A Minute to Think

Juliet Funt

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062970268
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

"You're going to want to share copies of this book with your overbooked friends and colleagues, but before you do, take some time to read it yourself. Funt's wisdom around making space is priceless." —Seth Godin, author of The Practice

Do you wish you could stop the mayhem of work and life and just take a minute? Do you sense you could contribute more if there were a little more room in the day? Does busyness deprive you and your burnt-out team of the oxygen your talents need to catch fire?

Many have felt that way, yet taking a pause has seemed impossible—until now.

In A Minute to Think, Juliet Funt, a globally recognized warrior in the battle against busyness, provides a powerful guide that will give you the permission, framework, and specific direction you need to do the following:

• Regain control of your overloaded, caffeinated, inbox-worshiping workday
• Liberate yourself and your teams from burnout and busywork
• Reclaim creativity and focus despite the chaos around you
• Bring thoughtfulness into designing your next work norms
• Tame the beast of email and escape the mire of meetings
• Find your precious minute to think

You're not alone in your yearning for freedom from constant reactivity. The global workforce today is so fried that it belongs in the food court of a county fair. We're relentlessly behind the curve, dousing fires everywhere, and our 3 a.m. insomnia provides the only unscheduled thinking time of the day.

What we need reinserted in our lives is the missing element of white space—short periods of open, unscheduled time that, when recaptured, change the very nature of work. White space is the stepping back, the strategic pause, the oxygen that allows the sparks of our efforts to catch fire. White space has the power to radically—and simply—reinvent the way we approach work in this maxed-out, post-COVID 21st-century world.

With Juliet's memorable stories, easy-to-use tools, and razor-sharp instruction, she carves for us an escape route from the overwhelming amount of low-value tasks and the daily avalanche of e-mails, meetings, decks, and reports. Using research, client stories, and a relatable voice, Juliet shows all of us how to reclaim time for thinking and make room for what truly matters. Whether you are an individual trying to build a more sane and humane flow of daily work, a team that wants new levels of efficiency and effectiveness, or an entire organization changing your culture toward thoughtfulness, this book will lead you there.

Part I

The Culture of Insatiability

1

The Missing Element

Our Hidden Yearning for Space

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SOMETHING IS MISSING IN THE FABRIC OF OUR WORK AND LIVES. IT’S POSSIBLE TO GET IT BACK.

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I never learned to make a fire when I was a kid. It’s not one of the core skills of growing up in Manhattan. Did I learn the art of trick-or-treating floor to floor by elevator? You bet. Could I masterfully fold-and-tilt a slice of Ray’s pizza so all the grease slid onto my napkin before I ate it? By the age of three. And of course, I learned to nimbly sled down a five-foot Central Park slope between a garbage can and a mound of black snow. However, as an apartment-dwelling kid, unless something goes terribly, terribly wrong you never learn to build a fire.

As I grew up, fire-making skills continued to elude me. I gave it a try on beaches with bonfires or camping with an outdoorsy boyfriend, but I never mastered how to get the flames started. Many years and three kids later, my husband, our boys, and I went to a little cabin near Big Bear Lake, not far from our home in Los Angeles. The journey there was a typical boys-in-back road trip alternating between two games, “Which Would You Rather?” (lick a street after a parade or eat a toothpick?) and the ever-popular escalating competition of “Does This Hurt?”

The cabin was worth the drive. Tucked into a beautiful woodsy area with giant windows, it had a wide, stately stone fireplace calling for something to be ignited. The boys were so excited at the prospect they were bouncing. Unfortunately, we had no wood or expertise and my husband had run into town, so I did what city folks tend to do in any area of knowledge lack: I found a coach.

On the round, doily-topped table at the Three Bears Lodge was a little sign: TEXT FOR FIREWOOD! DROP-OFFS IN TEN MINUTES. (It was right next to an unforgettably titled newsletter from the local chiropractor called The Spinal Column.) I whipped out my phone, sent the text, and with a comic speed that made us feel like he’d been waiting around the corner, Charlie arrived. He had the fashion leanings of a lumberjack and the chill-i-tude of a surfer. He told me and my chanting, bobbing, amped-up, pyro offspring that when starting a fire, layers are best: a little paper first, some dry pine needles over the grate, then a few chunks of fire starter, followed by two types of wood—softwood to catch quick, and hardwood to burn long. But he forgot to mention one critical ingredient: space.

We carefully constructed a dense pile of every fuel source known to man and then hurled matches at it unsuccessfully for twenty minutes before my husband returned. After a glance at our compact pile of charred wood, he lovingly extracted the mangled matchbook from my hands and began to redesign our stack. He fluffed the pine needles, staggered the fire starter, and “tee-pee’ed” the wood to create the perfect passages for oxygen to feed the fire. And then, with exactly one match, it was roaring. The boys roasted a whole bag of marshmallows, and I learned something valuable.

It’s the space between the combustibles that fire can’t live without.

The space is what makes flames ignite and stay burning. However, we forget this law of nature in every area of our lives beyond the hearth—especially at work. Our schedules are packed like the last moment of a winning game of Tetris, and our brimming minds overflow into dozens of insufficient note-taking apps. There’s no oxygen to feed the fire. We strike through matchbook after matchbook, desperately trying to ignite our brilliance to the fullest, but the resource we really need to elevate our work is a little breathing room.

Without space we can’t sustain ourselves. The full fortitude of our professional contributions eludes us. We miss game-changing, breakthrough ideas that fail to grace us with their presence because busyness is barring the door. We miss human moments of serendipity and connection that should occur in the in-between moments of life—because in-between moments no longer exist.

To fully comprehend the gravity of this loss, imagine what would happen if the periodic table of elements were to drop a tile or two. Imagine if nitrogen or sodium simply vanished, leaving plants pale and weakened and every single french fry incomplete forever. That single loss would ripple through the entire world. This has actually happened. Through our constant push to do more, we’ve buried the free, flexible time that used to be the buffer throughout our days. The element of open time has vanished.

The Age of Overload

As a result of this deficit, we sprint along daily in a trance of false productivity, maniacally checking off boxes while uncertain of each task’s relevance. Every interstitial second finds its own assignment. In fact, most are double-booked. The tyranny of the urgent subjects us to a thousand forms of daily pressure and stress. But finding time to solve this problem of overwhelm seems impossible. Tragically, we are too busy to become less busy, and our 3:00 a.m. insomnia provides the only unscheduled thinking time of the day.

Let’s look at this oxygen deficit in the flow of a typical professional workday. (Cue “Flight of the Bumblebee.”) From the starter pistol of our cell phone alarm, we jerk out of bed, checking email and social media feeds while stumbling over a terrier or a toddler. A seated breakfast is only a fantasy as harsh reality shoves an energy bar in one hand and keys in the other and we’re out the door. We search for a podcast while driving with our knees while using our passenger-seat-desk at stoplights to check PowerPoint slides for our first meeting. As we catapult ourselves into the office, we join the human stream of pressure, panic, and paperwork already in motion. Or we work from home and have a shorter commute, from the kitchen to the den, but somehow experience the same daily insanity as the rest of the tribe.

For eight or nine or ten (or twelve!) hours, we’re bombarded with an avalanche of emails, meetings, messages, reports, and interruptions. Any pause brings a flood of uncertainty, self-consciousness, and anxiety. When we have gaps in our calendars—God forbid—we cram and jam those slots with more action items driven by the core belief that unscheduled time is wasted time. We proceed till the breathless walk to the parking lot (or back up to our living space) when we ask ourselves, “What did I get done today?”

Often, we don’t have a clue. We wake up every morning and bring our best spark but there’s no space to feed the fire. Somewhere deep in our subconscious we think to ourselves: “If only I could plan before I act.” “If only I could think before I speak.” “If only I could rest before I have to turn back on.” But we can’t because modern work has a megaphone to our ears, pushing us forward. If met with the slightest naturally occurring gap, like an elevator ride or a computer powering up, we multitask with our phones to fill the open moment. Wonder why there’s a television installed in your gas pump? Because if you had to pump all twelve gallons without it, they think you’d die of boredom.

And then there is the guilt—the strange, pernicious guilt that clients from every industry, role, and professional level share with me. We feel guilty we haven’t solved our own busyness, guilty for the incorrect assumption that we’re the only ones chronically behind, guilty for our romance with gadgets and our inability to stop the tsunami. We ruminate about neglecting family members, worry about sabotaging our health, and fear a long, empty future of running hot and accomplishing little.

Mindy, whom I have dubbed the Peanut Butter Manager, was a victim of this paradigm.

Peanut butter is not on the typical office supply list. But for Mindy, a handy jar of chunky is just as critical as a headset—because Mindy does not eat lunch. This bright-eyed woman loves the work she does as a top salesperson supplying IV nutrients to medical patients too ill to eat. After surpassing her targets, she was rewarded with a promotion at work, which, she explained to me, became a demotion in her life.

Her schedule, which was previously rock-and-roll busy, now became crushing. Every second at work counted and there were none to spare. Since lunch seemed, in her words, “so foolishly wasteful,” she began to work with an ever-present jar of peanut butter on her desk to keep her blood sugar up. (It’s ironic for a professional whose entire focus is helping sustain her end users with the vital nutrients they need.)

Then, the lack of space began to take an incontrovertible toll on her and her team. Errors in her group’s processes began to surface in client-facing situations. Her health deteriorated, leading to constant headaches and insomnia. This dedicated team was wrung out and spending all day, every day just getting back to even.

And then there’s Pete. Pete knows a lot about the interactions of flames and oxygen from his thirty-year history of fire and rescue service and his training as an EMT. He also knows a lot about managing pressure since he used to conduct “stress inoculation” drills for first responders, putting them through progressively more taxing scenarios to prepare for life-and-death assignments. Using these techniques personally, he felt he’d gotten to where he was able to “drive through complex issues that would completely debilitate someone else.”

But when a huge company bought his smaller one, for which he was a regional manager, the strain was too much for even this powerfully protected man. He began to get up to two hundred emails per day and was saddled with an unforgiving boss who sent those emails at 11:00 p.m. on Sunday night, expecting immediate answers. His work life and home life became blended, he said, “like a shuffled deck of cards.” Pete ended up in the ER with trouble breathing from stress. And he broke my heart with his response to the last question I always ask folks, “Is there anything else you would like to add?” Pete thought for a moment, and said, “The only thing I’m trying to figure out is, when is it going to stop?”

I’ve met a thousand Mindys and Petes. Their busyness is back-drafting the air out of every room they occupy. Most would not even say they have a problem. It’s just the way they think work has to be and they’ve resigned themselves willingly to it. And that, my friends, is the biggest problem. It’s our consenting that’s killing us.

Busyness Is Everywhere

Motrone, Italy, has thirty inhabitants—thirty-five on the week we visited. You arrive there through the medieval town of Lucca, winding up a steep five-mile road cut into the side of a wooded mountain. It’s a two-way road that is the width of one car. When you meet another driver, one of you needs to ever-so-gingerly inch over into the foliage, to let the other pass. The ice truck comes twice a day and you’d better pray not to meet it.

Our B&B hosts, Geoff and Jenny, invited us to dinner the first night and shared their stories. When Geoff turned eleven, he left his English mum to go live with his dad in New Zealand, on a seven-week trip by ship. Standing on the deck and so alone, he felt the hot tears start and one of the passengers firmly said to him, “Boy, don’t cry. Eat this apple.” And he did—and grew up in that singular moment.

He learned to trap possums at two shillings per and was soon the only boy his age who could afford to buy a girl a milkshake at the corner store. And though he tried working in many industries he found his true calling when he fell in love with Italy on a visit, and became a farmer in Motrone, where he and Jenny raise sheep, geese, and bees.

In this microscopic village without a single store or restaurant, this couple is blisteringly, screamingly busy from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. In fact, when he drove me down the perilous hill to buy some prosciutto and cheese, he kept checking his phone (yes, while driving on that road) and muttering, “It’s a busy day. It’s a busy day. Whew! What a busy day!”

Busyness is everywhere.

Busyness is overseas and in our backyard. It’s felt by the young and old, working and not. In Houston after a speaking engagement, a radiant older woman approached me. Her perfume cloud was like being passed over by a Chanel crop duster, but her manner was instantly appealing. She said my message was a gift as she’d been trying to slow down for years. I asked what kind of work kept her so busy, and with a huge grin and a little ironic laugh, she said, “Oh, I’m retired!”

Juliet B. Schor, an economist who eloquently writes about our life and work in the shadow of consumerism and time pressure, calls the way we choose to operate “performative busyness.” There’s no “they” doing it to us anymore. From corporate executive to sheep farmer to retiree, our driving pace and pressure have become fully internalized. We carry it with us wherever we go. But as indoctrinated as most are to the white-water rush of busyness, a small yearning lurks within: A little whisper we can hardly hear says we just need a minute to think—a minute to breathe. And sometimes we get a hint of it by accident.

The Posture of Thoughtfulness

Think about those times when you do a little catch-up work on a Sunday, focusing on the difficult tasks there was no way to do during the harried week of clients’ problems and reactivity. The kids are out with friends. Your inbox sits frozen in time and it’s quiet, like a church. Without colleagues around or any distractions you take a little pause to collect your thoughts—because you can. And then you beg...