want to do differently tomorrow? Would I want to do the same?" And then "Is there anyone I need to update or ask a question of?" Or my favorite is, "Do I want to show gratitude or thanks to anybody for something that they've done during that day?" I use that to kind of wrap up, and together those minutes equal 18 minutes.

Rachel Salaman: And you must have shared that idea with perhaps some of your clients, how do other people get on with it? Does it work for everyone?

Peter Bregman: You know, it does. Everybody modifies things slightly, and I encourage that, you know, I'm still modifying and I think it's important to look at. That's what those last five minutes of the day are for, to look at what worked, what didn't work, what do you want to do differently, what do you want to do the same. But it's been tremendous in terms of helping clients understand how to be strategic about their time. I was talking with a CFO the other day who was receiving criticism for looking personally at people's expense reports. This is the CFO of a multi-hundred million dollar company. Is it really the best use of his time, to be looking at people's expense reports, or should he be thinking about the task flow of the organization and what needs to happen, to spend that cash in a way that's going to bring the greatest return. As people begin to think about what are their areas of focus and what are they going to ignore they begin to make better, more strategic decisions about where to spend their time, and that's most of the battle.

Rachel Salaman: Well we've talked about annual and daily focus, so if we could talk briefly now about focusing in the moment, and you have an unusual take on distractions, saying that they can sometimes be an asset. How does that work?

Peter Bregman: Well a couple of things. One is this one minute an hour that my watch beeps, that's a distraction in some ways, that separates me from the work that I'm doing, in the middle of the work that I'm doing, but that's a very, very productive distraction because it actually helps me to get back on track. There's also a very interest research about what allows you to... you know, willpower is not very useful, it's very, very hard to maintain self-control. So watching television might be a distraction from getting the work done that I want to get done, that's a bad distraction, but in some ways the way to prevent myself from watching television, some television is good but watching television is a distraction to me, isn't by stopping myself from watching television or trying to keep myself from watching television or reminding myself that I don't want to watch television, that's really good for something I want to do. If I want to exercise, a positive thing, I want to exercise, then reminding myself over and over again is actually really, really good, but something negative, something I want to stop myself from doing, like watching too much television or eating too many cookies, that is something where distraction is a much more effective tool, that rather than remind myself that I don't want to watch TV, every time I get the urge to watch TV I should go do something else, distracting with something else.

They did this wonderful experiment, "The Marshmallow Experiment" decades ago, where they put a marshmallow in front of a little kid, a six or seven year old, and said "Don't eat this marshmallow. You can eat this marshmallow, you're welcome to eat this marshmallow, but if you eat it it's the only one you get. If you can hold off on eating it until I come back, I have to go, I have to leave the room for a minute, for a few minutes, and then I'm going to come back. If you can hold off on eating this marshmallow until I come back I'll give you two marshmallows." And then the researcher left the room and there was a video camera. It was amazing, hysterical to watch these kids try to stop themselves from eating the marshmallows, but the ones who were most effective at not eating the marshmallows, which by the way was correlated with all sorts of things like higher test scores and better entrances to universities and more money in life and more success, all of this was correlated with people who could delay the gratification. And how did they delay the gratification? They avoided, they distracted themselves from the temptation; they sat underneath the table, they turned their chairs around so they weren't looking at the marshmallow, they did all sorts of things that would distract themselves from the things that they didn't... they would sing a song with their eyes shut, from things that they didn't want to do. The people who stared at the marshmallow and said "I'm not going to eat it, I'm not going to eat it, I'm not going to eat it" ended up eating it. So sometimes distractions can be productive if they are distracting you from things you don't want to do.

Rachel Salaman: You also write about fear as something potentially useful, in what kinds of situations does that work? Is it the same kind of thing?

Peter Bregman: A little bit. I noticed that same thing, I noticed it when I had this habit of talking into my cell phone in the car, and then someone sent me a video, a terrible, horrible video of reanimation I think, but of a car crash, of someone texting while they had friends in the car, and you saw in graphic, terrifying detail what happens in that kind of an accident. The next time I got in my car I put the cell phone deep, deep, deep inside a bag that I put well into the back of the car so that I wouldn't be able to reach it, because I was terrified that I would kill my family because I was texting. It's a very, very strong motivator but it's not enough, that it requires more than that, and what it requires is fear is a great instigator of change but it's not a very good sustainers of change, it burns you out. So to sustain the change I had to really recognize and focus how pleasant it was to not be on the phone in the car at the same time, how nice it was to talk with my wife or my children, how nice it was to just let my mind wander a little bit and not do anything. So it doesn't take just fear, but fear could be an absolutely excellent catalyst.

Rachel Salaman: So if someone listening wanted to start being more focused tomorrow, what might be your top three tips that would make the most difference?

Peter Bregman: I would say the first thing is to pause for a moment and think about what your top five things are, what is it that you really want to focus your time on, big picture. Doesn't have to be big picture life but big picture year, what do you want to spend your time on, and identify those five things. The second thing I would suggest is either downloaded from peterbregman.com or literally just draw some lines on a piece of paper, create a six-box to-do list, and put those top five things on top of each of those five boxes and label the sixth box "the other 5 percent," and take your traditional to-do list, the place you've been writing everything you need to do, and start to transfer things and see how many of them go into those top 5 percent and how many of them go into the other 5 percent, then make decisions about what you're going to spend your time on and what you're not, based on what funneling into those five most important areas that you want to focus on. And then the third is using the process, the 18 minutes process, to do that every morning, transfer things onto your calendar, stop every hour to ask yourself those questions, "Is this the most important thing to be working on right now? Am I being who I most want to be right now?" And at the end of the day asking yourself about what you've learned so you can continually get better. Those three things are probably the top three tips.

Rachel Salaman: Peter Bregman, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me, it's been a pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Peter's book again is "18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right Things Done." You can find out more about his work at www.peterbregman.com. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.