Project Diary: The One (Hundred) Thing(s)

Balancing the urgent with the important to prioritize your workload...

A few years ago, I read a book that had a fairly profound impact on how I approach work. The book was The One Thing by Gary Keller. In it, the author argues for radical prioritization. To achieve extraordinary results, you must narrow your focus to the most important task and ignore everything else. The key is to consistently ask yourself a fundamental question every day: “What’s the one thing I can do that can make everything else easier or unnecessary?”

For instance, if hiring an assistant would allow you to offload half your workload, then that might rise to the most important task today. Or maybe you should focus on creating a report template that can be used repeatedly; sure, it’s going to take a little extra time now, but having this tool is going to pay time dividends in the future. These kinds of tasks are “important.”

But the important is always at war with the “urgent.” If your boss asks you to drop everything and work on X, you often have to do so. But you also have to learn if/when/how to push back on this. The same is true for your email inbox, which I think of as someone else’s to-do list. Finding the balance is key to getting meaningful work done whilst maintaining one’s sanity.

Case in point: I once had a boss who would come in every day, having had some spurious thought in the shower, and declare we drop everything and do whatever he’d thought up that morning. Rarely were these tasks actually important, but they were “urgent,” as in the boss wanted them done. (The secret we all learned was to simply wait him out, as he’d (a) invariably forget what he’d asked; and (b) come up with something new the following day. Sigh.)

So what’s this have to do with the ngGONG project? Answer: I have dozens of action items and things I could focus on to standup the project. Some of these are important, some urgent, and some fall into both categories. Worse, until now I’ve been capturing these things in various locations. We have a formal project to-do list that we’ve created in Jira, but I’m reserving that for significant action items that the team must focus on. We’ve also held three weekly progress/status meetings thus far, and there are action items buried in those notes. Additionally, I keep a lot of my own notes and reminders in Apple Notes, and invariably there are action items I recognize when jotting down those things. Plus, there are countless emails, texts, and Slack messages, some of which contain to-do items. And so on.

To be honest, this was getting a little out of hand, so a few days ago I spent a few hours scouring all these different locations and made a main list of things that we had to do. I’ve teased out all the ones that need to be assigned to team members, and those will end up going into Jira. For myself, however, many of the things I have to accomplish don’t really rise to the level of formal tracking in that project list. Ergo, I am keeping my own “secondary” list of actions in a productivity app (i.e., Todoist, which is my favorite of many I’ve tried).

I started by simply writing everything down in a single, un-sorted list. Then I used the Todoist’s “priority” labels to sort the important from the not. And then within each of those categories, I determined whether the action was urgent, and dragged the most important to the top of those individual sub-lists. Finally, I took a brief pause and came back and viewed everything through the One Thing lens; i.e., is there something on the list that, if I did it now, would make future work easier or unnecessary?

For action items that I’ve done everything I can do, and I’m waiting for others to act, I keep them at the top of the list so that I don’t lose track of them. At the end of every day, I review my list, add/subtract new/retired actions that have arisen and/or shown up in my inbox, and re-prioritize using urgent-vs-important and the concept of The One Thing as my twin guiding beacons.

The power of thinking this way is that the next day I know immediately what needs to get done, and in what order. At any moment in the project, there is One Thing I should focus on, period. And after it, there is the Next One Thing. And so on.

As you can see from the partial list above in the image, my One Thing task is to get the Project Management Controls software we’re going to use under contract and under way. But I’ve done everything I can do on that, and I’m now waiting for our procurement department to place the order. The next thing on my list is to ensure the NSF is okay with our proposed monthly report template, as I’ll have to write that document soon, and I need to ensure we’re creating what the NSF needs; I’ve sent this off, but because of the current government shut-down, I’m in a holding pattern waiting for feedback. The next thing on the list for me to work on then is the hiring process. Said another way: I know what I have to work on today. If I progress that work to a natural stopping point, I’ll simply move down the list to the next item.

I encourage you to get your own project action items organized this way. It’s very easy to drop an important ball if you’re not organized in this manner. I prefer Todoist (it has a free version, but I pay the $50 a year for additional features) but there are dozens of similar apps available. You can also resort to a single list in a notes app, a spreadsheet, or whatever works for you. The key is to write everything down, sort by true prioritization, focus on the task at the top of the list, and then move on to the next item.