Farnam Street: An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day And Finding Focus plus more |  |
| An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day And Finding Focus Posted: 02 Jul 2014 05:00 AM PDT We start every day knowing we’re not going to get it all done or fit it all in. How we spend our time is really a function of priorities. That’s why Peter Bregman argues in 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done that we need to plan ahead, “create a to-do list and an ignore list, and use our calendars.” “The hardest attention to focus,” he writes, “is our own.” *** We need ritual to manage our days, “clear enough to keep us focused on our priorities. Efficient enough not to get in the way.” Bregman argues that ritual should take 18 minutes a day: Your Morning Minutes, Refocus, and Your Evening Minutes. *** Echoing Tim Ferriss Bregman recommends planning ahead. Ferriss prefers the night before, Bregman prefers the morning. Before you turn on your computer, sit down with your to-do list and “decide what will make this day highly successful.” Take the items off your to-do list (a picture of Bregman’s to-do list is below) and schedule them into your day.  “Make sure,” he writes, “that anything that’s been on your list for three days gets a slot somewhere in your calendar or move it off the list.” *** Some interruptions help us course correct.
*** “At the end of your day,” Bregman writes, “shut off your computer and review how the day went.” Ask yourself three sets of questions:
*** The key to this is the ritual and its predictability.
Bregman speaks worldwide on how we can lead, work, and live more powerfully. 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done is an easy to read book that will add a few tools to your toolbox. — |
| “Intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge” Posted: 02 Jul 2014 03:00 AM PDT A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. — Hemingway, who died July 2, 1961, writing in Death in the Afternoon — |
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