Transform Your MSP by Focusing on Your "One Thing", with Jay Papasan

[00:00:00] As you may know, it's my mission to interview 100 of the fastest growing and most interesting MSPs on the planet. What you may not know is I am distilling all of that knowledge into one battle-tested book. If you'd like early access to that book, make sure to click the link below. So the simple act of saying, when am I going to do this? And then adding it to your calendar makes you almost three times more likely to do it.

[00:00:27] So when we say it's the surprisingly simple truth, that's what we're talking about. Just go to your calendar on the thing that's really your most important to you right now, this month, this week, and make an appointment with yourself to do it. Hey guys, Damien Stevens, host of MSP Mindset. Today I got the blessing of interviewing Jay Papasan, and he is the author of multiple bestselling books, including The One Thing.

[00:00:57] We get into everything from why do we not really understand our purpose and how does that shape what we do to how to make this practical, block out our time and get more done with more clarity and spend more time with the ones we love. If that's interesting to you, make sure you don't miss out on our conversation. Jay, I'm super excited to talk to you today.

[00:01:21] And one of the things I wanted, we're going to talk about The One Thing, of course, but I want to actually talk about, I think most people, including me, as I was reading this book for the second time, kind of thought of it as a productivity system. And it is. But one thing that I think I missed in maybe the first go-round was how you connect to purpose. So tell me more about that.

[00:01:46] I think we've been billed as like one of the bestselling productivity books of all time. And my coach and our head coach in our organization, Jordan Freed, he refuses to label it that because of what you're talking about. And we talk about when you study the most successful people in the world and you see how productive they are, it's a little bit like the iceberg phenomenon. Like what we're seeing is the productivity above the surface and how they're doing it.

[00:02:15] But below the surface is to be productive in our nomenclature. Activity is activity. Productivity is acting on your priorities. So to be productive, you have to understand what your actual priorities are. And the ultimate way to get clear on your priorities is to have a clear sense of purpose. So you think about the iceberg, you have the productivity above it, but right below the surface is this sense of clear priorities.

[00:02:43] And under that is this sense of purpose. And so Jordan with me and with other people, he'll just say, I use it as a diagnostic tool. Someone has a productivity problem, I start asking about their priorities. If they're unclear about their priorities, I start going down to purpose.

[00:02:58] Because ultimately, if you know your true north is to be the best dad you can be or to be the best consultant you can be or to save the whales or whatever it is, like that thing that is driving all your effort, that yes, the magnitude of it allows you to say no to almost everything else. And it's magical when you can find it. So I want to stop before we get to purpose and talk about priorities, as you said.

[00:03:26] But I believe you cite how priority was a different thing. And it's singular. I know. And I mean, you can call me out on it, too. Like when you say it in the plural, the point is we do have multiple priorities, but we can only focus on one at a time. Right. Very interesting. And the idea of the word itself, the root, is a Latin word that means first.

[00:03:54] So try saying first in plural. Like it's actually hard to say. And it doesn't make any sense. My first, I have many firsts. Yeah. Right. But ultimately, it's getting back to that idea of the singular priority at any given moment that you need to be focused on that will give you kind of the maximum impact. Yeah. I love taking it back to impact.

[00:04:19] So I think for me, a lot of productivity systems, some of them teach maybe the top three. And then just the title of this book, the one thing kind of like I feel like I'm going to break out in an allergic reaction. Like how do I get it to one? So I'm sure that it is probably tied to purpose. But for those that are just, you know, that haven't read the book, they're kind of like one thing. How do I even start to approach that?

[00:04:46] Well, there's like a back story you can cut if you don't like it. But when we were writing the book, the core tools at the center of the book, we have some set up to get there, but it's called the focus in question. And it's based on the idea of Pareto's principle, right? That the majority of our results come from the minority of what we do, often put as the 80-20 principle. 80% of what you want comes from 20% of what you do.

[00:05:11] The book is about taking that idea to its farthest possible extension. What's the 20% of the 20% until you get to one thing? What's the lead domino for your results that you're seeking? I don't want to just say productivity because it could be a great marriage. It could be your health, right? Other things. And so the focusing question says, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or necessary? Mm-hmm. And it's not two things. It's one thing.

[00:05:41] And your brain's surprisingly good at identifying in your current state of knowledge, awareness, like what that one thing would be. And the rest of the question just says it's got to be the biggest lever in your life, right? In terms of it does magnitudes. It's the keystone thing that opens up all these other activities. And I was worried people wouldn't know how to answer the question. Yeah.

[00:06:04] And after teaching this to tens of thousands of people through keynotes and training, whatever, like they've told me it's like, oh, they know the answer. They're just not asking the question because they're too busy. Yeah. So you take that one step further. We have a whole chapter on discipline and the idea of forming habits.

[00:06:22] So, like, if you knew that your one thing for health was to have a very certain diet or to sleep some number of hours a day or workout, whatever your one thing was, like, wouldn't it make sense to make that a habit? Mm-hmm. To build it into a routine, which takes work, so that you then have a habit that works for you. Mm-hmm.

[00:07:15] No. He just focused and built really purposeful habits over a period of time, and those habits are driving almost all the results over time. Yes. So now the story. We were preparing to sell the book to booksellers. There's an event called Book Expo in New York. And if you're a book nerd, it's like nirvana. And all of the new books and some of the classics, like you go publisher to publisher to publisher, and they just give you books.

[00:07:42] And at the end of the rows, they have FedEx stations because people are getting so many free books that they go to the end of the row, and they just have them shipped to their office. That's awesome. Ha! You know, like as a book nerd, I mean, that's heaven. So we were there, and we were debating between two titles, the one thing or the success habit. And this is before Atomic Habits was out there, right? Mm-hmm.

[00:08:05] And so we kicked it around, and like 89% of professional book people said, success habit. That'll kill. That's what you should call it. Right. And we came back to our offices with our publishers, Gary and me, and our head marketing person, a woman named Ellen Curtis. And she's like, the data's clear, but if I look at two books, the success habit is like, that sounds hard, and I'm already doing a lot of hard stuff. Yes.

[00:08:35] But like the one thing, it's like I'm a little skeptical, but like I'm going to pick that up because I want to know if there's something simpler I can be doing. And so we went against the data, which I'm sure some of your people running software companies and stuff are horrified. What? You're going against the data? But our hearts were more attached to this idea that it's fundamentally about identifying that one thing. Yeah. And that is the provocative thing. Well, what is yours? What is your one thing for your life, for your job?

[00:09:03] So that's kind of the back story of how the title got really locked into that over time. A little bit of a book nerdy story, too. This episode is brought to you by Servocity. I started Servocity because I was an MSP that lost data because I thought backup success meant I could recover. And boy, was I wrong.

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[00:09:53] Now, you can do that by either hiring Servocity or we'll take all the workload of managing backups off of your plate and test your backups daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly. Or you can keep the tech stack you have in place, your existing backup into your provider and steal my 18 years of knowledge and download that process and add that to your operational maturity today. Speaking of stories, tell me about this handwritten essay that was really the genesis of this.

[00:10:24] Yeah, yeah. So at the time we were preparing, I guess before we even knew this book existed, I was working as the head of education for Keller Williams. And for those who don't know me, it's like used to be this tiny Texas company, and now we've got about 170,000 agents in 52 countries. We're the largest company under one brand. So running education for that was kind of a big job, and I was growing into it.

[00:10:49] And so I was still leaning into my writing partner, Gary, and I'd just written a course around what does it take for someone who's self-employed? How successful do they have to become to earn their first full-time hire, right? That's a big moment in time when you make that. It's not just a contractor. It's not a VA. Like, I'm going to have my first employee. And it's scary, too. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I remember that moment well. Yeah, yeah. You stared at the ceiling the night before, right?

[00:11:19] I'm going to make this offer, and it's so much money. And the night after. Yeah. And so, yeah, for a little while until you knew you got it right, hopefully. Some people don't get it right, and then they never do it again. That's a longer story. But Gary said, I love it. Like, we walked through the content, and I'd captured some of the right stuff. He goes, let me put an essay on the front of this. I want to do some inspiration.

[00:11:42] So over the weekend, he wrote like a 14-page essay, all handwritten, and it was called The Power of One. And in our industry, real estate, the one thing professionally is lead generation. Mm-hmm. The most successful business, when you look across all of them, the one thing they have in common is that they are always out there looking for their next customer, even if they're servicing one. Mm-hmm. They're not doing that roller coaster.

[00:12:08] I have to get a customer, put all of my effort, and be amazing, and then I have no business and have to start the whole process over. Yeah. They just consistently do it. And he had advocated first two, then three, and then ultimately four hours a day. Like, half of every day should go into this one thing. Mm-hmm. And the reality is you tell someone four hours, they're going to give you some subset of that in reality, but it sets them up for success.

[00:12:43] Mm-hmm.

[00:13:08] And so, all of his success really did authentically tie back to it. And we know this. A lot of books are a big idea that someone is very good at telling you about, but it may not be authentic to their journey. Yeah. And this had both. I'm not saying those are bad books, but to have both is a gift. Yes. So, that started us on a four-and-a-half-year journey to research and validate our hypothesis around what this could be.

[00:13:36] And we had two researchers, one that was asked to research our outline, find stories and research and quotes to back it up. And then we had this really cynical, not cynical, skeptical individual that we hired, and she was amazing. And we just said, I want you to go prove us wrong. Just go find all of the counter arguments so that we're informed and not just kind of, you know, smoking our own stuff.

[00:14:00] But that was kind of the journey started with that, just something he ripped off over the weekend, this little essay called The Power of One. And that was our working title for a while. But this is data that we did take. And everybody said, if I saw a book called The Power of One, I would have thought it was a religious book. And we're like, maybe we'll pivot off of that. Yeah. Yeah. What did you have to say no to? I'll tell you how we didn't say no.

[00:14:26] You know, we set out to write that book, got about a year and a half into it, and the Great Recession hit. So we had to say no to this book. So I remember we're sitting in the room, and Gary just kind of asked, he goes, is this book really our one thing right now? I feel like we have a duty and an obligation to teach our people how to navigate a true recession. And at that point, I mean, I think Gary's been through like seven now in his career.

[00:14:57] And he's a model builder. So he observes what, not what's, everyone is unique often in its cause, but they're very similar in how they play out. And we just wrote a book called Shift. So we paused this book, even though we were super passionate, and spent about seven months furiously writing a book called Shift, how tough, top agents tackle tough times. A little alliteration there that's almost a tongue twister for me.

[00:15:27] And that book drove all of our course writing and everything for the next four years. And what's interesting is that was the right thing to do. It was our one thing. And the Great Recession has how we went from number four to, so I said earlier, I said three, it was number four, because this is when it started. We went from number four to number one through the Great Recession. And then we created such a lead in terms of agent count that it would have been as big as the number three company in our space. Wow.

[00:15:56] And so, like, leveraging a downturn and understanding what the priorities are, which is a very one thing question. Like, what are the things I have to focus on and in what order? It was a very one thing book. But that was our distraction. So we had to say no to this book because of the market. And as soon as we could, we came back to it and finished it. I love that. But here's the intent of your question.

[00:16:20] To write a book that long, once we got through the research, we would generally block off from 10 to 2 or 10 to 4, four days a week. I was running departments. He was, you know, chairman of the board. We had other stuff to do. Right. And I will address people who've read the book. Like, we tell you, start your day with your one thing. What we found, because we had staffs, if we locked ourselves in the room at 830 and tried to write for four hours, people were knocking on the door.

[00:16:50] Because they needed answers in order to do their jobs. And so we called it clearing the decks. We just said we would give ourselves a couple of hours in the morning. We could check in with our people. If there was a personnel emergency, we could deal with it. And then we would go lock ourselves in a room. And we went to the basement. We went away from everyone else. We were out of traffic. And other than coming out for lunch in the bathroom, people just didn't see us.

[00:17:16] And so we said no to everything we could in order to create that space to write that book. And it was grueling. You know, it took us a, once we got to the writing part, a good 18 months. And there were several rewrites. And at the very end, we had to cut 40% of the book. Oh, wow. It was too long, right? It was like 400 and something pages. And Ray Bard, the publisher at the time, he's like, hey, guys, I love you. The book's great. But when someone buys a book called The One Thing, they don't expect a doorstop.

[00:17:46] So go back and cut stuff. And we're like, oh, but all of our darlings. But it made the book better. I love the practicality of having to clear the decks because you're running a real company. What you can't do is get distracted and then lose the whole day. Yeah. So we were always counting down to our writing time. And we talk about that in the book. We had a bunker. We found a place that was out of the traffic. There were very few people who even had a key card to get into that suite.

[00:18:15] So we really tried to minimize distractions once we went there. Like I said, we were most vulnerable when we left that suite to go to the bathroom because someone could bump into us in the hallway. It's funny you say that, though, because it's so easy for you to leave a tab open and an email pop in or somebody to pop by your desk or just, you know, our phones. Like there's so many of these things.

[00:18:41] And then you're just off in another, you know, you've lost that deep flow, that deep work. And especially when you're working with somebody else, now you're wasting their time. Oh, it's hard. It's hard. And, you know, there are people like I'm holding up my phone. People can't see that they're listening. But like people, they've invested millions and millions, probably billions into making these very attractive to us. And all the bells and whistles of the emails and the Twitters and the ticky tocks, all that stuff.

[00:19:10] Like it's very, very attractive to our brains. The reality is when someone says, have you got a minute? Even if it really does take a minute to answer that question, it takes as long as 30 minutes for you to get your full focus back. So we talk about this, this idea that multitasking is a lie in the book. Yes. And I can't tell you that we avoid it all the time. That would be a lie.

[00:19:37] But when we're doing our most important task, we really do try to, the third step in our four-step process, you build a bunker, you fill it up with everything you need, the supplies, and then you sweep for mines. And for most people, for me, it's putting my phone on do not disturb. It's this thing, yep. Yep. So that it's not, you know, those little notifications, which most of them were even turned off, aren't distracting me.

[00:20:03] And so when we're writing for like four hours, the reality is because of the nature of our jobs, we sometimes will say, hey, let's take a quick 15-minute break, and we will literally go triage. And that, you know, I think I wrote about that chapter in the book, and I used a submarine metaphor.

[00:20:23] Like when a submarine's going really, really deep in all those movies, and they're saying, we're beyond structural capacity, and you start to hear the, like, the longer you're in your time block, it starts to feel like you're in that sub that's going too deep. Mm-hmm. Right? That leaks are springing. And that's just the mental pressure of your, I don't think it's FOMO, but I do think it's like this fear that you're missing something. Something important is happening without my leadership. Mm-hmm.

[00:20:49] Or, like, if you're self-employed, like, there's a client waiting for me in my inbox right now. Yeah. Urgent. I need you right now. Yeah. Yeah. Urgent. Urgent. Urgent. Urgent.

[00:21:19] Urgent. Urgent. We run. Urgent. Urgent. In this, my husband, our experience. Urgent. It really isn't really the only way you do taking my approach, you know, but get up to all it at some very small business, I don't acknowledge you're making up to that just really the purpose of the world is like we get up because, like, the thing in the city where you've Three wonderful kids. And I do want to be a great dad, but that doesn't usually put any money in the bank. And so I've got to, you know, I've got to mix the professional side and, you know, what I call staying married, being a good husband.

[00:21:48] And, you know, we all have different things. So I know in the book you talk about, you know, one thing in each area of your life, which I think is a big takeaway because I think there's too many things that are like get it down to three things or something like that across your entire life. But how do you help or recommend that you uncover your purpose? Because like you said, if you're off there, the rest of this doesn't matter. And I've kind of seen this more of as a purpose system. Yeah. I love that you picked up on that.

[00:22:19] It was the sticky widget, right, for people. The research I read said that like less than 20 percent of adults have a clear sense of purpose. And the vast majority of those were deeply, devoutly religious. And so you can they didn't explicitly say it, but like my purpose is here to bring glory to whoever I worship. Right. Like some version of that, which is great. That's like what a gift to them.

[00:22:47] But there's very few people who walk around when they're a kid saying I'm going to be an astronaut. And my my ultimate destiny is to take man to Mars. Right. Whatever that is. They don't have that clarity of vision. Yeah. So when you pick it apart, like the simplest definition I can give you for purpose is what is that direction you want to be going? Not as a human doing, but as a human being. Who do you want to ultimately become and why?

[00:23:15] Why is that important to you? And what that does is it yields this sense of internal motivation. And we know that internal is so much better than anything that's external, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And so you're trying to tap in to what I would tell you is already there and understanding the decisions that I've been making. There's some that I regret and there's some that I rejoice in. And what's what's the thread? How do I decipher this?

[00:23:47] So when I was writing the book, I didn't have a clear sense of purpose. Here I am, you know, approaching, you know, like early 40s. And I'm like, man, this could be half my life. Yeah. And I didn't have a compass. I love that you're open. Like, I don't love that was the case, but I love that, you know, the author of the book didn't have it all figured out. Oh, God, no. Gary kind of did, but he had some real hardship early in his life that forced him to figure it out.

[00:24:16] I'll tell you the story, then go back to Gary's. I'll give you Gary's and give you mine as examples, not that they're what other people should copy. Sure. But there was a book called The Happiness Hypothesis, and I believe the author's name is Jonathan Fore, and it's weird, like F-E-O-R, maybe. But I think it's pronounced Fore. And he was going through all of these different religions, and it was a very high-level philosophical book.

[00:24:41] I enjoyed reading it, but there was a story he told that I labeled the rider and the elephant. And it was just a passage that I brought into the writing room, and I ended up using in a lot of my speeches. I don't even remember if it made it into the book. But the idea is that if you can imagine a child riding an elephant through the jungle, right? We've all seen it on National Geographic or one of those documentaries. He asked the question, you know, the kid's like 40 pounds. The elephant's like four or five tons.

[00:25:12] The elephant is following the rider's instructions, the little tapping the bamboo pole on the ear or whatever. But like, is there anything the rider could do to stop the elephant from going where the elephant wanted to go but the rider didn't? And now you're just getting into a physics problem. 40-pound child on four-ton elephant. Like, there's nothing. Ultimately, the elephant is in charge. The elephant always goes where it wants to go. It just chooses to go where the rider wants to go. Mm-hmm.

[00:25:40] And has said that metaphor here is that your heart is the elephant and your head is the rider. We think we're in charge, but it's actually what's in our chest that's driving all of our decision-making, and can we tap into it? And that was a great relief to me. Yeah. Because I read that, and I was like, well, maybe I'm not lost. You know, if the elephant's been in charge, like, I've been on this path for a reason. Now I just have to get the rider to look up and say, what are the breadcrumbs that I've not been paying attention to?

[00:26:10] And that ultimately led me to, I realized the things I would most regret, right? Right? The things that when you say, well, I usually ask someone, they said, I really want this. And I said, well, what happens if you fail? Mm-hmm. That's like my favorite coaching question. When they say something aspirational, great. Well, what happens if you fail? Well, if there's not an emotional pain there, it's aspirational. It's not coming from that deep place. They haven't connected it yet, at least.

[00:26:39] And for me, it was failing my wife and my kids. And so, like, literally, my first incarnation was to be the best husband and father I could be. Right. And I've got tattoos on my forearms, my first domino, two number ones, people point out. And I'm like, the first, first one is I got to be the best husband because I want to role model that to my kids. And then I want to be the best father because I know if I fail at those things, I won't feel good about anything else I did.

[00:27:09] And so that was really something that helped me understand if I needed motivation, could I still do the thing? I was having to write a book about commercial real estate that I didn't want to write. It wasn't a market for. I knew it wouldn't sell. Like, every argument went to the wayside because we just had to do it. And I told my wife driving home, I just said, I'm going to interview the co-author, Buddy Norman. He's super experienced. I'm just going to capture his thoughts and make it happen fast.

[00:27:36] And she said, like, a good frigging partner, you know, I could have, you know, punched through a wall at this moment when she said it. She goes, you tell your wife and kids that you're a professional writer. It sounds a lot like you're preparing to mail it in. Wow. And it just hit me in the gut. And I was like, you're right. Like, if I make that choice, I'm diminished in terms of their respect for me. And I don't know if you've seen the research.

[00:28:06] When you stop to respecting, ultimately, you go from respect to scorn. With a spouse, divorce is happening. And so that's the love and respect. But respect is really the thing in there. And it's like, wow, okay. So I made a choice. And I ended up writing the best dadgum commercial real estate book I could. And it won an award. And so for me, that's where I tapped in. And later, you know, I found out more about core values. We did research.

[00:28:36] When we rewrite the book, we will start people usually with core values. And I have my top three impact family abundance. And I just, any decision has to score a nine out of 10, a big decision. And that serves as an active compass. Because connecting it to the whole husband-father thing can be kind of an intellectual exercise. But I can just really quickly go, will this make a big impact for me, for others, for like, yes or no? And how can I imagine it?

[00:29:05] Will it keep me with or away from my family? Right. And does it create abundance? Like, I used to have wealth there. And that was more about me. But the longer I live and am successful, the more I want to create abundance, not just for my family, but for a lot of people. And so I just score it out. And it has to be a high score for me to pivot and go that direction. So that's kind of where we sit today. Like, the gateway to, I believe, understanding your purpose is to identify your core values.

[00:29:34] And we force people in our training to go one, two, three. If you could only live one core value, what's it going to be? If you get two, what's that? And then when you're making a big decision, you revisit that. So on the top of all of my goals, my wife and I, we have our core values present with us all the time when we're goal setting so that our goals are in alignment with our values. And that ultimately leads us to our purpose. So I didn't quite tell Gary's story, but we don't have to go down there if we don't want to. No, I love that.

[00:30:04] I feel like it's easy. I love your story about the heart versus the head, right? Because it's very easy. Yeah, the elephant and the rider. That's a big one. Yeah, very easy to see a 40-pound child on a 4-ton elephant. And I look back a lot of my life and I'm like, that's what's going on. Like, I'm just running around, but I don't know why. Yeah. And I think it's also easy to blame yourself, you know, because you weren't 20 or 21. Like, it's one thing when you don't know what you're doing at that age.

[00:30:33] Like, I know I'm old enough to call them kids now, but I know these kids that are like 20 or 21, they're like, I don't know what we do with my wife. I'm like, most of us at 40 don't. No. Yeah. So I think that takes a little of the pressure off and maybe gives you a little bit of grace to say there's a framework here and I can think through it. And it's a journey, right? Just pay attention. Like, if you don't know the answers, the people who know you best probably do. Yeah. Right?

[00:31:01] And because they're seeing us from the outside, right? They see our actions without the benefit of our intentions and we color everything we do with our intentions. Yeah. So we give ourselves a real nice grading curve on our own life and they just see the results of what we do. And they can, I think a lot of times our best friends, our spouses, our parents can clue us in. I'll give one caveat having worked with, we coach a lot of folks.

[00:31:28] One of the places your heart can confuse you is if it's really important for you to please others. Oh, yeah. So a lot of people live someone else's life instead of their own. Their heart is pulling them in a direction, but their heart is also saying, I don't want to disappoint my immigrant parents. And I'm supposed to be the, I'm just going straight into a trope, like this professional or entrepreneur or a doctor. And I'm like, that is my, like, that's what they want for me.

[00:31:57] Therefore, I have to do it. And I've known so many people who were living for their parents, for their spouse, and honestly, some people for their kids in some ways that they weren't actually living their own life. And we mentioned Bronnie Ware's book, The Five Regrets of the Dying. Like, the number one is they didn't live their own life. Yes. Yeah. Right. So that is one of the questions, like, well, you're coaching someone or thinking yourself, like, is that my heart talking about my journey?

[00:32:26] Or is it connecting to not disappointing someone I truly love? And there's usually a way to make that work. But ultimately, you have to live your journey. I love that. It's easy as a people-pleaser to get lost in that. Well, gosh, man, I work with a lot of salespeople. And that's a big one, right? And I'm there. I don't like to disappoint people. I don't have a problem not pleasing them. I'm a little bit more less social on that line. Right. But, yeah, yeah, it's a big one out there for people.

[00:32:56] And that's where, like, we talk about it in The Thieves of Productivity, the inability to say no is often driven by this sense that by saying no, I'm going to create some sort of gap in the relationship. I want to – you covered so many things I want to unpack there. But I was going to ask this later, but I feel like it was the timing because you're talking about your family and asking others because it's – you're coloring your life with intention. They see the actual results. I want to talk about cheating on your time.

[00:33:25] Yeah. That one really hit me. So can you explain that one? Cheating on your time? Yeah, cheating on your time where, you know, you've gone past that and you really are working into the evening and you're doing these other things. You're bleeding into your family time. You know, your one thing is so focused. I know that ties to counterbalance. But I know there's a part. Maybe I'm getting the wrong words, but the cheating part. Yeah. Well, we have this whole thing about time blocking.

[00:33:53] And we want people to do their most important work early in the day. And then they can do the less important stuff. And you have to put constraints around your work. Yes. I know that I'm trying to think of the – there's like some phenomenon, but it was actually just a joke. I'm trying to think of it. Somebody's law. But that work will fill the time that you give it, basically. And it's pretty true in life, though. It's an observation.

[00:34:22] It was meant to be comic. But you look up and if you put constraints about when you're going to work on these things, you actually enhance your productivity in interesting ways. It's counterintuitive. It's so counterintuitive. Yeah, I know. It's very counterintuitive. I'm a huge advocate for batching repetitive activities, right? Give myself a small window to clear out my social DMs.

[00:34:51] Give myself a small window to clear out my inbox. And then it becomes like for me a game. All right. I've got 20 minutes over my lunch break. I'm going to quickly go into my inbox. And now you can't just like, oh, I should file this and everything. Like I've got 28,000 unread emails in my inbox right now because I'm not playing inbox zero. I'm not.

[00:35:15] What I'm doing is I'm going in there in that time I have and asking what are the most important emails and can I address all of these in the time I'm giving myself to do it? And I often will literally, I love the little feature on my Apple Watch where I can say set a seven minute timer, set a 20 minute timer, and then it just starts vibrating. And I play the game of how much can I do in that block of time. And if I'm working from my priorities, the ones I don't get to can wait until the next time block.

[00:35:42] And so the idea of I'm going into my creative time block, I set some sort of goal for it. But I'm just really mostly like if I put in the activity now, then I'm not doing it later in the day. Yes. And so if you're an entrepreneur, it's very, very hard if you don't have someone in your life to help hold you accountable to do it that way. But I had a good friend, Rick Villani. He was one of our co-authors.

[00:36:10] And I can remember we coached him because he was self-employed. He's running a construction company. And it was hurting his family. And he goes like, I want you to set aside an office space in your home. You can't just do it in the kitchen, whatever. So you go to your office at home and now you're at work and set a time where you're not at work and your laptop stays in that space. And if necessary, he is a contractor.

[00:36:37] I said, put a lock on the door and give your wife the key. And he put his limits around, I think, 830. So the kids were off to school and he gave himself till six. And I remember him coming back like six months later going, my life has changed. That simple idea of putting boundaries, constraints on my time, completely arbitrary. But what I found myself doing is now there's no I can do it later. Yes. I can do it after the kids go to sleep. Yes.

[00:37:07] And honestly, after about six or seven, there are rare exceptions, right? True emergencies that can be handled after business. Everything can wait. Like there is no client call that is better at 9 p.m. When you're tired, your kids are screaming, your spouse is yelling at you or angry with you or frustrated with you than it would be to say, you know, have an autoresponder, you know, and teach the world.

[00:37:35] I will be replying back to you promptly by 8 a.m. I couldn't agree more. If you can have that morning expectation and train the world, they just know that it's in Jay's inbox. He'll reply back to me in the morning. And it'll worry them if I don't. That's what I want is to train the world that they can work on my time. Yeah, you teach people how to treat you.

[00:37:56] And if you respond quickly, what I was doing inadvertently was teaching them that email was almost, you know, some kind of instant message slack, you know, right? Boom, boom, boom, boom, back and forth ping pong. And that makes it worse. It's like text messages when you're texting your good friend and you see the little dots going and you know that they're writing. Like, that's not how email works, folks. No, we don't need to set that expectation.

[00:38:25] It's not how voicemails work, even though I think the world's been trained now that if you're of a certain age, leaving a voicemail is where messages go to die. Yes. Nobody picks up anymore. But I've given this advice to senior leaders that are they come in and they want to prove themselves. And as business people, we want to do that with our clients. And you say stupid stuff. I mean, just dumbass stuff like, call me anytime. Yep. Anytime. Saturday, Sunday, 20.

[00:38:53] And that's like a script that they gave these people that's going to completely ruin their life. Yes. And the irony is, is if you set expectations, you know, Damien, I can't wait to be working with you. It's going to be so much fun. And I just want to set expectations so that you're not expecting something. It's like I generally knock off for the day between six and seven every day.

[00:39:19] And so if something's hitting my inbox late enough that I'm not going to get there, you can count on me replying in the morning. And if it's an emergency, I would like you to text me. But like if it's not, just realize that you can count on me getting back to you in a reasonable framework on Slack and email. I just set that expectation. And if you start living that expectation, because people will ask you to cheat. There are aggressive people out there. And they'll start texting you.

[00:39:48] And you have to then set a boundary. It's like, hey, man, I hear you. I've been through this before. A lot of my other clients have felt the same way you do, that this needs to be addressed now. And here's what they found. They found that all the people who actually fix this are at home having dinner with their families. Yes. And they will be appreciative when we call them in the morning to book getting this fixed. So for now, we're going to let this rest, know that I'm on it.

[00:40:16] And this will get fixed within whatever. But you have to demonstrate. Like that's the old feel, felt, found. That's a construct. Like I hear you and I understand how you're feeling. Other people have felt the same way. They discover and you just work through that to get them back on board. Yes. But if you don't stand your ground, they're going to train you to be available 24 hours a day. I love that. I have read so many.

[00:40:42] And I won't name them all because there's for time's sake, but also just productivity systems. I know that I feel like this is a lot more than a productivity system. But one of the things that seems key to me is the time blocking. Yes. So I have implemented it. I'm living it now. It's life changing, especially when you say I did that one thing. And I think there's a corollary. If I had three things, I think you'd have a much tougher time trying to time block it and those sort of things.

[00:41:12] So help everybody understand. Help me understand why is it so important? What happens if I let go of that? Yeah. So when I first interviewed to work with Gary, I was working in the building doing research. And he discovered I'd been in publishing. I walked into his office. And this is like in 2002. And so at that time, I kept a calendar. I had like a checkbook size week at a glance.

[00:41:41] And he goes, do you mind if I look at your calendar? Which is a really weird question to ask. Right. But I handed it to him. And he flipped through it. And he just asked me to explain like what was on the calendar. And I'm kind of an introvert. So like I would write down my goals for the week on there. That was my productivity system at the time. And then I would kind of assign when I was going to work on those things. And that was a test. And I didn't know it.

[00:42:07] And what he wrote about in the book and he had observed because the only jobs he ever had were with millionaires, multimillionaires, before he became an entrepreneur. And he just observed that the most successful people in the world tend to make appointments with themselves to do their most important work. Most people's calendars are dominated with appointments with other people. Meetings and all of that stuff. They're not actually making a meeting just for them to do the thing.

[00:42:36] And so at its heart, time blocking is when you know what your one thing is, go to your calendar and assign time to do it. And very late in the process, we had to add it to a reprint. I discovered a study where they asked three groups, a control group, a motivation group, and an intention group to exercise for 20 minutes a day. And they wanted to know, like, how do you get people to do that? So the control group, hey, guys, go exercise for 20 minutes a day.

[00:43:06] We'll check in in two weeks. The motivation group, getting in the right order, was given a pamphlet on how 20 minutes of cardio would impact their health. You know, all of the benefits, right? Longevity, energy, better sex life. And they're selling it hard. I'm motivating you to go do it. The intention group was the third group. They were given the same motivational pamphlet, but then they had to make one additional step.

[00:43:32] They had to make an intention on these days, at this time, at this place, I will exercise. So they had to navigate their future, figure out when and where they were going to make that commitment. It's pretty much a calendar block. Yeah. Right? So if you put all those elements together, it sounds a lot like an appointment with yourself to do it. The first two groups averaged 38% to 35% actually did the work.

[00:44:01] The last group was about 91%. Wow. So the simple act of saying, when am I going to do this? And then adding it to your calendar makes you almost three times more likely to do it. So when we say it's the surprisingly simple truth, that's what we're talking about. And just go to your calendar on the thing that's really your most important to you right now, this month, this week, and make an appointment with yourself to do it.

[00:44:29] I went back to these phones with all the billions of investment. Like, one of the only alerts I get is from my calendar. And 15 minutes before that appointment, it'll show up and remind me it's about time to shift your brain from what you're doing now to doing this other thing. And we're really good at following it. Yes. So we're stacking the deck in our favor. And we talked earlier about bunkers and all of that. Like, you can go into, like, setting the time block is one thing.

[00:44:59] Honoring it is another. But you'd be surprised how much success just comes from what are, like, my core priorities or priority for this period of time. And does my calendar reflect that? Yeah. And I usually ask people the question, you know, if you show me your calendar, I will tell you your priorities. And honestly, you show me enough of it, I'll tell you your values too. You say you love your family. That's not how you spend your time. Yeah. It's very convicting. Yes. Yeah.

[00:45:30] I want to be an example for my kids, not a warning. How do you run a company that way? It's probably the way I want to bring that. Because there's so many things, like, I want my, you know, now it's like I'm time blocking me and doing these things. I'm like, ooh, I want to help those around me, my team, this and that, and other folks. But there's obviously some element of I need to, they've got to buy in. They've got to have the belief.

[00:45:55] So, like, there's all these systems out there, the traction, there's the, oh, gosh, is it KPRs? I'm trying to think of it, right? KPRs and scaling up and all the different. There's a lot of commonality in them, right? The 12-week year, I can think of all of them that people in my world have tried. When we do, like, workshops and we help companies adopt this, small and large, like, we first focus on, do you know what the company's one thing is?

[00:46:22] Like, do we actually understand what your company priorities are for this year, right? We call it a GPS. Goals, priorities, and then steps or, you know, strategies to do that thing. We try to keep it very simple on one page. Do you know who's responsible for them? So, I don't know how big the teams are for the people you serve, but so many businesses are in the less than 50 category. Would that be safe? Yeah, yeah.

[00:46:50] There's a few in the hundreds, but most are going to be under 50. Yeah. So, if you've got a sense of what your goals are for the year for the company, so you have your business plan. Now, like, we advocate a one-page priority worksheet for every employee. It's called a 411. And they're asked to put, based on where we're going as a company and your role in it, what are your goals for the year? And then each month, they say, based on my annual goals, what do I need to achieve this month?

[00:47:20] And then based on each month, for the four weeks on average, right, that's the 411, four weeks, one month, one year on one page, what do I have to do this week to be on track for my monthly goals? And it plays into this greater concept of goal setting to the now, which is working backwards from a goal. You're chunking it down into something you can actually do and time block in your week. So, from a management standpoint, you have direct reports. And they have direct reports.

[00:47:51] So, it's about a 30-minute meeting once a week. You can also do it a little longer every other week. But we advocate that you meet with those direct reports and they are bringing their 411 to you. You're not building it for them. And it's your chance to check in. Are they actually focused on what they're supposed to be focused on? Do they know what the 20% is and what a task list is? Like, this is for the big rocks. It's not for everything. That's why it's on one page on one side.

[00:48:20] And so, it doesn't – I can usually knock out that part of it in the first 10 to 15 minutes if they know what they're doing. But then I can ask, like, how did you do last week? What are your goals for this week? Based on what's been happening, do you need support? Do you need training? Right? You can go to a few of those. How do you feel about all this? And you can kind of walk through a simple accountability meeting very rapidly. And it's just hard to do if you have 20 people reporting to you.

[00:48:47] So, like, best practices would be five to six at most. And then you need to start building some layering. I love a flat organization, but it creates real leadership challenges because you can't really follow that many people in a small company. So, the rhythm is – it's a weekly rhythm where they – you reconnect with your annual goals and how that connects to this week. And that's a muscle that gets really strong.

[00:49:12] I've been doing this every single week since, gosh, September is almost 24 years this week. And so, it's a muscle that gets stronger. Like, based on that goal, what do I have to do this week? And as you train people, you're training them in self-leadership. But it's a very simple system. And you can have scoreboards and all of the other things. That doesn't matter. But the heart of it, a productive company has productive people. Productivity is working on your priorities.

[00:49:40] So, do your people know their priorities? And the 411 system, I love it because it's simple. It's not terribly time-consuming. On a rough week, I do a group 411. I did it this week. We're coming off of a big event. And I just said, let's come together. And they were like, we should do this more often. I love hearing Natalie's priorities. And I love, like, it gave them more visibility. So, you can do that. But you also want the one-on-ones because that allows you to hear. But you know what? I'm not – I'm working at night. How do I navigate that?

[00:50:09] They'll be more vulnerable to you. So, anyway, that's the system. Is there – like, did I capture it in the simple enough terms for people that are jogging with their dog right now? Yeah, no, no. I think what – I think you did for me at least because it's what I am guilty of with other things. Here's this amazing new concept or book. And then maybe I implement it. And then, you know, if you don't have the buy-in, I can hit it at others in my team. I'm like, what? Why? What are we doing?

[00:50:37] I don't understand what the 411 is. I don't understand why we're doing this. And, for example, I love how you – the thing I struggled with for the longest time was connecting the someday big long purpose down to this month or this week or today, especially. Yeah. And as a visionary, I was like, we're going to do this. Like, that part wasn't the hard part. And sometimes I could figure out what to do today, but the things in between. And then if I couldn't do that, how was I going to do that for my team?

[00:51:06] Well, as a founder, like, you tend to be a visionary. That is the thing that distinguishes leaders from other people is that they can see things that others can't. And they often can paint a path to get there. Yeah. Or they're willing to go on faith, right? But working backwards from a someday goal, like, it's not rocket science. Like, if someday – like, let's just say that you want to serve 100,000 leaders in your space, like some crazy goal.

[00:51:37] Then I would just say, like, based on that crazy goal, what do you think is the number one thing you'd have to achieve in five years to feel like you were on track for that someday goal? And someday is purposely out there in the yonder. Yeah. Because that allows you to think really big. If you put seven years, people start going into their analytical. Yes. But, like, it allows you to think really big and then ask a big question. Right? I want to write the number one bestselling book of all time in this space. Great. In five years, where do you think you have to be?

[00:52:04] And they might say, well, I probably have to have a polished manuscript in five years. Awesome. Great. Well, based on your five-year goal, not your someday, your five-year, where would you have to be at the end of this year to feel like you're on track for that? Right? And be like, wow, I'd have to have an outline and maybe 20% of it done. Like, that's just math. Who knows what it would be? So great. So for you to have 120 pages and an outline by the end of this year, what would you have to achieve this month to be on track for that annual goal?

[00:52:32] And the closer you move back to the now, right? Right? A annual goal to a monthly, a monthly to a weekly, a weekly to a daily. It's really easy to kind of see the connections. Right? By the time you get to the day, it's like, well, if I have to connect with 20 potential customers, you know, over the next five days, I can just do the, I need to connect with this many today. Period. Like, it gets clearer and clearer. And people say, but how do I know I'm on path?

[00:52:58] Well, if I look forward in life and say, I'm going to go to Mars, I can see a thousand potential paths there. But if you ask like, hey, Damien, how did you go from being X 10 years ago to today? You're going to rattle off a series of milestones. Well, I had this teacher that was inspired me. And then I had a boss that taught me this skill. And then I did this as a contractor. And then I launched my business. And then we hit this revenue mark. And boom, here I am. Like, when you look backwards, you see the milestones that mattered.

[00:53:28] What we're doing is tricking our brain into going to the future and asking what would those milestones be? And honestly, the five-year often is very much guesswork. But like, after a year, you're going to get that dialed in. After two years, it'll be very dialed in. Because you'll see what you actually do accomplish in this place on the path. And then you make adjustments. It's not like you're like chiseling that into stone in your lobby and you have to stick to it. You're going to adjust. Yeah.

[00:53:57] And I find that as a human, I go, wow, look how much I've changed in the last five years or 10. And then I go, oh, and there's five or 10. You know, I can see like a small change, 10% or something. Like I want to change. But like, I think as a human, it's default mode is that there will be slight changes. But when you look back, you're like, there's these dramatic changes. People that have shaped me, spoken into me, taught me. Yeah. It's like that nephew they only see one time a year.

[00:54:27] And you're like, wow, you've grown. Yeah. If you were living in their house, you'd never say that because it happens so incrementally. Right? And so I think people in general vastly overestimate what they can achieve in one year. And then on the exact same scale, they vastly underestimate what they could achieve in as little as five. And the older I get, the faster five years feels to me.

[00:54:54] If I'm a five-year-old, that's my whole dead gum life. It feels like an eternity, and it should. But I'm in my 50s. I'm like, five years? Sure, let's knock that out. And so like depending on who you're talking to and how old they are, that five-year has a different scale. If you're talking to a 20-year-old, it's like a fourth of their life. It makes sense that it feels huge to them. And they're probably going to be more focused on that annual goal, right? Because that just doesn't feel like forever away.

[00:55:21] That's honestly the KPRs and the 12-week year. I feel like that was them just creating that extra – I mean, there are companies that work on a quarterly rhythm. But it also allows you to get to a finish line faster than a year because a lot of people just can't focus on something that far in the future. So with corporations that they have a quarterly rhythm, we just insert what are your quarterly goals before we get to the monthly, before we get to the weekly. But I don't start there. I get it.

[00:55:50] I need to know that there's a finish line so I feel like I'm making progress towards my goal. As an entrepreneur, the image in the book from E to P really resonated. And as a visual person as well. So tell us about E to P and how – How do we unpack that visual for people who are listening? Right. So I'll start with the letters. The idea – this actually dates back to the mid-'90s, actually, when Gary kind of articulated this thought. And we've evolved it over the years since I've been working with him.

[00:56:21] We fundamentally always talk to business owners. And so we talk about an entrepreneur. It's not someone who's good at everything. What distinguishes an entrepreneur is that they're willing to do everything. When you're launching a business, if you don't have a janitor, you grab the mop. Yeah. Right? You do it until you earn the right to pay someone else. So entrepreneurial is really about wherever your natural ceiling of achievement is. Mm-hmm.

[00:56:47] You go from being E, entrepreneurial, about how you approach your work to purposeful, right, which is a different mindset. How do I purposefully approach this task? And so when people are entrepreneurial, what will happen is they get going out of the gates. Like, I know how to do this. I know how to do this. And then, boom, they hit a ceiling of achievement where they don't know what they're doing. And they back up and they may hit it again. And sometimes people just quit and they look for greener pastures.

[00:57:17] The purposeful person will always hit some level of ceiling achievement. But they ask the question, if I'm going to do this thing because it matters, this is about being purposeful in the areas that matter, what's the biggest model I could currently adopt? Who knows more about the approach for this? Like, if I'm going to build a habit right now, I'm probably going to start with atomic habits because I know that he pulled from BJ Fogg, who is like one of the foremost people out there in tiny habits.

[00:57:45] And he also pulled from a few other things. But what he did was he was very good at describing it to a normal human being, right? He took the inarticulate and made it accessible. It's like right now, that's kind of the benchmark if you want to set a habit. Great. Great. I'm going to use the biggest model currently available because models have higher ceilings than our natural approach. So I think I asked you this before, but like if I'm on stage or whatever, I'll say how many of you have ever had a golf lesson?

[00:58:15] And usually about two-thirds of the room, right? Even if it's only going to Topgolf, right? And it's like, do you remember how they told you to hold a club? And you have to cross your pinky over the pointer finger on your other hand. Like it's completely unnatural. It is. And that's the point. Because if you held it naturally, your natural ceiling of achievement, the entrepreneurial way, like a baseball bat, you would not hit anything on the fairway. Right. Consistently, for sure.

[00:58:44] But when you use the right model, and almost every professional golfer uses some version of that model because that's what takes them as far as they can go with that piece of the puzzle. So I believe it's really just asking the question, because this is important to me, what is the biggest model that I could currently adopt for approaching this? And why wouldn't I do that? You don't have to go all the way to the finish line.

[00:59:13] But it also means, like you hear this with entrepreneurs, I'm reinventing my business. Why is that? Most of the time, it's because they weren't working from a big enough model. And I've been there. I went from seven employees to 44 in one week. And that was a massive growth spurt. And all of my models for my health, for like my commute, they just all broke at once because it was too much change. And the model I was running was not meant for that scale.

[00:59:43] But what's cool is, even though I have a smaller staff now, I'm still running it on the models I built for a staff of 44. And guess what? I've got all kinds of elbow room in those models. I'm not worried about them wearing out. So that's the E to P. Like, start with a model, a proven model for that approach, and it'll take you so much farther. Yeah. Just because what you're delivering may be unique, that business model or operating model, somebody's done the hard work. Take advantage of it, right?

[01:00:11] I don't completely believe there's nothing new in this world. But people have lived before us, right? And we're fools not to take advantage of that information. That's ego or laziness, honestly. Right? How much time does it take to go to the library? How much time does it take to call up an expert, to hire a coach that's been down this path and get you there faster? Exactly.

[01:00:39] Like, my coach asks me sometimes, he goes, is this one of those things, Jay, that you just have to learn the hard way? And I just want to flip him off. I'm like, that's such a mean question. I know exactly where you're going. But, like, I mean, that's my teenagers. They are at a place where their brain's not fully functioning is how I deal with it. But, like, they're going to have to learn some things the hard way. I just don't want them to be around safety and, like, jail time. Not lessons that can't be reversed.

[01:01:10] Yes, exactly. Yeah. No tattoos just yet. Yeah. I love this. I feel like I could talk to you for hours and hours if we didn't have our one thing, respectively, to focus on. Thank you for the opportunity. We'll have to do it again. Thank you. We'll have to do it again. I'd love to. Would you tell everybody how to find you, if they were interested, the book, productive, whatever makes sense to connect to you and your work? Everything I've been talking about, they can go to theonething.com with the number one.

[01:01:39] But if they go there, they're going to find all of our free resources. Like, you were showing me some on your iPad. You know, if they want to tap into the free stuff or buy the book, there's links there, our training. We've got free webinars every month. So just go explore, tap into it. That's the best place. And honestly, Jay Papazan, as far as I know, there's only one of me among 8 billion people. So Google is very good at finding me. I love that. Make sure to take advantage of Jay's offer.

[01:02:09] Definitely read the book. Let us know what you think of it. Jay, this has been so much fun. We will have to do this again. Thank you for being on.