Why only focusing on one idea can help you prioritize progress

If you're constantly jumping between projects, making tiny progress on everything, and finishing nothing—your team probably feels like they're getting spaghetti noodles thrown at them all day long.

In this focused episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane and Micah tackle the productivity trap that's killing most small businesses: trying to do 20 things at once instead of doing one thing really well.

The word "priority" was never meant to be plural. When you have multiple priorities, you actually have zero priorities. And when your team gets scattered directions every day, they can't build momentum on anything that matters.

Here's what you'll learn:

• The simple exercise to narrow infinite tasks down to your one true priority
• Why "minimum viable" beats "perfect" every single time
• How to let projects breathe before moving to the next shiny thing
• The accountability systems that keep you (and your team) on track

Whether you're building systems, launching products, or scaling your business, this episode shows you how to break the cycle of endless baby steps and start actually completing the things that move your business forward. (And if you're struggling with perfectionism, check out our episode on "Why perfection is killing your business growth."

Ready to get focused and get things done? We're here to help you build the systems and accountability you need to scale sustainably.

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): How's it going today, Alane?

0:00:20 - (Alane): Just cruising right along.

0:00:21 - (Micah): Yeah. I thought we could do a really fun exercise for this podcast.

0:00:27 - (Alane): Like. Like arm. Like arm exercises?

0:00:30 - (Micah): Yeah. Physical exercise is just a silent podcast for 20 minutes where. Where there's just slight grunts that people hear about.

0:00:38 - (Alane): Grab my rucksack then.

0:00:39 - (Micah): Perfect. Perfect. No, what I thought we'd do is Try to cover 20 topics in one podcast.

0:00:47 - (Alane): Great. That's a bad idea.

0:00:49 - (Micah): It is a bad idea. Yes. And the reason that I wanted to start out this podcast like this is because we all are guilty of trying to do 20 things in a day. We're guilty of trying to jump around, move the needle on 20 different things. If we put it in the framing of one thing like this, like a podcast, like, how could we record a 20 minute podcast and cover 20 things and actually make any sense to anybody listening?

0:01:18 - (Alane): Right. It'd be a bunch of spaghetti noodles.

0:01:22 - (Micah): Exactly. Very good visual imagery there. But I think that's probably exactly how our teams feel when we're leaders going out and saying, hey, do this. No, do this. All right, do this. All right, now let's do this tomorrow. Do this, do this, do this. Where are we at with this? Oh, why haven't you done this yet? They're getting spaghetti noodles.

0:01:47 - (Alane): Yeah. I mean, I just think about my day and how I've got to just have one main focus. And it's not even the day, really. It's because it could be. You could look at it as like a project or an initiative in the company. If you have too many initiatives, you just can't do it. Especially for a smaller team or if you're managing a team. You can't have multiple initiatives. I can't because I can't make progress on any of them.

0:02:13 - (Micah): Yeah. I think we might have brought this up in a previous podcast episode, but the fact that priorities, the word never started as plural.

0:02:25 - (Alane): I don't know if we talked about that specifically.

0:02:27 - (Micah): Yeah, Originally, if you trace back that word, it was always a singular word, and then it evolved into being plural is a really interesting concept to think about that. What if there was only a single priority?

0:02:43 - (Alane): That sounds like such an American thing. I don't know where the word got changed to being plural, but it's like Americans, like, we're not just doing one we're going to do a hundred.

0:02:52 - (Micah): Yeah. Actually, priority originates from Uruguay and South America.

0:02:57 - (Alane): Oh, that's pretty cool.

0:02:58 - (Micah): No, I totally made that up. I have no idea. So, anyway, back to the point. This episode is all about how and why do we stay focused with one priority? Just like in this episode, there's going to be one topic. Every episode before this, there's one topic. We're focused on one thing. We're talking about one thing. When we're working, we need to be doing one thing and seeing it to completion. So, Alane, earlier you and I were chatting and I talked about one of the exercises that I put myself through yesterday. In fact, because I'm the type of person who likes to kind of redo these exercises, get my brain refocused every day, because otherwise I'm going to jump around way too much and look at the next shiny thing and go, ooh, let's do that. Without finishing the first 50 things that were shiny the days before.

0:03:50 - (Micah): And so I went through this exercise of trying to first narrow all the things down that I want to do to just five, which can sometimes be a challenge in itself. And then from those five, I looked at, well, what really are the top three? Two of them, I've got to deprioritize from those top three. And I said, if I had to do these in order, what order would I do these in? And that really helped me get to, I am going to do this one thing and I am going to get it done.

0:04:23 - (Micah): Because I know at this point, if I can get that thing done, then I have freed up my time, I have accomplished something important inside the business, and I don't have to keep thinking about it, and we can start moving on to the next thing if.

0:04:40 - (Alane): If we don't take it baby steps on all five of those things and never get to completion, because you're just little, tiny progress.

0:04:49 - (Micah): Exactly, exactly. And you know, I think it doesn't sometimes these objectives and these projects, maybe they take a week, maybe it takes two weeks.

0:05:00 - (Alane): Yeah. It's not always a day thing.

0:05:01 - (Micah): Yeah. But sticking with it to free up that time and to say, this is truly the important thing that I need to be working on right now, because it's going to affect the business in this way or that way is just so critical. It also helps us understand what isn't important or what is less important or what feels important today. And then tomorrow it's like, why the hell did I spend time on that? And to your point, these baby steps, you know, so many people that we work with, ourselves included, over the years. We look at things and we go, oh, man, here's the 10 things that we need to get done in the business.

0:05:39 - (Micah): Cool. Let's all take baby steps on these 10 things. And suddenly, 10 months later, not a single of the 10 things have been completed. Some are at 20%, some are at 40%. Maybe one's at 80% sitting there.

0:05:56 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:05:56 - (Micah): But nothing's done.

0:05:58 - (Alane): So, like Micah, there's a few things that I'm thinking of here, and I'm going to plug the book Essentialism, because the book starts off about this whole concept of you can't be good at what you do when you're taking on too many things. And, you know, the other side of it is creating boundaries for yourself and for your team. And I've even. I like doing everything all the time. But over the past 12 months, I've really worked on we're an onion, and we can't add.

0:06:30 - (Alane): We cannot add a new thing until we've finished removing the first layer of that onion. So I had to start saying, I don't have capacity for that. I can't do that. And it's really frustrating for other people because they want to pull me in, and I'm like, we just can't do it. Like, that's it. And it's hard. And it didn't feel good at first, but it's like, no. If I can just focus on what I wanted to complete the original goal that I set and we can get to completion, then sure, let me focus on the next thing after I peel that layer of the onion off.

0:07:05 - (Micah): I think having the discussions where you're going with this, because one thing that comes to mind is you getting everything set up to get speaking gigs and becoming guests on other people's podcasts. That's a big project. And if you were to just piecemeal that and try to do little bits at a time on top of 10 other things or five other things or 200 other things, you wouldn't have gotten all the, you know, guest appearances on podcasts. You wouldn't have gotten all the speaking gigs. You wouldn't have proceeded or improved anything on that side. You'd still be saying, I want to do this.

0:07:48 - (Alane): I want to blank. And I don't want to confuse our listeners with, this isn't perfectionism at all. It's what is the goal? And we're going to get there. What's the priority? We're going to get there. Like with Micah's example, when we I say we because I have a team that helps me. But I said, this is what I want to do. We're going to test this wording. We're going to do it like this. It was not perfect.

0:08:13 - (Alane): We didn't have a process at first. And then once we started getting into a rhythm of what was working okay, then we can add a new piece. I'm going to build AlaneBoyd.com and I'm going to have a speaker website. Now that we have some assets before you have assets. I can't build a website based on nothing that's not credible. And so you know everything first, number one, let's get some assets together. I have a string of a few speaking engagements that I've been asked to do. I'm going to hire a photographer, I'm going to have a videographer. I'm going to get testimonies, testimonials. Once I had those things. Okay, now we can peel the next layer of the onion, which is AlaneBoyd.com so I didn't just want to make it sound like we're perfecting things because most often what we're doing, doing is not perfection.

0:08:58 - (Alane): It's essential. And what we need is the next step.

0:09:02 - (Micah): Yeah, it's the bare minimum. Really.

0:09:07 - (Alane): I mean, that sounds a bit rough, bare minimum, but yeah, but truly, if.

0:09:11 - (Micah): If you think about it, it's almost better to start with the bare minimum, commonly called an MVP or a minimum.

0:09:18 - (Alane): Viable product, if you're in the tech space. And mvp, a minimal viable product, there is so much truth to that. So that you can just focus on that and getting it out there. Because if you're stumbling along the way and you're not getting feedback and you're not getting things to improve it, you are going to spend way too much time and we have an episode actually about this. Way too much time trying to perfect something that has never been out in the wild, meaning other people are looking at it and you got it wrong. Most times we get it wrong and we need to improve.

0:09:52 - (Alane): And so getting something out there, focusing on that one idea, getting out there getting feedback and then improving it.

0:09:57 - (Micah): Yeah. And I think this ties back perfectly with focusing on one thing. I know in the beginning when I thought about this, it was one thing to completion, perfect. But the secret is do one thing, get it shipped, get it launched, get it tested, and then go to the. Let that breathe, let that do its thing, and then go to the next thing and then reprioritize. Right. You may find you get insight back from that first thing that you did, you let it breathe for a little bit. You get some feedback, you see what works, you see what doesn't.

0:10:35 - (Micah): You shape it a bit and then that becomes your next one thing. But you're breaking it down still into these bite sized pieces to get things done. You're still just more singularly focused. At least with small companies and smaller teams this works really, really well. Far better than just doing everything all at once.

0:10:56 - (Alane): Yeah. And Micah, that like building it and letting it breathe a little bit is so true. Even with building a system in your project management system. Because I see this idea of perfectionism a lot of the time when. And it's fantastic. A client is so excited or letting you say a client. A company is so excited to be using their project management system and they want it to be working because they know what it was like beforehand and they want their team to be excited and be using it and so they want everything perfect. And did I build it perfectly in there?

0:11:28 - (Alane): And you can't hit perfect when you haven't been doing it. It's get it in there and start using it. Let it breathe, find out what works, what doesn't. There isn't a perfect way. Just like in the English language, we could say the same thing 50 different ways, maybe a thousand different ways. Does it mean any of them are wrong? No. Are there more concise ways to get to the point? Yes. Than other ways.

0:11:54 - (Alane): But that's what's like building in your project management system. There are a lot of ways that you can get to an end result. There are better ways. But first just get in there and start letting people use it. Get the feedback what could be improved and then, okay, let's take that. And they actually get to be more buy in in that process. As long as you're listening to the feedback and making the improvements.

0:12:15 - (Micah): I would even argue this applies to just business as a whole. I speak with a lot of people and they hit some, some growth, some scale. They might be one or two person teams, but then they start saying things like I want to prep for everything. I want to prep for scaling my entire business to 100 people, to 100 million in revenue. Fantastic. You're going to get it effing wrong. Don't do that. Yes, it doesn't work.

0:12:46 - (Micah): I have never met anybody who was like, I fully prepped everything for scale and then scaled perfectly, like fine, find me. Somebody will have them on the podcast. Podcast. I would love to be educated on that. And over 24 years I have not met Anybody who has done it perfectly, things change too quick, especially now. Iterations, improvement over time and focus. That's the magic.

0:13:15 - (Alane): Mm, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this idea definitely does apply to anything in business. Just wanted to kind of bring it to a very specific use case that we see often.

0:13:26 - (Micah): So I think, you know, maybe we could wrap this up and do just a quick summary. The whole concept is you're going to feel like you have a ton of things that you need to get done. Whatever exercise works best for you. Working through, making a list, whiteboarding, kanban board, sticky notes, doesn't matter how you do it. The goal is take a big, long list, get it down to five, take that five, get it down to fewer than five, and then stack, rank them.

0:13:58 - (Micah): What can you work on right now that's going to make an impact? That's going to change the course of the business, that's going to move the needle. Whatever catchy term you want to use, focus on that. Get it done, knock it out, let it breathe, reprioritize. Go through that exercise again. Teach your team to do this. Make them hold you accountable.

0:14:21 - (Alane): I was going to say accountable is the most important piece because if you're the owner and you're in control, it's so easy to slip out of that and you know, Alane's ideas, Micah's ideas, and be throwing everybody in every direction. So accountability is so big. All right, if you need help with how to start doing this, start making progress on just one focus at a time. And you need some outside accountability.

0:14:44 - (Alane): Biggest goal is here for you. Micah and I loved helping companies improve and scale. So come and find us. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai for free content and tools for automating your business.

0:15:12 - (Alane): Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business. Bye for now.