How To Become The Most Effective Version Of Yourself

I’m a sucker for a good productivity hack.

Ice baths, micro rest intervals, Pomodoro’s - you name it, I’ve likely done it.

The issue is that these things are tactics.

They don’t solve the underlying problem of what you should be doing.

A process for finding this is called identifying the One Thing.

Popularised by real estate mogul Gary Keller,

I’ve used this process often when I get stuck in the weeds and have been going around in circles for weeks.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Answer The Focusing Question:
   
   > "What’s the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"

   
   This question forces you to eliminate distractions by identifying the single most impactful task.

   
   Link the decisions you are making to long-term goals rather than immediate fires in your life.

2. Leverage The "Domino Effect" Principle:

   
   If you knock over the right first domino, it sets off a chain reaction.
   
   Some tasks have exponentially larger impact than others.

   
   By focusing on the biggest "domino," this leverages momentum instead of spreading energy across many small tasks.
   

3. Block Out Time
   
   Block out 2 hours a day to focus on this task and do nothing else.

Here’s an example of what this looks like for our business.

We’re not producing enough organic video content at K&J to support our lead generation efforts.

I’ve tried multiple times, I hit my straps for 2 weeks and fall right off the bandwagon again.

So this past weekend I:

1. Booked out time at a local co-working space

2. Found a tool to create a complete video replica of me (Hey-Gen is the tool if you’re wondering)

3. Tested & filmed my video replica

4. I made the AI-generated version of Kale

I can now prompt AI Kale to speak for me and cut in B-roll, pass it to an editor to tidy up the rest.

This four-hour stint is looking like it’ll save me literally weeks’ worth of content creation (I’ll write a newsletter on this next week).

Figure out what’s important, get it done and cut out the noise to get ahead.

High Leverage

It's easy to forget how much steady, incremental improvements can add up.

Building our software at Gravy keeps reminding me. Each small tweak stacks up, leading to large compounding growth.

It’s the opposite of a human‑intensive business like our gym.

A minor change to our sales funnel at Compound can take weeks.

Loop in the team.

> Gather feedback.
> Write the new process.
> Discuss it again.
> Adjust.
> Book training.
> Run training.
> Update the resources. etc.. Its endless.

At Gravy I see an improvement, make it, and it’s live. And it's adopted by default.

We’ve made more progress at Gravy this year than I’ve made at my gym in four.

More than we made at Rugby Bricks in the three years I worked there.

Gravy is unrecognisable compared to January, and we still have three months to play.

I'm not sure what the insight is here.

Maybe it's that when you remove humans from the loop, you can progress faster.

So those areas are the highest‑leverage parts of your business.

For my gym ,that might be marketing: website copy, ad creative - anything I can change without dealing with the "admin of change".

Pricing too. I can change prices in a few minutes and add thousands to our top-line.

It makes sense then that if you’re short on time, those are the areas you'd focus on first.

Then circle back to the slower, human‑heavy work later.