Friday evening, you close your laptop. This week you ticked off twenty-three items on your list, cleared your inbox twice, sat through six calls and answered everyone on Slack within five minutes. You feel like you've run a marathon. Then you remember the project that actually matters: the proposal for your promotion, the website that's supposed to launch your freelance business, the course you meant to finish over the summer. Right where it was on Monday. You've been incredibly busy. But if you're wondering how to be more productive, the answer isn't doing more. It's doing less, and doing the right thing.
The question that brings everything into focus
Gary Keller built one of the largest real estate companies in the United States, Keller Williams Realty. In his book The ONE Thing, written with Jay Papasan, he explains how he got there.
At one point he started coaching his top people one on one. At the end of each session he'd recap the handful of things they'd agreed to get done before the next one. Many of them got most of the list done, but not the things that mattered most. So he started shortening the list: if you can do just three things this week… just two… Finally, almost out of desperation, he got down to a single question:
What's the ONE Thing I can do this week such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
From then on, Keller says, results went through the roof. Looking back on his own career, he spotted a pattern: wherever he'd had huge success, he'd narrowed his focus to one thing; wherever his focus wandered, so did his results.
The domino effect
To explain why it works, Keller uses an image. In 1983 the physicist Lorne Whitehead showed that a falling domino can knock over another domino fifty percent larger than itself. In 2001 San Francisco's Exploratorium recreated the experiment with eight plywood dominoes: the first was about two inches tall, the last almost three feet. A gentle tick at the start, and a loud slam at the end.
If the sequence kept going, the fifty-seventh domino would practically reach the moon. The point is that big results don't come from doing everything at once, but from doing one thing after another, in the right order. Every day the job is to find the lead domino and keep hitting it until it falls.
At work, the lead domino isn't the most urgent email. It's the thing that, once done, makes everything else easier. The draft proposal that opens the conversation with your boss. The homepage that lets you start reaching out to clients.
How to be more productive: not everything matters equally
The trouble is that a to-do list treats everything as equal. The first item is just the first thing you thought of. So your day fills up with tasks that make you feel busy but take you nowhere. Keller draws a line between a to-do list, long and scattered, and a success list, short and pointed in one direction.
Behind it is an idea you may know as the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule: a small share of what you do produces most of your results. The work is finding that share and giving it the time it deserves.
And no, the answer isn't doing several things at once. In 2009 the Stanford professor Clifford Nass expected to find that heavy multitaskers had some kind of secret ability. He split 262 students into high and low multitaskers and put them to the test. The result surprised him: the heavy multitaskers did worse on every measure and were the easiest to distract with irrelevant information.
Your most important meeting is with yourself
Once you've found your ONE Thing, you have to make room for it. Keller suggests blocking it on your calendar like an appointment, in a specific order: first your time off and vacations, then your ONE Thing, then time to plan. Rest comes first, because nothing else holds up without it.
For the ONE Thing itself, Keller recommends four hours a day, as early as possible, after thirty minutes to an hour for morning priorities. If that sounds impossible right now, start with one hour. Even Stephen King, before he could afford mornings devoted entirely to writing, carved out time wherever he could: early mornings, evenings, lunch breaks.
At first you'll get interrupted: notifications, colleagues, "got a minute?" That's exactly why the block has to be defended the way you'd defend a meeting with your boss. And if you need a concrete way to choose what to focus on when the requests keep piling up, the piece on having too much to do picks up right where this one leaves off.
Find your lead domino today
All you need is ten minutes, tonight or first thing tomorrow.
- Ask yourself the question. What's the ONE Thing I can do tomorrow such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary? Write it down in one line.
- Block an hour for it in the morning, before you open your inbox. Name the appointment after the task.
- Defend that hour. Notifications off, phone out of reach, door closed if you can. Everything else can wait.
On Friday evening, when you close your laptop, the list may still be long. But the right domino will have fallen. And usually, others fall right behind it.
Your days are full, but you feel you're not moving forward?
Tell me what takes up your time and what you really want to achieve.