Use Focus to Execute on Your Wildly Important Goals
Jen Drago 
This post showcases the key takeaways from the book "The One Thing" and how to maintain focus on your most important goals to bring success.
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Hey, business owners, do you feel like you're scattered every single day?
Do you just hop from one activity to another, not sure if you're actually making any progress? This is common in entrepreneurship and, instead of beating ourselves up, let's just learn how to get some more focus in our lives.
I recently read a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.
You may recognize the name Gary Keller as a famous business leader from Keller Williams Realty. Obviously, when you see someone who is very successful in business, they have to have really good strategy, focus, and accountability in order to execute consistently and drive their businesses forward in that way.
Takeaway 1: Go Small
The key principle of this book is “go small.” Narrow your focus on the things that are most important and avoid other activities and other things on which to focus.
Maintain that narrow focus on your business. This principle recognizes that not all tasks matter equally, so there has to be some prioritization of the work that we do.
I made a video about the Pareto principle and small businesses. The Pareto principle says that if you take 20% of your efforts and they're focused on the most important activities, they will bring about 80% of your results.
As small business owners, we are so stretched for time. If we can just take 20% of our time and focus it on the one thing that will propel our business forward or on our strategic goals for the year, which also would be very limited in number, we can see amazing results at the end of that annual period.
Keller and Papasan state, "extraordinary results are determined directly by how narrow you can make your focus." They want you to think even smaller than the Pareto principle perhaps; they called it the "Extreme Pareto" principle.
Takeaway 2: Use Success Lists
One of the things that they said in the book is that we need to rethink our "to do" lists and use very short “success lists” instead.
I don't know about you but I am famous for making to-do lists with hundreds of tasks on them. This just means that there's a lot to do, but it doesn't necessarily prioritize those "to do's."
To-do lists are long, success lists are short. Per Keller and Papasan, “One pulls you in all directions. The other aims you in a specific direction. If your to-do list contains everything, it's probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go."
The book also posits that "when everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal, we become active and busy. This doesn't move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity and busyness rarely takes care of business." I love that quote: "Busyness rarely takes care of business." Wow!
Takeaway 3: Focus on Habits and Discipline
Let's gain some more focus. Another thing that they are proponents of is habit formation and discipline. Keller and Papasan maintain that “a habit is easy to start but hard to maintain.” They challenge us to start with one goal but to choose a goal or a habit that we can start every single day that will set us up for success in other areas.
James Clear, another author that wrote "Atomic Habits," actually refers to this as the "keystone goal." The keystone in an arch when there's an arch made of stones, the one in the center is called the keystone. It's the most important in holding that arch up.
A keystone habit for me, for example, would be exercise. On days that I exercise, I have more clarity of thought, I have more energy, I'm calmer, I can handle stress better, I can focus better. Keller and Papasan advocate for selecting one habit and committing to it. It's hard to maintain, but if you just have one and you know that it's going to make an impact in other areas of your life, it's easy a little bit easier to commit to regularly.
Takeaway 4: Take Goal Setting to the Now
Another aspect of the book is about goal setting and so they like to take your strategic goals and bring that from an annual goal to a quarterly goal to a weekly goal to a daily goal.
I shared a little bit about this in a video on simple strategic planning and how to take annual goals and break them into quarters and then into the 13 weeks of the quarter. It really helps to chunk a bigger goal down into smaller, more manageable tasks.
Keller and Papasan suggest that your daily work be very focused on the most important thing to propel your business that you're working on at that time. This brings a long-range goal “into the NOW” as they say. Focus on it every single day.
Takeaway 5: Time-Blocking
Another idea that they like to talk about is time-blocking. They say, "time-blocking is productivity's greatest power tool" and, boy, do I agree. In our lives today were challenged with too much information coming at us from every angle and it's our job to screen it and shut it out when it's time to work.
That is essentially what time-blocking does. Time-blocking means taking your calendar for the day and setting aside blocks of time that you're going to work on important tasks.
I like to block activities into 30- or 60-minute tasks and then I can focus. Sometimes I even use the Pomodoro method which is 25 minutes of focus, five minutes of break. Having a periodic break built-in is kind of fun because you can get a fresh cup of coffee or tea, take a stroll around the block or stretch during the five-minute breaks.
Here’s one of my most favorite quotes in the book. "The people who achieve extraordinary results do not achieve them by working more hours. They achieve them by getting more done in the hours they work." And how do they do that? Time-blocking.
I have a great tool that helps you to be productive during your day. It's called The Daily Blueprint and I have a free downloadable guide so you can try it out.
I hope you've enjoyed these key takeaways from The One Thing book by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. It's a great read so when you have time, pick it up and definitely read it.
These lessons and takeaways apply to everything we do in business and so I thought it was really important to share this, especially going into the New Year, knowing that you're all going to be working on your strategic plans and executing on those strategic plans.
Need some guidance on creating your business vision and annual goals? Try these two free downloads here: