Being busy today often gets confused with being productive. Gary Keller & Jay Papasan suggest, in their bestseller The ONE Thing, that by asking ourselves this question, everything else will either become simpler or unnecessary. The book looks at how devoting all your effort to one central goal can help you achieve excellent results.
Besides helping people succeed, this way of planning plays a big role in management, especially with Gantt charts and group projects. We’ll review the main ideas of The ONE Thing and how they can impact your planning, management and execution of projects.
The Focusing Question: Finding Your Project’s ONE Thing
Keller devoted The ONE Thing book to answering the focus question. Which one action can I take that, by doing it, makes everything else simpler or unnecessary? It helps you focus on what matters for your objective. In management projects, the key is to recognize, at every stage which task or achievement is the most important.
As an example, while making a Gantt chart, consider:
What is the dependency that supports and drives all the rest?
What work item, if pushed back, would block the progress of the entire timeline?
Regularly posing this question enables project managers to allocate their resources in the best way. It helps make sense of the busy work schedule, joining the team in doing the most important tasks.
Aligning Daily Actions with Purpose: Goal Setting and the Success Habit
Applying Keller’s idea, you can take your long-term goals and make them projects you can work on today. It starts by knowing exactly what your “someday” goal is and then looking at your objectives for this year, this month, this week, and today. This approach makes strategic planning better when put into project management tools like Gantt charts.
Project managers can determine what the final goal is, slice it into significant sections, use each section as a milestone and then create tasks to meet each milestone. All tasks become part of the main goal, so nothing is added that will not be useful.
Multitasking Should Not Rule Project Management
The ONE Thing opposes the idea that dividing our attention can increase our productivity. Keller believes that trying to do different things at the same time leads to less concentrated work. The truth is, that hopping between different work tasks brings a period of recovery, causes mistakes, and lengthens the time needed for a project.
It advises against giving teams several projects at the same time. As workers use a Gantt chart for assignments, each step should allow them to handle their main role.
Application of this principle helps to solve the following problems:
Reducing burnout.
Raising the standards of what is delivered.
Getting important tasks done more quickly.
Many times, multitasking happens because planning was not done well. Instead, rely on your Gantt chart to spread out tasks and help everyone stay on their goals.
How to Organize Your Project Work on a Calendar
Time blocking is a powerful method explained in The ONE Thing. Keller advises putting aside some time when you won’t be interrupted to work on what’s most important to you. You can plot these steps right into the Gantt chart for your project.
Give your project managers enough time to concentrate on strategic planning.
Provide developers with set hours to work on important features.
Create uninterrupted testing windows for QA teams.
By time blocking, you focus better and make your project schedule more organized. Stakeholders will understand that blocked time in the Gantt chart means they should not interrupt you.
Small Reasons Why People Succeed
The Domino Effect is one of the important metaphors Keller employs. Concentrating on just one crucial thing starts a process that alleviates the requirement for following tasks in many cases. When managing, the way the Domino Effect works can influence the creation of Gantt charts.
Determine the vital task in every major phase of the project.
Keep it at the top of your mind with everything you do.
Don’t move on to secondary tasks until the first domino has been knocked down.
Thanks to this principle, the work is matched up so it happens efficiently. Instead of beginning marketing before knowing every detail of the product, make the product your main part of the strategy. Every task is easier once the one before it has been finished.
Why It Helps to Use Willpower and Plan According to a Schedule
According to Keller, your willpower slowly runs out the more you use it. So, you should attempt high-focus tasks during the time your mental skills are strongest. Delivering this in project management could include:
Set a time in the morning for holding brainstorming or strategic sessions.
Having these kinds of meetings later in the day.
Scheduling your deep work tasks in the early hours of your Gantt chart.
Doing more when you have energy and less when you are tired makes you both more productive and happier at work. Now, teams are more mindful of how they organize their time, and project managers can identify tasks that need to be energizing, besides being timely.
Using Gantt Charts and the ONE Thing Method Can Make Your Project Shape Even Easier
With purpose, Gantt charts can display timelines as well as add strength to the mission. Based on The ONE Thing, a useful Gantt chart shows the focus of every phase of a project. In this style, you should give priority to key work, cut down on unimportant activities, and set aside dedicated time to do concentrated tasks.
There are two ways to do this: First, highlight important tasks with distinctive colors; second, place all unimportant tasks together; and lastly, make any important connections to tasks obvious by marking them on the diagram. By following this method, a Gantt chart changes from being a simple timing tool to becoming a helpful tool for alignment.
The Success Habit consists of doing just ONE thing every single day.
Alongside the planning method, Keller suggests The Success Habit, meaning we need to do the ONE Task each day that matters. Being consistent, he believes, helps you reach your goals.
For project teams, it could mean daily touch base sessions concentrating on the same priority, weekly reviews to reassess and fine-tune the list, and frequently asking themselves: What is our ONE Thing at this point? If leaders make this habit to be part of daily activities and group behaviors, teams are more likely to avoid feeling busy and instead work on achieving set objectives.
By making purpose and actions match in every step, the project develops a disciplined approach to achieving results. As a result of this cultural change, the focus of the team changes from doing many things to making real progress.
When project managers adjust the team’s work habits to reflect long-term targets, everybody on the team will feel like they are working towards a goal aligned with the overall outcome.
Applying The ONE Thing to Agile and Hybrid Projects
This approach applies just as much to Agile and mixed project environments. Though The ONE Thing is compatible with linear planning, its main premise, prioritizing one thing, blends flawlessly with the way Agile works over time.
Every sprint may have just one primary goal and Gantt charts with added layers track any dependencies between sprints. During sprint planning and retrospectives, it is important to focus deeply to keep everyone on the same path. In hybrids, where Agile and Waterfall are used, assigning the ONE Thing to each part guarantees both clarity and consistency, no matter the approach taken.
Overcoming Distraction: Staying True to the ONE Thing
Being focused on a nonstop project environment means you should address distractions when they occur. Tools from The ONE Thing are useful: Write your not-to-do items down, use cards or sticky notes to refer to your goals and determine which requests aren’t your responsibility.
Scope creep and shifting priorities are usually caused by distractions; making the main goal of their efforts clear to each team helps teams avoid dilution. In addition, Gantt charts can be used for planning and to keep everything on track.
Conclusion
In ONE Thing we discover that it’s not about doing more, but about doing what matters. Because of this, teams can achieve their goals with less chance of error. When used with this intention, Gantt charts help ensure progress, instead of only managing tasks.
If you focus on your ONE Thing as you go, relate all work to your main goal, and manage deep work, you remain productive and achieve big strides. Now that multitasking has become the norm, The ONE Thing helps us realize that being focused is the real key to getting things done. The process of project management begins when you ask yourself: What’s the ONE Thing?
