Breaking Down The ONE Thing
What's the ONE Thing that you can do, such by doing it, that everything else becomes easier or unnecessary.
This one question is the basis for this entire book and it is referred to as the Focusing Question. The idea here is that when you truly boil down your priorities to just ONE Thing, you get to the thing that actually matters the most.
I think this is an especially an important idea for those of us with ADHD because often we have a lot of trouble identifying what our most important thing to do is. We have so many interests and say yes to so many things and we rarely stop to think about what we genuinely think our most important priorities are.
When I first heard the idea of the ONE Thing I was pretty skeptical. How can just ONE Thing have any meaningful impact on the rest of my life? And the answers is pizza - wait, no, I mean dominoes - wait, still not the pizza, but still dominoes.
What we are trying to do is set up our to-do list so that by knocking down one item we're setting ourselves up to knock down the next one. We do this by going small. This may seem counter intuitive, but it's the small things that we do that set us up for bigger success. I love this idea because it really helps with my ADHD - as Eric Tivers often says, starting is the hardest part - and when you break things down into their smallest parts it makes starting the much easier.
Now I'm sure you're running into the same question I've had many times, "can I have more than one ONE Thing?" - and the answer is yes, well no - well kind of.
One of the most confusing aspects of the Focusing Question is that it plays double duty and that has been something that has tripped me up a lot while trying to think through my ONE Thing. As I stated earlier we can use the Focusing Question to go small, but to go small we've got to start with the bigger picture stuff. What we need to do is split the Focusing Question into a few other questions (and I'm going to drop the part, "such by doing it everything else is easier or unnecessary for brevity here)
We can ask things like, "What's the ONE Thing I want to do this year?" and then "What's the ONE Thing I want to do this month?" "What's the ONE Thing I want to do this week?" "What's the ONE Thing I want to do today?" - with each of those being informed by the one before. If we identify what we want this year, we can use that to help us figure out what we want to do this month, and that can help us figure out what we're doing this week and even what we're today. In the book this is referred to as Goal Setting to the Now.
As I see it, it's like having both four One Things and also just one ONE Thing. If we know what our future goals are going to be we can use those to inform us of what our current goals should be.
If we use the Focusing Question to start with something BIG we want to do and then use it to incrementally drop the scope down until we find ourselves with the ONE Thing we can do right now, that means that yeah, we can definitely have more than one ONE Thing - it's just a question of scale. But we still can only have ONE Thing for right now.
To add to that, our lives are complicated and the different areas of our lives are going to have their own ONE Thing. I like to break it up through my life domains, which to remind you from my planning episodes are:
Home/Family
Work/Career
Health
Personal Growth/ADHD Management
Fun
Each of these domains should have it's own ONE Thing - ultimately it is up to you to choose how you want to prioritize your domains. But the thing is we can't just completely ignore one of these domains in favor of the others - If I don't work on my 1.health all my other domains will suffer. If I don't work on my ADHD management my family and work will suffer. If I'm not having fun and don't spend time with my family what am I even doing any of these other things for?
I'm going to borrow a story included the book, that is actually from James Patterson's Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas
"Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls - family, health, friends, integrity - are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered."
The point of this story is that in our never ending bout of juggling there are some balls that we never want to drop - I'll let you know right now that undoubtedly we are going to drop a ball eventually. Even if we didn't have ADHD, that's a hard act to keep up. What we want to do with the ONE Thing is figure out the most important things in each of those categories so that we can make sure we do those things. We can't do everything, but with the ONE Thing we can work on doing the things that matter most.
Let's take a look at how we might use the focusing questions in these various domains.
For my home and family sphere it might look like, "What's the ONE Thing I can do to improve my relationship with my wife, such by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"
Now if you are getting caught up in that last part of the question, the "or unnecessary" part, I've been right there with you. That was a hard one for me to understand, but let's dive into this example a little to see if we can't figure it out.
So some nights my wife and I end up talking way into the evening, I like spending that time with my wife, but it definitely digs into the time when we're supposed to be sleeping. Part of the reason that we are talking at night is that we've got kids and so if we're trying to have a conservation when they're around we're constantly getting interrupted. My wife and I like having time talk but the only time we're finding that time is late at night after the kids go to bed. So what would make that unnecessary? Well, we could plan to have lunch together more often or schedule more date nights - this would give us a chance to talk more, improve our relationship and by scheduling that time we wouldn't be forced to only find that time to talk late at night.
Let's try it with another domain.
I'm going to go with Health, since that's something that I'm definitely going to be working this year. I think the area that would give me the most benefits would be getting better sleep, so we can ask, "what's the one thing I can do to get better sleep, such by doing it that everything else would be easier or unnecessary?"
Truth be told, I've already done a lot to improve my sleep, but what I really need to do is to lose some weight.
So let's take our Focusing Question to go deeper: "What's the ONE Thing I can do to help myself lose weight, such by doing so would make everything else easier or unnecessary?"
There are a lot of things I could do to help my eating habits, but I think the one that had one of the biggest impacts was making sure I pack a healthy lunch for work every day - which is something I unfortunately didn't keep up last year despite seeing good results.
But that's okay, let's keep going with this: "What's the ONE Thing I can do to make sure I'm packing a healthy lunch for work everyday, such by doing it everything else is easier or unnecessary?"
Well dang, now this is getting harder but I'm going to with packing my lunch the night before so that I don't have to worry about packing it while getting the kids ready for school in the morning. I could keep going on this train I'm going to cut it short for now because I think you're getting the picture of how this can work.
And just look at that - I went from what's a way I can get better sleep down to packing a healthy lunch for work. The great thing about the focusing question is it allows you to find the small actions that are going to get you big results. And we do want to go small here. This is especially important for those of us with ADHD because as we whittle that answer down to smaller and smaller component parts we are setting up those dominoes to knock down.
Buying into the concept of the ONE Thing requires us to change our thinking. We've got a lot of mental baggage that keeps us from embracing the idea of doing less.
One of the most important areas that we've got to change our thinking is that everything matters equally - and while it seems like an obvious statement that somethings matter more than other things, it's a trap that's all to easy to fall into. I can think of plenty of days where I by looking at what I crossed off my to-do list I had a very productive day. But despite all the crossing off at the end of the day it wouldn't feel like I had gotten anything important done. Often this was because I was just crossing items off my list without truly addressing the important items on my to-do list. Maybe I was able answered a bunch of email, but if I didn't get around to doing the things that were actually important to me what was I really doing with my day.
Even understanding that not everything matters equally, with ADHD one of our biggest problem is that we have so many things that we want to do, how can we pick just ONE Thing? There is no getting around it, when you use the strategy of picking just ONE Thing, other things are going to get left behind. When we say yes to something, we're essentially saying no to everything else - we want to say yes to a lot of things, but that is just going to lead us to overwhelm and to dropping one of our juggling balls.
Our first step at getting better using the ONE Thing is saying "no" a lot more. I know it's hard. I struggle with it a lot - and while I can plan ahead to say no, when someone asks me to help them on something I just want to drop everything and help them right there and then. But that's not a great strategy and often leaves me wondering where all my time went.
Instead, the strategy that I've been working on recently is to give my brain a little breathing room before actually answering by starting off with "I'll have to check my calendar" and with how well I remember things that are on my calendar this should have been my response anyway - using this phrased has already saved me from countless double bookings.
This has also it has allowed me to realize the value of my own time, because I've also started adding time blocks into my calendar for when I want to work on my ONE Thing. Now when I say let me check my calendar, I can see that I've booked time for myself already. If a request ends up being something I actually want to do I can work with the person to find a time that works for both of us. By respecting my time, when I do give someone a yes it means I can go all in and not worry that I'm spreading myself too thin. A big part of the ONE Thing is realizing that there really are some things that are more valuable than others and you need to protect your time that you are dedicating to your most important things.
As we're juggling our five domains what we want to keep in mind is that all those domains should also be working towards a common purpose - your purpose. Purpose can be kind of a scary word, at least for me - if you're like me and are having a hard time with the word purpose, the book suggests thinking of it as a direction instead. We just pick a direction and start down that path, then if we need to we can adjust our course as necessary.
Picking a purpose can be scary but you've got to start somewhere - I'd like to tell you a fool proof system for finding your purpose, but I'll let you in on a secret, I'm still working on mine. So, again if you can't work out a purpose just yet, that's okay - just work from the direction you want to take your life. What's something you'd like to accomplish? What would you like to be able to do every day? Use that as guide.
Once we have our purpose or direction we can then ask the focusing question again. When we ask this question we want it to be big and specific. If we're not specific we're not going to be able to get good actionable steps and if we don't ask a big questions then we aren't going to be pushing ourselves.
Right now I am using this podcast as a guide for my direction, so for me the Focusing Question might look like, "What's the ONE Thing I can do to 10x my podcast downloads this year, such by doing it that everything else is easier or unnecessary?"
Asking a big question like this might seem like too big of a step to take, but remember that we're using this as a jumping off point. My answer to that question is just another cog I'm going to fit into the focusing question and I'm just going to keep on doing that until I come up with an answer that I can do right now.
So, "What's the ONE Thing that you can do for your purpose, such by doing it that everything else is easier or unnecessary?"
Today’s Top Tips
Use the focusing question to help you determine your one thing - the focusing question again is: "What's the ONE Thing that you can do such by doing it that everything else is easier or unnecessary?"
Change your thinking and value your time by saying "no" more and time blocking time for your ONE Thing
You can have a ONE Thing for each of your life domains, but they should all be working toward a common purpose
If you liked this episode I'd recommend you check out the book the ONE Thing and read through it on your own - I skimmed a lot of parts for this episode so I'm sure you could get a lot more out of it.
Mentioned in this Episode
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