The One Thing Book - Strategic Lens

This book sets out the focusing question to help you prioritise work:

“What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary?”

This question is applied to make you think about goals at different distances, e.g. your 1 year goal, your 1 month goal, your 1 week goal.

The question makes sure you avoid duplicated work the “unnecessary” part, and asks you to aim for work that adds up over time (e.g. making something a little bit better/easier each day adds up over time).

There are lots of useful ideas in here, such as multitasking producing poor results, time blocking and focusing on the highest leverage task, and doubling your goals to make sure you don’t set an artificial limit on yourself.

The book is more focused on productivity than strategy, the goals set are not strategic, they are just goals, and the book does not cover how to think upwards towards a strategy.