So I started reading The ONE Thing by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan this week after a recommendation from Simon Rushton - his recommendations always yield great results so I was excited.
The book sat on my shelf for a few weeks until an opportune moment which arose on a family holiday to Kent. I am about half way through so thought I would blog about it now and then at the end - or I might miss some of the amazing stuff from the beginning! The premise of the book is that we should focus on the ONE thing rather than multiple lines of work or layers of priorities. The authors suggest that the myth of multitasking is making us almost 1/3 less productive than we could be if we focused (on average those who do more than one thing at once lose 27% of their working day in trying to refocus after a distraction). This is supplemented by an interesting critique of to-do lists - often we focus on ticking items off rather than being productive in the right areas. As an avid post-it user who writes down everything I needed to do to avoid missing things (!) I am acutely aware of this. I often wanted to cross things off rather than doing what needed doing. So the accomplishment dopamine fix from 'doing' rather than 'doing right' is addictive. I definitely need to rethink this. The next section looks at building habits and debunks the myth that habits take 21/28 days to form. They suggest that on average it is 66 days so if it doesn't stick straight away, don't panic! 2 months' worth of perseverance is necessary. I love how Keller discusses geometric progression in dominoes - that one domino can knock over another 1.5times it's size. That means that tiny decisions can have multiple levels of impact much bigger than their own size should really leverage. The key for me that Keller doesn't mention is alignment - unless the dominoes are aligned correctly they won't knock each other down. This ties into a great message by Sam Duerden about alignment - worth another listen I think. Here's to deciding on the ONE thing... Part 2 coming soon...
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AuthorI am Ben Whitaker. I love to write about allsorts - life, tech, faith, education, books. Enjoy! Archives
November 2017
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