strategy
What can you do today?
How the ONE THING focusing question can help accelerate you towards big results
by Adam Bouchard
The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan does a wonderful job distilling simple reasons why achieving extraordinary results often comes down to your ability to focus on the most important thing every day and eliminate distractions.
The focusing question:
The focusing question:
What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
From a strategic perspective, this means approaching the day with a mindset to deliver at least one key result on your path towards a long-term vision.
Imagine you are working on a big task, like writing software with a team of engineers.
Without a focused intention, you may listen to updates at a daily stand-up that sound something like this:
"I'm working on feature XYZ; estimating about a week"
The problem with that statement is the future is uncertain. Any number of external circumstances could take your plan off-course.
A more strategic and effective intention on your daily stand-up is to focus on what you can achieve that day.
Something like this:
"I'm focused on getting the ABC function working and deployed to our staging environment"
That type of intention drives results and will set you and your team up on a better path to success.
Like the video of the compounding dominos above, each day is about aligning the right next action that builds momentum towards the larger vision