“One Task to rule them all, One Question to find them, One question to bring them all, and in the productivity bind them” – The Lord of Productivity*
Being effective is a matter of focus. A book I am rereading in the moment, as part book research, is “The One Thing” by Gary Keller. As you may assume from the title, the main mental model is to reduce all your possible task to just one.
To accomplish this, ask the following question: “What is the one thing I can do, that makes everything easier or irrelevant?”. Your goal is to find the lead domino, the one task, that will rule them all.
“One Task to rule them all, One Question to find them, One question to bring them all, and in the productivity bind them” – The Lord of Productivity*
Bit reality is often a bitch, shiting you to death with useless tasks. How can one possibly reduce all the crap to one single to-do? The answer is simple. You just have to be comfortable with the emerging chaos. If you get the right answer to our question, you are already minimizing a lot of the possible problems. Because everything else should be irrelevant, or at least easier.
A way to make asking this question a habit, is by doing following exercise. List all the possible tasks you should do tomorrow. Do a quick 80/20 analysis. Which tasks produce 80% of the results? Let’s assume you reduced your tasks from 20 to 5. Another trick to reduce tasks, is to ask yourself: What would happen, if I would skip this task and never do it? If your answer is either nothing or not much, cross it out.
Next, take your smaller list and ask yourself: If I were allowed to do only one thing on that list, which one would it be?
This is hard. You may say, they’re all equally important. But that’s not true. It can’t be.
The weird thing about the pareto principle is, how ever small you go in your sample size, it always applies. Let’s say 20% of the population owns 80% of the capital, its also true that 20% of the 100 richest people own 80 % of wealth of those 100 people. You can take the Pareto-Principle to its extreme, and use it again on your reduced list. Do this until a single task emerges. This is your one priority. Everything else is distraktion!
Thanks for reading,
Max
Ps: As always, I’m grateful for every grammatical or stylistic error you can spot.
*I made this up of course. Do not hate. I love the Lord of the Rings
