Book Review 3: 18 Minutes by Peter Bregman

I am not a book expert nor even a consistent book reader, but I intend to start reading more books from now on. I would like to start giving my two-cents on the books I have read to share my views and opinion on them with others just like me, the infrequent reader, to overview the perspective I gained after reading a book. I am hoping to receive critical feedbacks on the points I may have been missing out or even wronged about. Recommendations on books that you all think might be helpful and useful to me would be certainly appreciated.

I tend to get very committed to whatever I am involved in. During my studies and now at work, I always force myself to keep my concentration and focus. However I always feel I don’t utilise my efforts and time on the right things and properly. But the problem is not just there. It is also before I start on my projects or whatever it is I needed to do. I tend to delay, procrastinate and didn’t seem to have the urgency to get started. I also tend to get distracted by others and even by the situation I created myself and prolongs my work to the extent, I feel like I want to give up on it.

I have to admit, I don’t really have the correct system, well, even a system on how to manage my focus, time management and even work plan. I needed to learn how to properly balance out what are the most important things that I need to work from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed. I wanted to be able to say “I had a productive day today and I got everything I had planned for today, settled!” And I wanted to be able to say that every day. Sounds ambitious? But I need to give it a try.

So I got this book – 18 Minutes by Peter Bregman. I really appreciate the author’s approach of proving the effectiveness of his suggestions and advices to lead a more organised and successful life by sharing his own experience in the corporate world – plus a few from his peers as well. The content was also filled with research statistics and facts that helped to convince how the approaches are in fact, logical and agreed from the academic world. These approaches are simple and do not require a lot of our time to invest in but requires consistency in managing our working life.

However, as much as I enjoyed reading this book and it did lifted me with hopes that these tips could easily boost my confidence and make me more organised, while I was finishing of the last quarter of the book, I realised that not all of us – including myself, would have the privilege to follow these tips. These recommendations, in my opinion, are actually limited to those upper management level employees that have the rule to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to certain requests and any other decision making processes. For lower level employees and especially fresh employees that follow orders from their bosses, they certainly do not have the choice to do all of the recommendations.

 All in all, I did learn a lot of things from this book. Though I found quite a chunk of the book are recommendations that I might find unsuited for a junior management employee like myself, I do believe that managing our daily work with a clear, goal-oriented and organised way will help to increase our productivity and efficiency. The book helped me to learn the importance of focus on one thing. Just one thing at a time. Know what you want to achieve, set a realistic goal, PLAN how to get where you want and work for it.

Maybe one day, with hard work and discipline, I can get to be in a higher management level, that I can utilise everything that is pointed out by the author. But for now, I just need to FOCUS ON ONE THING AT A TIME.

Book pages: 251

Price: RM 12
Store the book was bought: The Mines - during the Big Bad Wolf Sale