The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time

I used to be an enthusiastic guy when it came to professional goals and engineering projects, and I mean that in a bad way. I always had at least five audacious projects cohabiting in my head. And that brought a combo of feelings that usually went more or less like this:

• Stress due to the constant pressure of multiple things going on.
• Confusion due to the lack of headspace for managing so much cognitive load from multiple contexts simultaneously.
• Frustration for being unable to deliver everything I committed to (actually, of being unable to deliver anything I committed to since one project inevitably ended up trumping others in a vicious cycle).

Eventually, it became sadly obvious that I fit the stereotype of the person who always has multiple ideas and is incapable of proceeding with any of them. I had to change my behavior.

So I came up with a method, which — as usually goes with strategies that work — was pretty simple:

1. Create two files (Obsidian notes, in my case, but any file you can easily come back to will be enough): “Want to do” and “Doing.”
2. In the “Want to do” file, make a list of every idea, project, or study artifact in your mind. And don’t fool yourself by thinking that small stuff doesn’t matter. Every path that was initiated and that you still want to walk “someday,” even if you don’t think about it often, occupies part of your background attention and contributes to making you feel like a non-accomplisher.
3. Prioritize that list in the order of what is most important to you.
4. Move the number 1 item to the “Doing” list.
5. Forget the items in the “Want to do” list and radically focus on the “Doing” list, which should always have only one item.

Number five is the most important and challenging, especially for overly enthusiastic people. If you are anything like me, you will soon find yourself dying to do just a little bit of another project on the “Want to do” list. You’ll watch a YouTube video that will reawaken an interest that had been half-forgotten; you’ll read something that will give you an idea for project number seven in that list; and so forth.

Your hardest job is to resist that urge and radically commit to your list (which, by the way, was prioritized by yourself). As the cliché goes, prioritizing is about saying “no.” It may be painful, but it’s the only true way to focus.

Of course, there’s wiggle room here. The state of the world changes, and you may have to revise your priorities. However, constantly doing so means you probably returned to the shallow, enthusiastic approach. So try not to. Question the inner voice that tells you, “There’s no longer a point in doing this” or “This is too hard for me,” and resist the urge to abandon your goal if it’s really important in your path to achieving your higher goals. If it isn’t, then why the heck did it make number one on your list?

Human minds are single-threaded. And there is only one of you, so there’s no point in trying to do all at once or even two things at once. You can only do one. So, if it’s important to you, stick with it until it’s done. And then go to the next item. You will see that as a side effect, your overall productivity increases because constant context changes drain your ability to be effective in each context. So you might spend six months on contexts A, B, and C if you’re always going back and forth between them, while you might finish in three if you serialized your attention: do A (feeling free to employ your complete focus on it), then do B, then C. 

What this approach does for you is that it lets you relax. By trusting the method, you know that other important goals are waiting to be tackled and that you don’t have to think about them right now. Instead of juggling poorly worked ideas, you allow your mind to embrace each idea with more serenity and seriousness.