What’s Your ONE Thing?

Are your days always full of meetings? And you have a constant barrage of email and demands on your time?

Do you feel like you aren’t addressing what’s actually important or making real progress?

Or when you start feeling overwhelmed, you lose your focused attention, instead of zeroing in on what’s most important in the moment?

But how do you know what’s really most important when you have so many demands for your time and attention? How do you shift more of your minutes to being strategic rather than reactive?

Less is better (and actually leads to getting more done). 

While it can be tempting to do everything, or have 10 most important priorities, you can adopt a more disciplined way to focus on only what is truly essential.

It is about making the wisest investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your best and highest point of contribution.

If everyone has the same number of hours in a day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than others? How do they do more, achieve more, earn more and have more?

The answer is they have a more powerful mindset and get to the heart of things that really matter in their approach and their priorities.

It means ignoring or delegating the things you could be doing and instead focusing on what you need to be doing. Narrowing your focus, instead of trying to do it all.

Most people think just the opposite and that success is time-consuming and complicated. As a result, their calendars and to-do lists become overloaded which leads to high stress (this used to be me!)

You only have so much time and energy, and when you spread yourself out, you spread yourself thin.

You can intuitively know that less is better, but where to start?

Ask yourself, what’s the one thing . . . ?

There are a few great books that get into focusing on the one thing (resources listed at end), and you might have noticed this as a theme lately. It’s a very effective strategy to zero in on what’s most important.

Successful companies, teams and individuals know their one thing that they need to evolve or transform. They are continually asking themselves, what’s their most important thing? Their highest value contribution.

Getting clear on your ONE thing – the very most important thing and your highest value contribution – can help to make those choices where to focus your time and trade-offs. This can be on a big and small scale.

Reflect on these questions, based on the central idea in the book The One Thing: The Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller. You will find this common theme in the leadership books I listed and getting to the heart of what really matters.

Start with your values and where you contribute the highest value in your work. And then narrow down your focus with these questions. In the context of these questions aligning to your values and where you contribute the highest value.

• What’s the ONE thing that is most important in your life that by making time for it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?

• What’s the ONE thing that you can do in your organization or team that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?

• What’s the ONE thing that you can do in your position or as a leader that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?

• What’s the ONE thing that you can focus on for the next 90 days that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?

• What’s the ONE thing that you can focus on this week that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?

• What’s the ONE thing that you can focus on today that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?

• And if you really need to get focused, ask yourself in the moment “What’s the one thing that is most important RIGHT NOW? (and ignore everything else)

When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this actually doesn’t move us any closer to our goals.

You’ll still need to ensure you have time with your customers and employees, and those necessary, less strategic tasks get accomplished such as email but, by better prioritizing your days and putting focus on your one thing whether big picture or in that very moment, you create focus on what’s most important.

You also increase your own productivity while creating a ripple effect that will increase the effectiveness of your team.

Inspiration: The One Thing: The Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, Gary Keller; Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown; High Performance Habits, Brendon Buchard and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey.

What Next?

You can sign up for Stacey's masterclass, The Confident "No" here.

Stacey L. Olson is a Leadership and Certified Positive Psychology Coach, has 15 years of corporate experience and has gone through her own transformational change from burning out to balanced in life while performing at a high level (both in her corporate career and own business). She works with professionals who want to work less, live more and be their best even with all the demands, high expectations and messiness of everyday life. Stacey is the founder of The Balanced Leader™ program and offers executive and leadership coaching, workshops, and speaking.