We can all benefit from greater focus, higher productivity, and a strong understanding of what our priorities are. Tasks much easier said than done. But that is what The One Thing is all about, making those things easier to do. Our friend Mark Henson at Sparkspace in Columbus, Ohio had recommended The One Thing as the next book I should read. Mark’s track record for recommending books is phenomenal so I immediately ordered it off Amazon. In hindsight I should have bought two.
The One Thing turned out to be an incredibly insightful read about how to practically go about identifying and organizing your priorities. At the core of the book is the focusing question; “What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” The book teaches you to use this question to constantly bring focus back to determining what your priorities are. I have found some immediate benefit from the focusing question provided by the book and I have been trying to incorporate it more and more into my routine.
Although the focusing question is at the heart of the book, I found plenty of other things that stuck with me after reading as well. One of which being the detrimental effects of multitasking. The book makes a pretty powerful argument that multitasking is not only not helpful for productivity, but that it can be downright harmful to becoming highly productive. Another thing that stuck with me was the description of highly successful peoples habits, especially the concept of time blocking. Time blocking is the practice of where you want to go with what you need to do in a given day, and protecting the time block. I have gone back and read that section of the book and will probably visit it again, just to put in perspective the differences between the way I operate and the way highly successful people do.
There are times when our group is so full of great ideas, but not enough time to implement all at once. The One Thing has definitely shown me a method to help sift through things like that and determine what the real priorities are. If you are looking for some practicable ways to up productivity and bring focus to your daily tasks, I highly recommend The One Thing.
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