Volume: 9, Issue: 1
INTRODUCTION
Goal setting, time management and task management have become the most sought after soft skills amongst executives/entrepreneurs of all cadres irrespective of their functional domain. The pressures on executives/entrepreneurs to achieve maximum in shortest span of time has become order of the day. There are so many books available on the above topic which tell about the importance of goal setting, time management, and task management and how one can manage these in an abstract manner like; classifying activities to be done or tasks to be accomplished into four categories, i.e. Important and Urgent, Important but not Urgent, Urgent but not Important, and Neither Urgent nor Important and then allocating time and delegating work accordingly and so on. But Peter Bregman in this book has in fact explained what one has to do or can do to ensure the honing of above mentioned soft skills to achieve maximum in the shortest span of time. As the title says very clearly, one has to dedicate eighteen minutes out of four hundred eighty minutes of a working day as per the following; Five minutes before the start of the day: for setting specific targets for the day and planning. One minute every hour as the day passes: for monitoring the progress made in that hour with respect to the targets set for the day. Five minutes at the end of the day: for total retrospection with regard to goals set for the day and accomplishment of the same. This investment of eighteen minutes, every day, will result in enhanced focus and getting the right things done. The four parts of the book give reader a complete tool kit as to how to manage the time effectively and efficiently. The first part is all about slowing down, stopping or pausing for a while and doing some serious introspection with regard to; what are the priorities of one's life, what is that one wants to achieve in his life, and so on. Such pauses will in fact refuel one's body an,dmind and help in creating time and space to aim one's efforts more accurately.
