A minute to think : reclaim creativity, conquer busyness, and do your best work /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue Racing to Nowhere (p. 1)
• Part I The Culture of Insatiability
• 1 The Missing Element: Our Hidden Yearning for Space (p. 7)
• 2 The False God of Busyness: Why Work is so Much Work (p. 31)
• Part II The White Space Way
• 3 The Strategic Pause: Making Space a Daily Reality (p. 53)
• 4 The Thieves of Time: Identifying the Forces Against Us (p. 81)
• 5 The Simplification Questions: Reclaiming the Best by Removing the Rest (p. 101)
• 6 Hallucinated Urgency: Unhooking from the Culture of Now (p. 121)
• Part III Applying the Principles
• 7 The Tool that Turned on Us: Defeating the Email Beast (p. 147)
• 8 How the Best Teams Talk: Elevating Our Communication (p. 169)
• 9 Meetings Done Better Experiencing the Gains of Getting Together (p. 193)
• 10 The White Space Team: Creating New Norms Together (p. 215)
• 11 Life Beyond Work: Don't Miss the Ride (p. 239)
• Epilogue Under the Limestone Mountain (p. 261)
• Acknowledgments (p. 265)
• Notes (p. 269)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Consulting firm CEO Funt offers solutions for burnout in her encouraging debut. A prevalent "culture of insatiability," she suggests, creates hectic days and leads to stress and underproductivity, for which the cure is a "strategic pause": putting space on one's calendar for thinking, rest, and creativity. These pauses offer an opportunity for professional enrichment and can improve productivity by reducing busywork, identifying what's most urgent, and making use of team members' strengths, she writes. Funt suggests "training wheel" exercises to get readers to incorporate pauses into their own lives; using one's commute time to let one's mind wander, for example, is a good place to start. As for the office, Funt advises "clarity, brevity, and punch" when writing emails, choosing the correct medium for communications with colleagues, and changing a company's culture to incorporate patience and openness. Examples from Funt's work with corporate leaders and personal anecdotes pepper the pages and keep things fresh: "To this day, I remember how good it felt to just give up and sit for a while." Burned-out readers will find this a much-needed, easy to implement call for calm. Agent: David Doerrer, Abrams Artists Agency. (Aug.)

Booklist Review

Burned out, tired, and overworked are all-too-familiar terms bandied about today, both at work and home. Funt offers advice for combating the pull of being sucked into a life of constant busyness. Based on many years of teaching, testing, and observation, she calls her solution "white space--freed time in the day to think (and breathe, and ponder, and plan, and create)." Funt offers a three-part guide to finding white space and practical tips on how to do it. First, she introduces tools like Simplification Questions and the Hourglass, which is a decision-making guide. Part two includes mental exercises such as The Wedge, forcing readers to actively practice separating two tasks that would otherwise have followed one another, buying time to think. Part three focuses on the workplace and communication, for example, learning when to speak what "language" (finance, people, and ideas). Coming out of the pandemic where many are struggling and juggling life in new ways and want to reclaim their time and mind, this book can offer practical steps for doing just that.