A Minute to Think

Book summary

Featured in leading media outlets such as Forbes, CNBC and Fast Company, Juliet Funt is a globally recognized keynote speaker, Fortune 500 tough love advisor, founder and CEO of productivity training firm Juliet Funt Group.

Those around you may view their busyness as a merit, but this doesn't mean that you should. Real achievement doesn't appear from stuffing your program with meetings and tasks; it stems from being creative, focused, and committing time to essential activities. So what are the essential activities? Think about it for a minute. You'll likely discover you instinctively have an answer. Define what urgency means to you. In the present working environment, it may seem like everything is urgent. This is what the author calls hallucinated urgency. If you handle every task, demand, or mail as if it were urgent, you might get into the practice of doing things without consideration. So when you are tempted to reply the minute you receive an email, just stop for a second. Take the time to think; do I need to do this immediately, or should I give myself a moment to breathe?

"Vacation time is critical to focus and creative contribution. We should not let false urgency steal it from us."

"Whenever we get where we think we are going, the finish line moves."

"Call it gap, buffer, slack, or margin, allowing white space between our endless doing makes everything better."

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