Juliet Funt - A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

To my wonderful mom, whose love has never wavered.

Cheeking you.

I have a problem with video conference calls. They prevent me from taking one of my most important self-corrective professional actionsgently holding my lips closed while the other person is talking. Im not kidding. Im an incurable interrupter and this simple fix has worked for me for years. My interrupting is truly not born of ungraciousness; its just a symptom of how very fast my brain runs.

Over twenty years of keynote speaking, a signature of mine has been a rapid onstage bit called the Fast Day. At breakneck comic speed, I parody the hair-on-fire flow of a very busy persons day. Everyones always surprised I can talk that fast, but for me its just like my inner tempo is finally getting to come out.

Looking back, I see that as a result of moving quick, I also had trouble determining how many activities I could do each day. In my raw state, I always have a desire to squeeze in more than is logical. Once, during a particularly busy time of life when I was taking on way too much, I burned my inner arm on a curling ironbecause, while using it, I reached around it with the other hand to simultaneously put on my mascara. Then, in the same overbooked week, I sprained my ankle and found that the top of my crutches hit right on my little burn, making walking impossible. I was finally forced to cancel everything, retire to the couch, and just stop. To this day, I remember how good it felt to just give up and sit for a while.

I was not, as you can see, built to take a minute to thinkor to pause for even a moment during the dayand thats the irony of my whole professional life. I pursue and revere open windows of time largely because of how elusive I find them myself.

But I need them every day. And so do you.

Never before has the roller coaster of reactive busyness kept us more breathless. Our time is under attack and the global workforce is so fried it belongs in the food court of a county fair. A favorite T-shirt motto perfectly describes our overloaded, multitasking, screen-addicted lives: I do not have ducks or a row. I have squirrels and they are at a rave.

The solution, I have discovered, is something called white spacefreed time in the day to think (and breathe, and ponder, and plan, and create). As you will learn, the term came from looking at the white unencumbered spaces on a paper calendar and realizing that those empty little squaresthe areas of inkless paperwere the key to adding flow, peace, and startling creativity to ones day.

In graphic design white space refers to the blank area on the page. In sales, it means untapped market share. At our company, we define white space as time with no assignment. Its the open, unscheduled timelong or short, planned or improvisedthat is accessed by taking a strategic pause in the activities of life. The absence of white spaceand the need for itis everywhere I look. Lacking it is the reason burnout is always chasing us and why high achievers struggle to reach the apex of their capabilities.

When people discover that white space is possible, you can almost hear an audible sigh of relief. Its a joy to watch them embrace it. Ive been privileged to share its wonders with thousands of people in intimate conversations, workshops, and at the worlds largest leadership events. White space users send the most touching notes from across the United States and from Germany to Australia to even Rwanda, saying here, too, people need mental spacea minute to think. Ten years ago, when clients in corporations began asking us to help scale these concepts, our consulting firm was born and it has gone on to work with brands such as Google, P&G, Vans, Sephora, Nike, and Spotify.

This book is the coming together of many years of teaching and testing, including hours of client surveys, research, and observation. In it youll learn important concepts such as how to measure the hidden cost of your busyness and the four ways to use the strategic pause (the way to access white space). Youll pick up applicable tools such as the Simplification Questions (which will help you strip away waste and refocus anytime); the Hourglass (which will lead you gently and clearly through the decision-making process of when to say no or yes); and the Yellow List (a tool that will drastically reduce email and interruptions).

In , Applying the Principles, youll get good at using the tools to improve your workflow, team communications, meetings, email, company culture, and your life beyond work.

A note about the stories in the book: All the people identified with first and last names are people Ive worked with, interviewed, or have learned from, who chose to be mentioned specifically. Those addressed by first name only have had their identifying details changed for privacy or are composites; however, all elements of the stories are true.

Ive written this book for people I counsel every day. Its for the managers who eat peanut butter at their desk because the idea of leaving for lunch seems like folklore from another time. Its for executives who cancel their vacation four years in a row because they cant see how to jump off a moving train without getting hurt. And its for the dads and moms pushing a swing with one hand and emailing with the other because its all so important.

Apply yourself to white space and work will begin to feel easierless like dancing with a weed whacker and more like placing tiles in a mosaic. I strongly encourage you to explore this content in pairs and in teams where you canto join together as white space ambassadors who will become the rising tide that lifts all busy boats.

Its time to make this change. Right now, we must begin to reclaim creativity, conquer busyness, and do our best workbanishing the values of the Age of Overload before they deplete us further. We are Wile E. Coyote, having just run off the cliff and hanging in midair. We can still choose to scramble back to safetybut not for long.

I still tend to race and overdo. But Ive learned its possible to stop, and I hope you find the same. Begin with addressing your own challenges and then join me as an enlisted warrior in this missionfighting against our nonstop doing and the work norms that crush good peoples spirits. My fervent hope is that the ideas and tools in this book will hit your busy self like a cool washcloth on a fevered brow. If I have done my job, its direction will feel accessible and friendly and will fill you with loud, persuasive hope of a different way of working.

Im so glad to have you here.

I never learned to make a fire when I was a kid. Its 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 Rays 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