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

Each day, I pour my to-do list into my calendar and watch as my calendar is filled with the right priorities.

That ritual should take a total of 18 minutes a day:

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 if the last hour has been productive.

have become our work, our professions. Connected 24/7 via BlackBerry, obsessively checking email and voice mails, we have left no space for other parts of ourselves.

So one of the upsides to rest days is that they give you time to think. But there’s also a downside, and it’s serious enough that I believe it’s the unconscious reason many of us resist taking them: They give you time to think.

This life is a marathon, not a sprint.

“Slowing down your breath has a direct calming effect on your brain.”
“How long do we have to stall?” I asked. “How much time does our prefrontal cortex need to overcome our amygdala?”
“Not long. A second or two.”

It turns out while there’s a war going on between you and someone else, there’s another war going on in your brain between you and yourself.

There’s no rule that says we need to respond to something right away. So pause. Take a few breaths.

Those five seconds Google gives us to undo our mistake? Maybe we can use them before we hit SEND. Perhaps that’s all we need to avoid making the mistake. Five little seconds.