Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Miles’s three half-hours
Miles is a customer success manager who writes a newsletter for new dads who work from home.
His to-do list holds the newsletter, the LinkedIn posts, and a course for the same dads,
and each one gets half an hour a day.
Half an hour feels fair, and cutting any of them from the list feels like giving up.
By Friday, not one of the three is finished, because none of them got enough hours to get anywhere.
Then Monday comes, and the same three things are back on the list.
🧩 His struggle:
He treats all three projects as equally important, so he never looks for the one that would make the others easier.
On his lunch break, he’s watching a video that tells the real story of a real estate founder
who also had far too many ideas to work on at once,
and later wrote a book that sold more than two million copies.
Turns out he got there by asking a single question.
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🏘️ The man who asks the same question every morning
Gary Keller co-founded Keller Williams, a real estate company in Austin, Texas, that became the largest in the world by number of agents.
In 2001 the company was growing, but the industry’s top agents still weren’t paying it any attention.
So Gary called his key executives into a room and had them list a hundred ways to fix that.
The next day they cut the hundred down to ten.
Then they cut the ten down to one: write a book that taught agents how to become top earners.
That book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, came out in 2004.
The other ninety-nine ideas never got done, because the book already did what they were meant to do.
Years later Gary wrote another book about the question behind that decision, The ONE Thing, with Jay Papasan, a writer at his company.
It has sold more than two million copies.
He calls that question the Focusing Question, and he’s precise about the wording.
“What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
The important words are the last two: or unnecessary.
People usually leave them out.
He isn’t asking which task is most important.
He’s asking which task, once done, removes other tasks from the list entirely, or makes them much smaller.
And he doesn’t ask it once, write the answer down, and stop.
He asks the same question about a shorter and shorter stretch of time.
First about his whole life, then this year, this month, this week, and today.
He asks it when he wakes up, again when he gets to work,
and again when he gets home.
Each answer narrows down the next one, so his ONE thing for the day is never a guess.
It comes straight out of his ONE thing for the week, which comes out of his ONE thing for the year.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Focusing Question
Gary’s team cut a hundred ideas down to one, and that one made the other ninety-nine unnecessary.
He didn’t push harder.
He put one thing first, chosen so that it would make everything after it easier or unnecessary.
Gary’s tactic is called The Focusing Question, and here it is word for word.
“What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Most to-do lists answer a weaker question: “which task matters most?”
But the most important task may not remove a single other task from the list.
The Focusing Question asks which single job makes the others easier or unnecessary.
So you stop ranking your newsletter, your posts and your course by importance.
Ask instead which one, done first, makes the other two easier or unnecessary.
The newsletter might be that one: once an issue is out, the posts are easier to write, and the course is easier to plan.
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🛠️ Miles’s turn
Let’s check in on Miles, and the three projects that each get half an hour a day and never get finished.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what he wants a year from now.
His AI sidekick says:
Put all your hours into the newsletter first, because each issue gives you your posts and the lessons for your course.
He takes the posts and the course off this week’s list.
He spends every evening on the newsletter, and sends the issue on Friday.
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🌅 Two months later
Miles has sent his newsletter every Friday since.
He turns each issue into three LinkedIn posts in under an hour.
A hundred and forty dads read his newsletter now,
and the course outline is built from the issues they replied to most.
Your list probably has one task on it that would make the others easier.
Find the one task on your list that makes the others easier or unnecessary, and do it first.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes your actual list and finds the one item that makes the rest easier or deletes them.
🧰 What you’ll need
Everything you’re trying to move forward, and what you did on each last week
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a newsletter for new dads, LinkedIn posts, a course for the same dads. Last week: half an hour on each every evening, and none of them finishedWhat you want a year from now, and the hours you really have each week
- e.g. 3,000 readers and one course they want, and about ninety minutes most eveningsWhat you’re scared happens if you drop the others
- e.g. that I lose momentum, and that the course idea goes stale
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume new dads who work from home.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Do not rank my list by importance. The only test is which item makes the others easier or unnecessary.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Everything I am currently trying to move forward, and what I did on each last week:
{e.g. a newsletter for new dads, LinkedIn posts, a course for the same dads. Last week: half an hour on each every evening, and none of them finished}
What I actually want a year from now, and the hours I genuinely have each week:
{e.g. 3,000 readers and one course they want, and about ninety minutes most evenings}
What I am scared happens if I drop the others:
{e.g. that I lose momentum, and that the course idea goes stale}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The one thing — the single item that makes the most others easier or unnecessary, with the chain spelled out.
2. What it deletes — which items on my list stop mattering once the first one is done.
3. What it makes easier — which items get cheaper rather than disappearing, and why.
4. The honest cost — what I genuinely lose by parking the rest, stated plainly rather than waved away.
5. Tomorrow morning — the first ninety minutes of work on the one thing, as specific steps.
Then tell me which item on my list I am keeping for emotional reasons rather than useful ones.