Juliet Funt > Quotes

“Unspoken appreciations are the saddest kind of verbal abdication. There is only one good thing about them—how easily they disappear. Dislodge one unspoken appreciation from your heart and it will inspire you to share ten more the next day. You can begin them with words like these: I may have never said this, but . . . I was so impressed when . . . I have always admired you because . . . I realize a fault of mine has been . . . I like you. Not just like you but “like you” like you, so . . . I would love to know more about . . . One of my favorite memories is . . . I’ve been meaning to tell you that . . . Thank you so much for the time . . . What’s wonderful about you is . . .”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“When my father interviewed kids for Candid Camera, his favorite part of his work, he had a challenge. How could he quickly break through the intimidation felt by a little child toward a big unknown adult? He did so by lighting a match and feigning difficulty in blowing it out. Balanced on the edge of a preschool-size chair, he would huff and puff with theatrical overacting, turning finally to the youngster and saying, “Can you help me?” And they would. Moments later, my dad and his new friend would be chatting about guardian angels, the wonders of spaghetti, money, and a host of other delightful topics. The gap my father was closing is called the “power distance,” a concept developed by Professor Geert Hofstede. This phenomenon can cause people to avoid or defer to those they feel are more powerful and, in doing so, to shut down channels of honest communication. By asking for help, my father broke the power distance and opened a gateway to closeness with each and every match blower. If you lead at least a few people, this section is for you. And in order to develop the closeness needed to build a white space team, you’ll need to address the same lopsided dynamics as my father. You must ask for help, step out of having all the answers, and truly enlist a wide spectrum of input to move toward the changes you want. Speak to people about their needs, desires, and enthusiasms. And make it more than a gesture, authentically being open to using the ideas that spring from these conversations. The following steps will show you how.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Drive THE CON: We should take on as much as we can handle. THE TRUTH: Being selective about goals brings higher quality of output. Excellence THE CON: Every touch point deserves to be optimized. THE TRUTH: We lose time and energy mired in unnecessary detail. Information THE CON: There is no such thing as having too much knowledge. THE TRUTH: Our human brains can consume only so much information. Activity THE CON: Busy and productive are the same. THE TRUTH: Always being in motion can limit thought and deplete us.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“We mindlessly accept a meeting invite, because we are driven. We overtweak a presentation, because we want to be excellent. We go too deep into dashboards and data, because we want to be informed. We impulsively grab the next to-do on our list, because we feel we should always be active.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Like the value system of more, the thieves operate according to a psychological construct called the “hedonic treadmill,” which states, “Whatever we have, we will adapt to it, and soon we will want more.” The hedonic treadmill, sometimes referred to as hedonic adaptation, is our tendency to reset our level of contentment after each advance. As we achieve more (drive), finesse more (excellence), know more (information), and do more (activity), we get used to each new plateau and quickly feel it’s a little unexciting. Whenever we get where we think we are going, the finish line moves.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“I’ll provide some templates and strategies for what to say, but first, let’s address the choice to say nothing at all. I want you to commit to rejecting “the coward’s no”—ghosting.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Frank had a rule that he would dock the pay of any employee who worked through lunch, because he wanted his staff to be truly present for every afternoon patient—and it worked, and they thanked him. He taught his interns to stop outside the door of every exam room for around thirty seconds before entering to align themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally. Some of his protégés said it was the single most valuable thing they learned over a three-year residency.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“They CC me on everything, but more broadly find our culture an adjustment as a Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE. This means the only thing we care about are results, not when or where an employee works. Not if they work on a weekend, weekday, evening, morning, in a box, with a fox, or in a tweetle beetle battle with a noodle-eating poodle.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“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.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“The trouble is, “Did I do enough?” is always the wrong question.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Try a little experiment. Sit on the couch and tell yourself you deserve to do absolutely nothing for ten minutes. Put your feet up and exhale. Then listen as your home bursts into life like an animated movie. You’ll begin to hear demands from different tasks around your home. The gutters say clean me. The dishes say wash me. The closet says, Marie Kondo me. This rising chorus becomes louder until it yanks you up two-fisted by your collar and you begin to do. And that’s just the voices of the inanimate objects! When flesh-and-blood humans join in the cacophony of requests, you’ll be running in six directions before you realize it. You don’t believe in the basic permission to stop. I wish I had the power to grant this permission to you. If there was an incantation or potion that I could bequeath to you, I’d crawl on my knees to get it. The best I can do is tell you, “I, Juliet Funt, imperfect mother and businesswoman, give you permission to stop.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Phone Narration is the action of describing out loud what you are doing when using any screen-based device. It’s handy for keeping the human-to-human link when the digital ice-cream truck drives by.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“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.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“FIX THE ROAD, NOT THE CAR.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Resist the urge to teach them a lesson. As in, “We feel it’s unreasonable to make this request at the end of a Friday.” It’s tempting to try to show them the unfairness in their approach, but it’s not helpful to your cause.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Take a moment to remember the last time someone ghosted you in the middle of an exchange. Reexperience how dismissive and unkind it felt and use that sense memory to commit to playing a braver game. Decide that saying nothing is not an option.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Your hairstyle is your choice. Your hobbies are your choice. Your words are your choice. Urgency is your choice. Your boss and team can write a story that blankets everything with a light dusting of mania, but you don’t have to buy in. In fact, by opting out of this particular form of social conformity you serve yourself and your company better.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“The handy guideline is this: If it feels like white space (like you’re leash-free and running through the park), you’re probably doing it right. The visceral experience should be of mental liberty in some form, so if you’re out for a run without headphones, I’d call that white space. If you’re on a treadmill in front of Breaking Bad, with your mind tethered to the show—not so much.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“He writes, “In terms of using mental energy creatively, perhaps the most fundamental difference between people consists in how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Perhaps we should borrow the Italian concept of “dolce far niente,” literally translated as “the sweetness of doing nothing.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Ware writes that her patients were flooded with deeply perceptive insights in those final days, and underlines the fact that the second regret listed was actually the number one regret for every single male patient: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, spent an hour a day in what he called “looking out the window time.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Professional achievement is not a substitute for happiness, personal connection, and meaning. Many people eventually experience intense regret for having worked too hard. This regret can be avoided by having more white space with your loved ones and passions. The Thieves of Time—Drive, Excellence, Information, and Activity—show up at home in our compulsive and competitive doing, comparing, and overachieving. In order to have a life at home with depth, you must dethrone your devices so you can be present for the people who matter most. If you’re a parent, it’s never too late to slow down, pay attention, and share white space with your children. Don’t miss the ride. ASK YOURSELF What do I need to seize right now before I miss it?”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“To enter open mode, Cleese says we must create “boundaries in space and boundaries in time,” taking ourselves away from people and obligations for a specific period. His advice is to simply noodle until you get a payoff. “If you keep resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your subconscious. Maybe in the shower later or maybe at breakfast, but a new thought will suddenly appear—if you’ve put in the pondering time first.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“One team made a collective goal of each person having one night off per week. The “Predictable Time Off” (PTO) experiment featured a team commitment to rotate evenings where one person was totally disconnected from work and wireless devices.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“In it you’ll 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).”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“The Thieves of Time ASSET RISK DRIVE OVERDRIVE EXCELLENCE PERFECTIONISM INFORMATION OVERLOAD ACTIVITY FRENZY They appear in our lives like this: We mindlessly accept a meeting invite, because we are driven. We overtweak a presentation, because we want to be excellent. We go too deep into dashboards and data, because we want to be informed. We impulsively grab the next to-do on our list, because we feel we should always be active.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Whatever “it” is for you—family, service, travel, hobbies—white space interlaced in your day will allow you to rush out there. Take a brief strategic pause, jump to your feet, and let the chair fall.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“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.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work

“Three main factors have placed us on the moving walkway to overwork: insatiability, conformity, and waste.”
― Juliet Funt, A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work