AP 0623: How Do You Stay Focused on a Big Project?

AskPat 623 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 623 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Matt, but before we get to Matt's question I do want to thank today's sponsor which is Earth Class Mail, which moves your snail mail to the cloud, giving you instant access 24/7 and it integrates with the tools and services you already use every day. You can also get a real professional address to share publicly with customers, business partners and investors. Now, I've checked out Earth Class Mail, and I think it's a brilliant solution that's perfect for businesses and independent entrepreneurs of all types, just like you. So, visit earthclassmail.com/pat and you'll get your first month of service for free when you sign up. Again that's a first month of Earth Class Mail for free, can't beat that. EarthClassMail.com/pat. There you go.

All right, now here's today's question from Matt.

Matt: Hi Pat, this is Matt from Manchester, UK. In one of the last episodes you said that writing the book has been the one thing for you, and you put all of your energy and focus into writing the book. I know you're a very busy man and you have a lot of other projects going on, so I was wondering how you manage to keep your focus and energy on that one thing while working on everything else at the same time. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and I can't wait to read Will It Fly? I also wanted to say thank you for everything you do, you're an inspiration and you give me a lot of motivation and doing my own thing. Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Hey Matt, thank you so much for the question. You're not the first person to ask this question. Well the first person to ask on AskPat, but no, a lot of people have asked me this because I do preach the “One Thing Method,” meaning you've got to always focus on one thing at a time, if you don't do that you're always going to lose focus. Your energy gets expended in all these different places and nothing gets done. You have to prioritize, when you work on everything at the same time, nothing gets done. You need to focus on one thing at a time, and my one thing at a time for several months was writing my book Will It Fly?. Again, thank you for giving it a shout out, I hope you've enjoyed it if you've picked it up, if not you can all check it out at willitflybook.com.

Now in terms of me working on it, no it wasn't the only thing I worked on during those months, but it was my sole number one focus and it always took top priority every single day. Also, in addition to, and leading up to the point of which I knew I was going to be writing, I went ballistic with getting everything done ahead of time as much as I could. So that means recording months of AskPat, months of Smart Passive Income, and writing a lot ahead of time. I also had a lot of support with my teammates behind me, my team members helping with the publishing and the editing of those things, things that I might normally do myself or spend some time doing, that they knew they were going to have to come on and help out with because I needed to be focused on writing. But I also knew that I needed to mix things up.

Now, like I said, the priority was working on the book, but I knew I couldn't work on that book all the time, so I had secondary priorities, and tertiary priorities, and things that I also had to do. So those things were like recording podcast episodes or writing emails. I set time, specific time during specific days of the week to actually do those things and that's how I was able to, you know, upon each day or upon each particular time block, actually focus on one thing at a time. So that's the trick there, one thing at a time doesn't necessarily mean everything else in life doesn't matter. It just means that there is a top priority you put your energy and effort into that, and then other things they get their time and place, but it doesn't get above that, where it works in kind of harmony with that, if you will.

So really that's what it's all about, and for a while it was very much about that time blocking thing. Something you'll remember if you've read The One Thing, time blocking, really important. Creating those hours, those bunches of hours of work to do that next thing that you should be doing. You have to really honor that, that's the big trick and that was the big struggle for me, especially when I got into hard moments in the book that I knew I had to do more research on. I struggled a lot, I would often kind of get out of that sync and get out of the rhythm and try to do other things just to feel like I was getting work done, when I knew I should've been working on the book.

It's not easy, being productive is not easy. It's definitely not easy, but you know what, when you have people holding you accountable, when you know what your goals are and you break them down and you work on them every single day, when you know what your priorities are and know that which you are working on is actually moving the needle, you will become productive, you will see movement and you will see results. So, hopefully that answers your question, Matt, and gives you some insight into sort of how I think about that and what that one thing actually means.

I want to wish all of you the best of luck with your next task and your big project that you are working on, too. So Matt, thank you so much again for the question. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. We would love to hear from you and hopefully even get your question featured here too. Thank you all so much, I appreciate you all. Here's a quote to finish off the day by Meredith Hill, she says, “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.”

Cheers, take care and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat. Bye now.