18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (2 page)

I
was moving as fast as I could and not getting anywhere, a feeling I’m well acquainted with. This time, though, it was deliberate: I was on a stationary bicycle.

When the towel draped over my handlebars fell to the ground, I tried to stop pedaling and get off.
Tried
being the operative word. I couldn’t stop. There was simply too much forward momentum. The pedals seemed to be moving by a force of their own. It took me several moments of slowly backing off my speed before I could coax the pedals to stand still.

Momentum is hard to resist.

For example, fifteen minutes into a political argument with a friend, I realized I wasn’t sure I agreed with my own position. But he was arguing so harshly that I found myself taking the opposite side, vehemently supporting ideas I didn’t know enough about. And it was hard to stop.

It’s especially hard to stop when you’re invested in being
right, when you’ve spent time, energy, emotion, and sometimes money on your point of view.

I have several friends who got married and divorced within a year or two. Every one of them told me they knew, at the time they were getting married, that it wouldn’t work. But they had gone too far and they didn’t know how to stop it. It’s the same story with people I know who made some investments that seemed to be going south. They knew things weren’t working, but they had already invested so much that it was hard to face the mistake. In some cases, they put
more
money in and lost it all.

Sometimes it’s not so dramatic. It might be an argument about which resources to put into which project. Or a decision about whether or not to continue to pursue a particular opportunity.

When you have the sense you’ve made a mistake but you’ve already pushed so hard it would be embarrassing to back out, how do you backpedal?

I have two strategies that help me pull back my own momentum: Slow Down and Start Over.

I’ve seen people’s inability to admit they’re wrong destroy their marriages and decimate their businesses and
professional lives. In many cases, they tell me it’s because they didn’t want to appear weak. But it takes great strength of character to admit you’re wrong or even to question your own views. And others perceive this as strength, too.

Great leaders have enough confidence to look critically at their own perspective and stay open to other people’s points of view, using the technique of Slowing Down. Even when they know they’re right.

Dr. Allan Rosenfield, past dean of Columbia’s School of Public Health, was one such leader. He died in 2008 after spending more than four decades helping to shape the public health agenda, making a particularly huge impact on the lives of women and the lives of people with HIV. Columbia named its School of Public Health building in his honor.

I remember watching Allan in a conversation about whether children should be vaccinated, a public health issue about which he felt strongly and was clearly an expert. One of his friends, Lee, was arguing against vaccinations. Allan offered statistics on the millions of hospitalizations and deaths that have been averted in the past forty years because of vaccines for polio, mumps, measles, and so forth.

Lee then cited some research from an unnamed source on the Internet claiming that vaccines were doing more harm than good. Allan, one of the greatest public health experts of all time, would have been justified if he’d laughed. If he’d told Lee to get his information from more reliable, credible sources. If he’d repeated his arguments
about the good that vaccines had done. But Allan didn’t do any of that.

He simply looked at Lee, slowed down, and replied: “I haven’t read that research. Send it to me. I’ll look at it and let you know what I think.”

I
am alligator man, a dangerous amphibious monster. I swim quietly toward my prey, a seven-year-old girl named Isabelle, who also happens to be my daughter. Sensing the danger, she nervously scans the surface of the pool. Suddenly she spots me. Our eyes lock for a brief moment. She smiles, screams, and lunges in the opposite direction, laughing. But I’m too fast. I push off the bottom of the pool and pounce. When I land within a few inches of her, she turns to face me, gasping, hand held up in the air.

“PAUSE!” she yells.

“What’s the matter?”

“I swallowed water,” she sputters.

So, of course, we pause.

Which gives me a few seconds to think:
Why don’t we do that in real life?

We’ve all hit the
SEND
button on an email and
immediately regretted it. So many of us do it regularly, in fact, that Google has added a feature to Gmail called
UNDO SEND
, which you can enable through Gmail settings. Once you hit
SEND
, Gmail holds the email for five seconds, during which time you can stop it from going out.

What’s interesting is that, apparently, a five-second pause is all most people need to realize they’ve made a mistake.

With an email, hitting
UNDO SEND
can save a tremendous amount of time, energy, and backpedaling. But in real time—in person or on the phone—there’s no such button. Sometimes, like a judge who tells the jury to ignore what a witness just said, we try to undo send. But once the words come out, there’s no turning back. As my mother is fond of saying, “I forgive… but I don’t forget.”

The key, in real time, is to avoid the unproductive
SEND
in the first place.

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.

“Pause,” Isabelle yelled when she swallowed the water.
Stop the action for a few seconds and let me catch my breath.

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

One morning, due to a miscommunication about timing, I missed a meeting with Luigi, one of my clients. Later that day I was in the hallway in his office building when
suddenly I heard him yell, “Hey Bregman, where were you?”

Immediately my heart rate shot up. Adrenaline flowed. And emotions flooded in. Embarrassment. Anger. Defensiveness. Who does Luigi think he is yelling across the hall at me like that in front of other people?

I spoke to Dr. Joshua Gordon, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at Columbia University, about my reaction. “There are direct pathways from sensory stimuli into the amygdala,” he told me.

Come again?

“The amygdala is the emotional response center of the brain,” he explained. “When something unsettling happens in the outside world, it immediately evokes an emotion.”

That’s fine. But pure, raw, unadulterated emotion is not the source of your best decisions. So how do you get beyond the emotion to rational thought?

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. And that quiet internal battle is your prefrontal cortex trying to subdue your amygdala.

Think of the amygdala as the little red person in your head with the pitchfork saying, “I vote we clobber the guy!” and think of the prefrontal cortex as the little person dressed in white telling you, “Um, maybe it’s not such a great idea to yell back. I mean, he is our client after all.”

“The key is cognitive control of the amygdala by the
prefrontal cortex,” Dr. Gordon told me. So I asked him how we could help our prefrontal cortex win the war. He paused for a minute and then answered, “If you take a breath and delay your action, you give the prefrontal cortex time to control the emotional response.”

Why a breath? “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.”

There we have it. Google’s five seconds is a good rule of thumb. When Luigi yelled at me in the hall, I took a deep breath and gave my prefrontal cortex a little time to win. I knew there was a misunderstanding and I also knew my relationship with Luigi was important. So instead of yelling back, I walked over to him. It only took a few seconds. But that gave us both enough time to become reasonable.

Pause. Breathe. Then act. It turns out that Isabelle’s reaction might be a good strategy for all of us.

“Ready?” I ask Isabelle once she seems to have recovered.

“Set, go!” she yells as she dives back into the water, clearly refreshed and focused on the stairs she’s trying to reach.

I give her a five-second head start and then dive under the water after her.

A few seconds. That’s all we need. To intentionally
choose the direction we want to move. To keep ourselves on track once we’ve started to move. And to periodically notice whether—after some time has passed—we’re still moving in that right direction.

O
n a Friday afternoon almost twenty years ago, soon after I had started a job at a New York consulting firm, I was working on an important presentation with Dr. Andy Geller, who ran the office. We had promised to deliver it Monday morning, and we were running behind.

At two o’clock, Andy told me he had to leave.

“But we’re not done,” I stammered. Andy was not one to let work go unfinished, and neither was I.

“I know,” he said, looking at his watch, “but it’s Shabbat in a few hours and I need to get home. I’ll come back Saturday night. If you can make it, too, we’ll continue to work together then. Otherwise, do what you can the rest of today and tomorrow night I’ll pick up where you left off.” I decided to leave with him, and we met again at eight o’clock Saturday night. Refreshed and energetic, we finished our work together in record time.

A little backstory: Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath; it starts
at sundown on Friday and ends when it’s dark Saturday night. The exact start time depends on sundown—it’s earlier in the winter, later in the summer. For observant Jews, it’s a rest day. No work, no travel, no computers or phones or TV. The way I heard it once, the idea is that for six days we exert our energy to change the world. On the seventh day the objective is simply to notice and enjoy the world exactly as it is without changing a thing.

Observant Jews spend Shabbat praying, eating, walking, and spending time with family and friends.

They’re on to something.

This life is a marathon, not a sprint. In fact, each day is a marathon. Most of us don’t go to work for twenty minutes a day, run as fast as we can, and then rest until the next race. We go to work early in the morning, run as fast as we can for eight, ten, twelve hours, then come home and run hard again with personal obligations and sometimes more work, before getting some sleep and doing it all over again.

That’s why I’m such a fanatic about doing work you love. But even if you love it, that kind of schedule is deeply draining. Not an athlete in the world could sustain that schedule without rest. Most athletes have entire off seasons.

So if we’re running a daily marathon, it might help to learn something from people who train for marathons.

Like my friend Amanda Kravat, who told me she was training to run the New York City Marathon. She’d never
run anything before. I asked her how she planned to tackle this herculean feat with no experience.

“I’m simply going to follow the official marathon training plan,” she said. I asked her to email it to me. Here’s what I learned: If you want to run a marathon successfully without getting injured, spend four days a week doing short runs, one day a week running long and hard, and two days a week not running at all.

Now, that seems like a pretty smart schedule to me if you want to do
anything
challenging and sustain it over a long period of time. A few moderate days, one hard day, and a day or two of complete rest.