Hold a sheet of paper up in front of someone, pulled tight between your hands. Ask them to spread their fingers wide, like they’re doing lots of things at once, and punch through it.
It doesn’t happen. The paper might move a little, but it doesn’t go through. Now ask them to change the shape of their hand, so a single finger points out, and come at it again. It goes straight through, every time.
I often use that little demo when I talk about focus. It says in five seconds what Gary Keller takes a whole book to explain. The book is The ONE Thing, and it’s one of the simplest business books I know.
Keller, who wrote it with Jay Papasan, argues that big results come from going small. You stop trying to do everything. You find the one thing that matters most right now and give it your best hours. He even has a question to keep you honest. It boils down to this: what’s the one thing I could do that would make everything else easier, or unnecessary?
Ask that about a long to-do list and watch how much of it suddenly looks optional.
Keller also takes apart a few myths along the way. One is that everything matters equally. A short list of things drives most of your results, and a lot of the rest is noise that happens to look like work. Another is the perfectly balanced life. He’s honest that when you go all in on something that matters, other things get less of you for a while. The skill is not leaving them too long.
Multitasking is a lie
The line from the book I come back to most is the shortest one. “Multitasking is a lie.”
Keller’s point is that what feels like doing two things at once is really flicking between them. Every flick costs you something. You lose time getting back into the thing you left, and you make more mistakes while you’re at it. It feels productive. Mostly it’s just busy.
I’m the last person who should be preaching about this. On my podcast I once owned up that there are probably three-year-olds with a bigger attention span than me. And social media used the wrong way is a weapon of mass distraction. I’ve said that out loud too, more than once.
So I don’t rely on willpower. I rely on a few simple habits that make focus the easy option.
A to-do list of one
The first is a to-do list of one. The ideas still get written down somewhere, because they have to live somewhere. But the list that runs my day only has one thing on it. I do the most important thing. When it’s done, I work out what the next most important thing is, and do that.
The second is a timer. Anything that needs proper thinking gets twenty-five minutes with the phone out of reach. It’s cheap and boring, and it works far better than it has any right to. I wrote about it in How to stay focused in a distracted world, and I still use it.
The third is a question I ask business owners who are spinning too many plates. If every project you’ve got going is an ingredient, do they belong in the same recipe? Four or five things can work fine together if they fit. When they don’t fit, you end up pulling against yourself and wondering why nothing moves.
If you’ve read Done Beats Perfect, some of Keller’s thinking will feel familiar. I gave a whole chapter to dominoes: find the one big domino that, once it falls, makes the rest easier or irrelevant. Keller uses the same picture. Knock over the right small thing and it knocks over something bigger, which knocks over something bigger again.
What his book adds is the discipline around it. He wants you to block time for your one thing every day, early, and defend it like an appointment you can’t move. Knowing your big domino is the easy part. Protecting the time to push it over, while everything else shouts for attention, is where most of us come unstuck.
If you’re juggling more than you can hold right now, this is the book I’d start with. It’s plain, it’s quick to read and it’ll make you look hard at that list. It sits in the focus chapter of my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me. The others there are about doing fewer things and doing them better.
So, next time you sit down to work, which hand are you making? Fingers spread, or one finger pointing?
