I once spent an entire afternoon reorganizing my task list into color-coded categories, priority, low priority, “someday,” and a mysterious fourth pile I labeled “vibes.” By 5 p.m. I had a beautiful system and had accomplished exactly nothing on it.

If you've ever built the perfect productivity setup instead of doing the actual work, you already know the problem was never organization. It was choosing.

We caught up with Jay Papasan, who co-wrote “The One Thing” with Keller Williams founder Gary Keller, at Craft & Commerce, and talked about exactly that kind of choosing.

If you're a web designer juggling five client projects and three “should really get to this” marketing ideas, or a small business owner running your own website and your own marketing at the same time, Papasan has spent nearly two decades studying why some people cut through the noise and others just add more of it.

So we wrote it all down, because we think it'll help you do the same.

How “The One Thing” Almost Didn't Get Written

The book didn't start as a book. Papasan was running education for Keller Williams when he and his team wrote a course on a narrow topic – how a self-employed person earns the right to hire their first employee. He handed it to Gary Keller, who took it home for the weekend and came back with 14 handwritten pages called “The Power of One.”

“I said, it's great for what we asked it for, but I think there's a book in here,” Papasan told us. Keller agreed, and that conversation kicked off a four-and-a-half-year process, far longer than most people assume for a 240-page book.

The timeline isn't even the most interesting part. Papasan came from publishing, where he was an acquisitions editor at HarperCollins in New York, so he and Keller treated their own idea the way an outside editor would treat a stranger's manuscript. They hired two researchers – one to find evidence supporting their hypothesis, and one to actively try to disprove it.

“It can't be Jay and Gary's ideas,” Papasan said. “We have to look for evidence outside of ourselves. We also know that we're all fallible, and we like to drink our own Kool-Aid sometimes.”

They also brought in someone Papasan calls a “black hatter,” a critical thinker whose job was to find every flaw in the argument before readers could. “She's a great black hatter. I'm a great black hatter too,” he said. “The first thing you say is, great idea, but then you list ten things that could go wrong. That's not negativity, that's enthusiasm, because I'm seeing how we'll go off the rails before we actually do.”

Their first full draft ran 440 pages. Their publisher, Ray Bard, sent it back with a note that doubles as career advice for anyone building anything – “When someone buys a book called ‘The One Thing,' they don't expect a doorstop.” Papasan and Keller cut 40% of the manuscript in the final three months. A book about focus had to prove it could practice what it preached.

Finding Your One Thing When You're Running Five Businesses

What if you genuinely have more than one thing?

Papasan and his wife run multiple businesses between them. So how does the “one thing” framework survive contact with a multi-hyphenate life?

His answer, based on his own experience, is that you need to find the through line. You can do many things, but you have to learn different ways of doing them.

“The thing that got me here was my curiosity. I love to solve big problems, and I'm really good at communicating the solutions simply. And I happen to love writing. So for me, the through line is always: I need to keep writing. That is the foundation of everything,” Papasan said.

Your through line isn't a business model. It's the skill or instinct that shows up no matter what you're building, even when the businesses themselves look nothing alike.

When “The One Thing” first took off and Papasan found himself running a coaching business and joining a private equity group, he felt the friction directly. His own coach asked him the question that made it all click: What's the one thing you could do that would help all of the businesses you're part of?

For Papasan, the answer was connection. Even as an introvert, he realized his real leverage wasn't doing more. It was opening doors for other people. That single insight became a 13-year habit, and it's arguably the most useful part of this whole conversation for anyone reading this from behind a laptop right now.

The Unglamorous Habit Behind a 13-Year Network

Papasan calls it his “introvert networking plan,” and it's almost aggressively simple, meet one new, talented person in person, every week, with zero agenda.

He committed to 50 meetings a year, roughly one a week accounting for cancellations, and started with the help of his assistant pulling names off LinkedIn of people in Austin who looked like founders or CEOs. He held them on Wednesday mornings at the same coffee shop for years. “I would earn the right to exchange contact information,” he said. “I would often follow up by sending them a book, whatever, just learning about them. And that was it. No agenda.”

The habit compounded on its own. Word spread, and Papasan's meetings grew from 50 a year to well over 100, before he had to set boundaries. To stay in touch with everyone, he started a low-key monthly newsletter called “What I'm Up To,” sharing whatever books and shows he and his wife are into that month, nothing polished. He's kept it going for years, and it's directly responsible for reconnecting with people like “StrengthsFinder” author Tom Rath, who told Papasan he felt like he already knew him from eight years of newsletters.

Papasan's wife, also an entrepreneur, once told him his goal sounded almost embarrassingly modest. “Jay, y'all talk about thinking big. That's the lowest goal I've ever heard.” His response is the entire argument of the book in one sentence: “If you add 50 pretty interesting people to your personal database every year, ten years later you've got 500 really connected, interesting people.”

A lot of entrepreneurs are good at the sprint, always racing toward the next launch like the hare. But it doesn't matter how many times you read the book, the tortoise always wins.

Why Habit Stacking Beats Willpower Every Time

So how do you actually build a habit instead of just admiring it from a distance?

Papasan pointed to a concept borrowed from behavioral scientist BJ Fogg – habit stacking. Fogg's original example, “after I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth,” helped 10,000 people start flossing by attaching a new, tiny habit to one that was already automatic.

The beauty of habit stacking is that the end of one established habit becomes the trigger for doing the new habit, until that becomes an established habit and you can build on it.

This research also suggests that on average it takes 66 days to build a habit, which means you could realistically build five new habits in a single year, not fifty.

The trap most people fall into is trying to overhaul everything at once, starting Monday with more water, more exercise, a journal, a networking plan, and a reading list, all on day one.

Papasan's advice is almost stubbornly narrow: pick one small habit, and put it on your calendar.

“There's a lot of research that backs us up on this. The moment you schedule the activity, we're pretty good at following through,” he said.

The piece most people skip is accountability. As adults, nobody's checking our work.

People living genuinely big lives aren't doing dramatically more than everyone else. They're launching their days with the same small, deliberate habit, repeated for years. It is extraordinary to do little things on a regular basis for a long period of time. That investment over time compounds into a kind of consistency that becomes intensity in itself.

Start With the One Thing, Not the Whole List

Talking with Papasan, the throughline (fittingly) was this: the businesses and habits that actually compound aren't the flashy ones. They're the boring, specific, scheduled ones, like one coffee a week or one habit built at a time. If you're a web designer trying to grow past referrals, or a small business owner trying to actually finish your website instead of endlessly tweaking it, the lesson is the same – figure out the one thing that matters, then make it small enough to actually do.

That includes your website. A lot of business owners treat their site like Papasan's cut chapters, something they'll perfect “later,” once everything else is handled. But your website is often the one thing that makes every other habit pay off, because it's what turns your consistency into visible credibility.

If you're ready to stop tinkering and just build the site that represents what you're actually doing, Showit's drag-and-drop design tools give you full creative control without needing to code, so your website can finally be one less thing on the list. Try Showit free for 14 days and see why so many designers and business owners trust it to get its site done.