The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: The ONE Thing, with Jay Papasan (Productivity, Discipline, Mindset, Author)
Tue, 10 Sep 2024
Author, speaker, and executive Jay Papasan explains a few of the biggest lies about productivity, defines "switch-tasking", and dives into the science of discipline, LITERALLY feeding willpower, and the demonization of open floorplans.
Researchers believe about a quarter of our day, 28% is lost to this, and we're not even aware of it. It costs you time, it makes you dumb, and you're just less effective. It makes me a little bit sad.
Top leaders. Meaningful conversation. Actionable advice. Bulldoze complacency. Ignite inspiration. Create impact. Produced by Southwestern Family of Companies. This is the Action Catalyst.
Are you interested in advertising with The Action Catalyst? Our listeners could be hearing about your brand, right here, right now.
Jay Papasan is at Keller Inc., which is the publishing arm of Keller Williams Realty. And getting a chance to talk with Jay is exciting because Jay is also Gary Keller's co-author. And they've written several bestselling books, including The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, which was a New York Times bestseller. And then The One Thing.
And The One Thing was a number one or is a number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. business bestseller. Jay is the co-author. He's here with us now. He is one of the most powerful people in real estate and just an awesome, awesome guy. So Jay, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So if people haven't heard of The One Thing, what is the main premise, overall concept in a nutshell?
We wanted to explore how people get extraordinary results. Not average, but extraordinary. What's an approach that we can take for that? And for us, it was about focus. But we tried to come at it from a new angle. How do you identify the one thing, right? What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else is easier or unnecessary?
What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? You're looking for the biggest lever in your life. to achieve your goals. And we wanted to help people identify that and then implement that thing.
In the one thing, Jay, you know, kind of the opening part of the book, you talk about the lies of productivity.
Before we talk about what we want you to do, we often say, what do we have to get out of your head? And in this book, we call those the lies. And the first lie, which we felt like was the number one, was this idea that everything matters equally. And I actually don't think people argue that or express it, but it's act that way. And it's because our to-do lists are too full.
Our calendars are kind of overflowing. I've had moments in my life where I was literally mapping out my days in 15 minute increments. And there are a lot of people who feel that way. We have a lot of opportunity to do stuff and we have a lot of obligation. And I kind of compared the way we operate
with so many things kind of stressing us out, the need to do them all, to like being a character in a B-horror movie that runs up the stairs instead of out the front door. We make really bad decisions on how to spend our time. And so the antidote to that, that first lie, was essentially, you know, we want you to launch your days by identifying the things that you could do
and then identify the handful that you really should do, and then prioritize them from one to whatever. And that's lie number one. The second lie, people have a lot, they're looking at all the things they might have to do. The other thing they're really tempted in this day and age to do is multitask. And we make a strong argument that multitasking is a lie.
And the big crux there is that in reality, when we think we're multitasking, Researchers call it switch tasking. If they call anything in their research or multitasking, it's just in the headline so they can get it in print. But they call it switch tasking because what actually happens is we're doing our work. And then we decide to switch. And that's instantaneous.
It's like squirrel, boom, we're off to the next thing. The thing that they realized challenged us is when you switch tasks, your brain has to reorient to the new rules of the game. And there's a lag. If you've ever been like writing a really complex email and maybe your spouse walks in and starts talking to you, you know they're talking to you.
You can hear words in the air, but you actually don't comprehend them. And you say, oh, I'm sorry, what were you saying? And you repeat that. That's that lag time. And every time we switch between screens, you know, stopping our email to pick up a phone call, we experience this lag time. And researchers believe about a quarter of our day, 28% is lost to this. And we're not even aware of it.
It's a huge loss. I mean, as an employer, I look, wow, I have five employees when I might need four if they were all just being efficient with their time. There's just tons of research out there that the funny one that always kind of You know, people say this is making me smarter or whatever. You know, I can do all these things.
There's a guy in the College of New London and he did research into IQ tests and he compared the results of people who were focusing. He compared the results of people who were having to multitask. They had to juggle emails and phone calls while they took an IQ test. And very hilariously, he compared them to people who were stoned.
You know, nobody was surprised that on average, the people who were focused scored 11 points higher than the other two groups. They were shocked that the people who were stoned on average scored six IQ points higher than the people who are multitasking. So I could go through six ways. We don't need to go there. It costs you time. It makes you dumb and you're just less effective.
So we really tried to get people, if not stop multitasking all the time, when you're doing your main thing, your one thing, at least stop multitasking then. If I was actually more focused when I was at work, could I have more time with my family? I think there's a real human cost that I think about, and it makes me a little bit sad.
The economic cost is one thing, but what's the cost to my family if I'm working late every day just because I'm not being as effective as I could be? So the next two lies are discipline life is a lie. And then willpower is always on will call is a lie. And what we tried to break out two things. Discipline, one of the meanings for it is training yourself to do something until it's habitual.
When I was giving my one thing talk in Nashville, a guy showed up an hour and 15 minutes early. And I went up to him and I said, oh, wow, you won the early bird award. You know, are you with the team? And he goes, nope, I'm just here. I'm always early. It's a habit. I hear that habit word and I'm like, you know, tell me more. And it turns out that he had been a Green Beret.
He'd been out of the service for almost two decades, but he'd been in it for, I think, I don't know, 15 years. And he said, I was trained to show up early and observe, and I just can't shake the habit. Everywhere we go, we're early. We're early to dinner, to the movies. It drives my wife crazy.
And I love that because it's a perfect illustration that in our sense, and when we were building our construct, we really wanted to hit on this idea that being disciplined all the time, which we go into in willpower, there is some science about how There is an ebb and flow to your, what we often call this phenomenon called willpower.
But this other definition is, if you know what your one thing is, the very next thing you would want to do is make it a habit. Because if that became habitual, you work to build the habit, and then the habit would work for you. And kind of the big aha we had here is, was that when we looked at the research, like how long does it actually take to form a habit?
Most people conventionally believe it takes either 21 or 30 days. But the most recent research we found, they had asked, I think, over 200 graduate students to take on a new health habit. Anything from drinking eight glasses of water to quitting smoking, whatever they wanted. And for a year, they followed them around and said, did you do it, yes or no? And how hard was it every single day?
And what they discovered is that on average, around 66 days is when it got as easy as it was ever going to get. So it takes us about three times as long as most people think to form a habit, even on average. We want to at least keep our foot on that pedal, right, for that long. And so that was the discipline thing.
So clarify the willpower part. So then what's the distinction? What would you call willpower?
So we dove into the science of how we say yes to what we need to do and how we say no to everything else. But the researchers, the scientists, right, the guys in the lab coats, We're calling it willpower. And they defined that as the power to say yes to what you need to do. If I'm on a diet, that means, you know, carrot sticks and hummus and no to everything else. So no nachos for me.
And both of those, they measure it, literally take energy out of your system. And kind of shockingly, your brain is one-fiftieth of your body mass, and it takes up one-fifth of all of the energy you consume. It's the hungriest organ in your body after the liver.
And so literally, if you make a decision, you know, I am wearing black shoes today and a black tie, that little tiny decision, they can measure that glucose in your bloodstream will drop. But there's things that require a lot more power. Like I'm going to focus on this task. I'm not going to go play on Twitter. I'm going to focus on my work. I'm not going to go hang out by the coffee machine.
Saying no to those temptations or saying yes actually uses a lot of energy. And that was our big aha is that what you're calling discipline and what we're calling willpower is actually really fragile. It's a lot more like the battery on an old phone. It's always going to zero and you have to plug in all the time. So for us, our big aha is you tend to have the most in the morning.
That's what it's always highest. And you can replenish it by eating properly. So we tell you, give willpower the time of day and feed it. It's not that you're, you know, willpower is hungry. I think about kids, right? You have a kid, a young child. What does a mom do for a young child every day around three o'clock? A snack. That's like an essential thing. They come home from school.
The first thing they do when they've outgrown the nap, they get both when they're at a certain age, they get a snack. They've used up all of their discipline at school sitting in their chair straight, walking in line, waiting. And so we tell you, make it a habit in the morning, right? You're one thing, do it in the morning and you naturally have the willpower to say yes to it.
And then throughout the day, if you looked in my office, I've got power bars, I've got nuts, I've got foods that are high in protein and complex carbohydrates because I want my brain to have all the discipline or willpower it needs throughout the day. And those tend to feed your bloodstream for long periods of time versus just splatting it with sugar.
But we wanted to talk about making things a habit and managing that discipline willpower thing throughout the day itself. And I've kind of observed like, you know, open floor plans have been kind of all the rage. And they've looked at some of these and they do foster more creativity, but they haven't necessarily fostered more productivity.
And my theory, and it's not been measured yet, is if I'm in an open office and I'm in an environment full of distractions, I'm using a lot of my willpower to focus on the task at hand. And, you know, we have noise canceling headsets in our office in the cubes.
People literally put up like shower curtains and they do all kinds of things to try to get more focus so that they have to, you know, the distractions take less of a toll. But I do think that, you know, an environment is one of the things that I became aware of. Does your environment support your work and your focus? Because that can saying no to all that stuff can be really tough.
How do I know what my one thing is? And I know that kind of comes back to the premise that we started with, but do you have any like practical ideas for how to find the thing that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or not necessary? On the simplest level, we wanted people to put down the book and ask that question.
What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier and necessary. And for a fair number of people, they kind of know what it is and they feel guilty for not doing it. They just haven't been told that, you know what, you're smart enough to know your own answers.
For those that are still struggling, and I find especially a lot of younger people, maybe people going through transition, it's the idea of thinking, what's my big reason for being here? And then you work backwards to, and what do I need to be doing right now?
I love it. Well, Jay, thank you for making the time here. Thank you so much, Jay, for being here.
Thanks. If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure to subscribe. And to stay updated on everything that the Action Catalyst is up to, make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Action Catalyst Podcast and on Twitter at Catalyst underscore Action. And thanks for listening.