Putting A Halt To Procrastination

October 10, 2011

Interview with Peter Bregman, author of the book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done

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Mike Carruthers:
Personal success is typically no accident it has to be deliberate.

Peter Bregman:
We live in a world that will take what it can from us unless we are strategic about what we want to give it, it will be haphazard.
 

Peter Bregman, author of the book 18 Minutes, says if you ever find yourself not accomplishing your goals or being successful there’s typically a simple explanation.

Because of pensions for procrastination is insatiable and we will constantly try to distract ourselves from doing our most important work. Partially because our most important work is the hardest work to do and partially because our most important work because it’s important to us means a lot. And so if we fail at it, it begins to put into question everything we’re about and so we’d rather not begin at all.

So Peter’s 18 minute system helps prevent that from happening.

So it’s 5 minutes in the morning, 1 minute each hour and 5 minutes in the evening. The first 5 minutes I look at what it is I need to do today, what are my most important priorities and I transfer those things from my to do list onto my calendar. Every hour I have a watch that beeps and I ask myself 2 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?” And at the end of the day I spend 5 minutes thinking about what I learned, what I would do differently tomorrow and that sort of wraps my day. 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here