4 Productivity Lessons from “The ONE Thing” by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan

Last year my mantra was Focus, yet all year long I struggled to maintain my focus well enough to achieve any of the goals I had set for myself.

At the end of the year I still had a ton of unfinished projects and unmet goals. Feeling bad about myself, I decided to dive into a book to remedy my problem (usually my first course of action, for better or worse!)

I selected The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

If I’m being honest, I picked it because of its full title: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results. Although the title sounds a little click-baity, I found a lot of genuinely helpful nuggets of information throughout the whole book. I also loved how it was organized so clearly and that there was a “Big Ideas” summary at the end of each chapter. (I even referred to those to help me write this post!)

Certain lessons and principles really clicked with me so I started applying them to my own life. These little changes helped me improve my focus and make more progress on my goals – exactly what I was hoping to get out of this book!

Here are my top 5 takeaways from The ONE Thing that can help you focus on YOUR goals and priorities.

Takeaway #1: The Focusing Question

From the jump, the book promises to deliver the ONE thing: a “surprisingly simple truth” that will help you reach “extraordinary results.”

So, what is that surprisingly simple truth that we were promised?

That would be the Focusing Question, which goes like this:

“What is the ONE thing I can do by which everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”

Asking yourself the Focusing Question – about anything! – can help illuminate the clearest, most direct path to the results that you desire. It’s a really simple question designed to cut to the core of any challenge and help you gain the clarity needed to keep moving through it.

You can modify this question to make it about whatever area of life you want to focus on.

It works like this: “What is the ONE thing I can do [insert the specific area of your life] by which everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”

For example, here’s how you might frame it around your finances: “What is the ONE thing I can do for my finances by which everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”

For me, that one thing would be creating a budget and actually sticking to it.

I even asked myself the Focusing Question for this blog: “What is the one thing I can do to grow my blog by which everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”

The answer? Stick to a consistent posting schedule! (Which I now have to work on!)

Try This

1. What’s an area of your life that you want to get clarity on and create results?
2. Ask yourself the Focusing Question, tailored to this part of your life: What is the ONE thing I can do (in this area of my life) by which everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?
3. Write your response to the Focusing Question. Jot it down in your journal. In your phone’s notes app. On a sticky note for your mirror. Wherever you decide to write it, make sure that you’ll see it and be reminded of it every day.
4. When it’s time to work on your project, get specific and narrow your question down: “What is the ONE thing I can do right now?”
5. Start taking action on your ONE thing and see everything start to shift into place!

Takeaway #2: Purpose Defines Priorities

To live a meaningful life, define what matters to YOU.

By identifying what matters to you, you begin to uncover your purpose. Your purpose is your big reason for doing what you do. It’s your big WHY. And it’s your inner compass.

Your purpose guides you as your move through life. It helps shape your choices and actions, which in turn shape the path your entire life takes.

So ask yourself, what is your WHY?

What gives your life a sense of meaning?

What gives you a sense of purpose and motivation, a reason to do what you do?

While many things might bring you joy, there are usually a few main things that fuel your fire more than others. Spend time to figure out what your thing is. This is the thing that helps you keep going even when you’re tired and want to give up. What sparks a light in you?

When you’re tapped into that driving force – your purpose, your why – you have the fuel to keep going on your life path when you feel challenged. Stay on this road. It will lead you to fulfillment, happiness, and, if you keep putting your all into it, abundance.

As you uncover your purpose, your priorities will begin to emerge.

With your purpose to guide you, your job is simplified: live your life in alignment with your WHY and values. Live by what matters to you. Life will feel better for it. You will start to automatically attract and be open to things that are right for you, and repel and turn down things that do not serve you. As a result, things will naturally start shifting into place.

If you haven’t done this yet, now is a good time to figure out your WHY. Sometimes life shakes things up and you only find out what’s important by what’s left after the dust has settled. Start recognizing what your purpose is now so that you can identify your life’s true priorities, sooner rather than later.

Take the time to identify what your innermost motivations are (your purpose) and in doing so, you will begin to recognize the things that matter most to you in life (your priorities). Purpose illuminates your priorities; acting on your priorities will lead to enhanced productivity; productivity results in profit, or the rewards of your efforts.

Try This

Journal on it!

What lights you up inside? What do you get excited about in life? What GIVES you energy? What can you talk about for hours? What is something you’ll never get tired of?

Is there a pattern emerging out of your answers? What’s the golden thread running through it all?

This is your WHY.

Keep your WHY close to your heart: for example, post it on a vision board or make it your phone background.

Keep coming back to your why and reminding yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing when it’s hard to keep focused and motivated. That way you will remember that it’s not about the small wins or temporary struggle – it’s about the bigger picture. You’re just doing your one small part in the moment, as part of a grander whole.

Takeaway #3: Saying Yes to One Thing Means Saying No to Something Else

To do something big that requires your time and attention, you have to say No to distractions that would steal your time and attention away.

I’m highlighting this as one of my biggest takeaways in a book with many, many other golden insights, because saying no is something I’ve struggled greatly with my whole life.

There are two main distractions I fall prey to: other people and technology.

Let’s start with other people.

Even now at 31 (at the time of writing this post) I still struggle with saying no when people ask me for something. If I say no, I feel like I’m letting the other person down and I end up feeling guilty beyond what’s proportionate to the actual request.

In my head I tell myself saying yes is a small sacrifice I can easily make, in order to avoid potentially upsetting the other person. Helping someone else is a big deal to them, while it’s only a minor inconvenience to me… so I tell myself. Except small inconveniences add up. And sometimes the request is actually a big inconvenience. Then I start feeling resentful toward the other person, quite unfairly. At the end of the day, I’ll be stuck thinking about how annoyed I am instead of feeling energized to work on my goals (like writing blog posts!)

People pleasing is sooo draining and brings out the worst in me. I’m starting to really come to terms with the fact that I don’t have room for that in my life anymore. As I get older, I realize that I have the option to say no gracefully, honoring my boundaries while still respecting my friendships / relationships.

There’s a really solid excerpt from the book, in which the authors quote marketer Seth Godin:

“’You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly, and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.’” Godin gets it. You can keep your yes and say no in a way that works for you and for others.

Now, this is not permission to get tunnel vision and exclude your friends and family from your life altogether. There’s still an element of balance that you must work to maintain: live aligned with your values to lead a life that you ultimately feel good about. Protect the things in your life that you choose to prioritize.

That’s the distraction of other people. My second biggest distraction is technology.

I spend too much time on my phone. (Anyone else?)

For me to focus on my actual priorities, I need to manage my time much more effectively.

That means not playing games and wasting time doom scrolling on my phone. Not watching tv shows or music videos that can distract me while I’m working (or writing this blog post; literally just played a ton of music videos thinking I could multitask then finally closed out of it – now I’m actually writing what I thought I was going to finish an hour ago!)

Saying yes to working on my blog means saying no to distractions (like music videos). I have to choose to stay focused without distraction, then follow through.

More generally, work on becoming aware when you are are getting distracted. Then, make it your focus to work on your ONE thing – a single task that will make a difference to the overall goal – putting your undivided attention toward it until it’s completed. Watch great results unfold!

Try This

First, build awareness of where you are getting distracted. Instead of glossing over it or ignoring it, face it head on and decide how you’re going to deal with it.

What are your biggest distractions? Start thinking about how you might manage them more effectively. Maybe you can use these distractions as rewards as you finish your action items. Maybe you can do away with certain distractions altogether, and delete certain social media apps. Feel out what can work for you, and don’t let it give you too much anxiety. You’re just trying things out to see what can happen.

Be real about your distractions, too. How much time and energy are you spending on these distractions, compared to working on your goals and dreams? Are your distractions worth the amount of attention you pay them? How do you want to spend your time?

For example, say you love watching Netflix, but you also want to write a book. Can you give up some of your Netflix time to writing your book? Maybe one night a week is dedicated solely to working on your project. Or maybe you cut the time that you spend watching Netflix in half, and allocate that remaining time to your book. Try starting with your book-writing time (set a timer, and really stick to writing until that timer goes off!) Then when time’s up, let yourself switch over to Netflix.

Or say you’ve been volunteering at a friend’s weekly event and it leaves you too tired to work on your book. Can you have an honest, open conversation with that friend and cut your volunteering down to every other week? Might you even graciously remove yourself from this commitment, explaining that you must honor another commitment to yourself? These conversations can feel really hard, but remember who you are living your life for. It might be uncomfortable, and not everyone will get it, but your time is your life. It truly is up to you how you want to spend it.

The next time you are working on your ONE thing, make it your absolute priority. Focus on your task at hand, giving it your full attention. Don’t give into distractions. You have a goal – stick to it. If that seems too daunting, break your goal into smaller actions. Chunk it down into something you feel is more attainable. You can do it.

As you start saying no to the things that aren’t you true priorities and start spending that time on what really matters to you, watch your schedule open up to create more time and space for you to work on the things that actually do matter to you!

Takeaway #4: With the Right Action, Your Efforts Will be Compounded

Huge results come out of a few focused actions pretty quickly because you are effectively compounding your efforts.

When you determine the single most important thing that you need to act on, act on it, and repeat with the next most important thing, you initiate a domino effect that creates monumental change with a few focused actions. You get huge results from doing the ONE thing because are effectively compounding your efforts.

Huge results come out of a few focused actions pretty quickly because you are effectively compounding your efforts.

The ONE Thing is a technique that effectively helps you initiate a domino effect of change in your life.

The domino effect is the idea that with a number of steps lined up, you knock over the lead domino to create a chain reaction that topples the whole line. This is of course a simplistic metaphor for what actually happens in real life… but the book rides on this idea, because we all do have to start somewhere. Although real life doesn’t give us steps lined up in a perfectly neat order, cause and effect is real. And by identifying the lead domino (the ONE thing) in your life, you can focus your efforts on taking action on something that will create a bigger effect than if you were to spend your time working on smaller tasks.

But we can get even more specific.

The Pareto Principle describes a well-recognized pattern where about 20% of cause yields about 80% of effect. We can also look at this as saying that about 20% of our actions will create about 80% of our results. The ratios vary depending on the situation, but the general idea is this: a small minority of inputs leads to the majority of results.

In practice, this means that we should really focus our efforts on the few most important things that will create big changes. Instead of getting caught up on all of the items that we think we need to do on our to-do list, we can give ourselves permission to focus on the key items that we really need to do in order to make a difference in our goals.

This is how you compound the results of your actions: do (x) specific thing to generate the manifold results of doing something else!

Here’s a work example: in order to save time and make certain processes more efficient at my office job, I had to create the infrastructure of standardized paperwork and procedures. I’ve done this in my medical administrative assistant jobs, sales and marketing jobs, and as a founding team member of a startup.

While it’s a big undertaking that requires a lot of lift that I honestly never want to do, I always knew that getting it done would make everything else easier. Processes would be streamlined, everyone would know what needed to be done before a project could move forward, and all information would be kept in one place so that it could be easily searched and stored by the whole team.

How about a personal example?

I needed to apply the Focusing Question to my personal life. What was the ONE thing that I could do for my personal life by which everything else would become easier or unnecessary?

In this case, I wanted to figure out how to feel and do better in the world everyday. For context: I usually feel sluggish, irritable, and generally unhappy with myself and my life. (Hence why I have all of these resources and thoughts on how to live and feel better – it’s the number one thing I have to work on, myself!)

The ONE thing I decided to do was to start exercising daily. This was a small commitment to move my body, whether it’s stretching at night before bed, doing a brisk walk around the neighborhood, 3 minutes of cardio in the living room, or anything else. Any of these things or something similar would help me feel better, think more clearly, have more energy, allow my creativity to flow, and so much more!

This is why the Focusing Question is so great. By identifying that thing that will make the most difference in any endeavor – in other words, selecting the lead domino – you position yourself to create a compound effect that is greater than you would see by doing many other, smaller, less important actions!

This saves you time, effort, energy, and honestly a lot of money. The ONE thing is a worthy technique because it helps you spot shortcuts where you might otherwise have been spinning your wheels and driving yourself into the ground with exhaustion from chasing so many things without ever seeming to get anything done. (Been there, done that!)

Do what counts, where it counts the most, and let your dominos fall with more ease and less stress. Rest assured that by continuing to take the most impactful actions, you will compound your results to achieve great results!

Try This

Use the Focusing Question: What is the ONE thing I can do right now by which everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? What will be the result(s) of that?

What’s the next ONE thing? What will be the result(s) of that?

What’s the ONE thing after that? What will be the result(s) of that?

Where will you be after these three individual items are done?

I hope you’ve gained some insight into what a difference doing a few small actions can make on your longer-term goals!

Conclusion

To recap, these are my top 4 productivity takeaways from reading The ONE Thing:

1. The Focusing Question “What is the ONE thing I can do by which everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?
2. Purpose Defines Priorities Identify your motivating force, your WHY behind everything you do. Let this shape your priorities.
3. Saying Yes to One Thing Means Saying No to Something Else Focusing on the most important thing requires that you redirect time and attention from other things (distractions) back to what you want to get done.
4. With the Right Action, Your Efforts Will Be Compounded By narrowing down to the most important things, and doing those few things first, you will create bigger results than if you had spent even more time on a greater number of less important things.

If you’re interested in a quick, to-the-point read about how to get clarity and maximize your efforts toward achieving your desired results, check out The ONE Thing. You’ll walk away with a refreshed mindset and lots of juicy tips that you can start using instantly to work on making your deepest dreams come true.

Let’s Discuss

Have you read The ONE Thing? What were your thoughts on it?

What was your favorite tip from the list above? (Or from the book, if you’ve read it!)

What are your favorite productivity books and tips?

Let me know in the comments 🙂

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