¶ This is How Billionaires Set Goals
Hey gang, welcome to a different kind of episode. This is kind of a live coaching session. We're gonna walk you through how to build a great 411. It's the most requested training we have. In fact, we used to call this how billionaires set goals. My writing partner, co author, and partner in this business, Gary Keller,
He became a billionaire and built the largest company in our industry under one brand around the world using tools like this. So I've brought in our director of training, who's taught the 411 more than anyone else. He is the most requested coach or trainer around this to bring it to your business or yourself. And we're going to break it down.
So that if you haven't ever used the 411 or you're using it and you want some coaching, you can be building a first 411 or a really great 411 by the end of this episode. If you're not at your desk, I predict that you'll listen to this, go back to your desk. Download the free resource and start building it. It's that important, folks. It's about clarity on one page so that you can say no to the distractions and do your one thing. Let's dive in to the 411 and how you can accelerate your success.
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This is the one thing.
All right, so before we dive into this, I'm gonna introduce Chris Dixon. He is our director of training for the last five years. 411 comes up an awful lot, doesn't it, Chris?
¶ Why To-Do Lists DON'T WORK.
It does. Most often.
And you get picked because you've got the longest line of experience helping people build and understand the 411. And you've worked with a mix of corporate customers, like huge companies around the world, and also individual business owners.
And I do, I love it because I love the 411. It's had a huge impact on me personally and I've got to use that tool in so many different audiences like you described and see the impact it has on others. And as a coach, it's an incredibly powerful way to make a difference with our coaching clients. So I love speaking about it.
The challenge for us is it's this tool that we believe in, but it's maybe three paragraphs in the book. Right. So this is our opportunity today to kind of unpack it for people, help them understand what it is, why it's important, all of those things. But before we dive into all things 411, I want to kind of like quickly recap when people show up at our door, a lot of them are using other tools. And I'd like to identify them so that people can say that's me.
That's me and kind of what we think the challenge with those tools are so that they have a a reason to maybe consider should I trade in my to do list for a four one one? Should I trade in my Asana board for a four one one? Or if there's other options. Yeah. One of my clients, she used to talk about when she first started running her own business, basically I would call her method uh post it notes in a prayer.
Right. They are diving into their email, their DMs, their text messages. They're writing down notes. wherever they can, often literally on post-it notes, right? And I've done this before, right? You like didn't get to that post it note by the end of the day. You stick it in your pocket and hope that you remember what it was for when you got home. But like what's the challenge with that besides the obvious kind of chaos?
I think number one is you're you're operating out of reactivity and you are driven by urgency and it's difficult to get your head above water. I think many people can relate to having that experience of
showing up on Monday and then just running as fast as you can to try to catch up. And you're looking at your to-do list, you're going for the things that are easiest to gain momentum. And you're not necessarily oriented on where you can make the greatest impact or what truly is going to move the business forward.
I think the seduction of the post-note no prayer method is that you're kind of always in hero mode. So if a lot of your identity is around knocking things out fast. Being reactive has a certain probably there's a you're getting something in return for living this way. Client calls they got a problem, you jump straight on the problem, you knock it out. And then you're looking around, what's my next target?
So it's like playing a perpetual video game where you don't know what's gonna jump around the corner where you get to be the hero of the story, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're going anywhere that you plan to go.
Yeah, you said something I think that's important to call out around identity and someone that's built a lot of at least success to this point, what's got them here is being the hero. And they've they've found success and feel attached to being incredibly busy and being the person that can do a lot. But making that shift to focusing on impact. It's not necessarily more. It's doing the right things. And your to do list may not easily distinguish what is the most impactful thing you can do.
Some people who are are really good at using to-do lists, they they do a version of prioritization there. They may say, okay, on my list here, I'm I'm kind of clear on what number one is for this week. But that's this week, right? We're not zooming out far enough to think about what really is gonna move me forward towards a milestone I have for this month or connect to my goals for the year and the organization or the quarter.
And having that connectivity is missing. If you're just zoomed in on the week or the short term, it's hard to really prioritize effectively.
Yeah. And you're you're leading us to number two, which is the to-do list, right? A lot of people, that's all they use. Yeah. And we actually called it out in the book. That's the only other system we talked about because so many people actually work from a to do list. If post a notes in a prayer is a bunch of to-dos in the most random possible, like reactive way. The to-do list at least advances it. You're at least putting them all in one place. Right. I have a list that I keep things on.
The challenge with it for me is immediately it is a great record of everything the world has introduced that you might should do. But there's also nothing else to it. Like you're talking about some of the pros and cons. There's no priority inherent in a to-do list. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and it there are strengths of a to do list. Uh it's not to say that they aren't beneficial, but by itself, it's limited. And you you it's a great way to capture the things that are on your list that you may need to knock down and track those. So it's it's helpful to keep a to do list, but we need a way to separate out the things that are higher impact.
Absolutely. I advocate a to do list for people's eighty percent. If we talk about the eighty twenty rule. 20% of what we do, the big stuff, right, connected to our one thing is where most of our results come from. There's still a long list of stuff that has to be done. Someone has to answer that client email. Someone has to clean the dishes, whatever that is.
I kinda moved.
All of the eighty percent items to my to do list. Is that what you do or is that what you see other people doing?
I think that's the right approach because if we don't track those things and dedicate time to solve them, they will become important and a twenty percent and urgent. And that'll start to weigh on you. You'll feel that like a heavy backpack on your shoulders over time. And if you can't unload that and have dedicated time to do it, it's hard to then sit down and focus on the higher impact work because you've got that weight.
So the next category is like all of the project management tools. I can't possibly name all of them. I've played around with Trello a lot. I use it with my EA and my chief of staff. Uh our marketing director Love Sasana. We've used Mondays, I believe, right here in the One Thing at Different Times. We have all of these project management tools out there.
And they're great for organizing the comprehensive work and also who it's assigned to and when it's supposed to be done. What's the challenge with those tools?
It forces you, I think, to Not have a a big picture view of everything that's on your plate because they're focused on a singular project or series of tasks and they're great. If it if your role requires working on complex projects, you you need a way to kind of map all that out.
But it still doesn't help you separate out impact. It's focused on urgency. Hey, what's due on my deadline this week to move this project forward? But it's not necessarily helping you zoom out and look at, okay, well, where, where do I really need to get to this month or this week to be on track for the larger goals we have in the organization.
I think of it as like because it can be assigned to people, you can put time deadlines on them. It's great if you're a project management or managing a project where you really do like, where do we go to see the whole project? But inherently it's designed to capture the whole project and not highlight the core thing. So I just think if there's a fault and maybe there's ways to hack it.
It's that it doesn't identify clearly the 20%. Like what's the executive summary of this project? What are the five milestones that no matter what happens, we have to hit those things?
Yeah, and it it catches everything, all of the moving pieces. So by design. By design. By design. By design. So it's inherently complicated. And complex systems are important in certain circumstances, but having a simple way to see what's most impactful. It's missing.
I think both the to-do list and those project management tools are great tools applied to the right problem. I don't know when we talk about goal attainment. uh for personal or professional lives, that they should be the leading domino unless we really work hard on.
I think just broadly speaking, people either intentionally have a system that they're using or they unintentionally don't have a system. And what we're what we're trying to do is figure out, okay, what how is your system serving you or not serving you? Right.
What we find and these examples that we shared is oftentimes that there's just a lot of complexity and noise in the environment and someone's looking at everything or they've they've got a missing sense of priority. And I think what's important is it There is a piece missing to your system that is simple. That is a place you can go to as a source of truth where you can separate out the things that matter most and stay accountable to them. And I think that's what we see.
And what I see the most often is they just get lost in the noise. And in there is a signal of what's truly going to move you forward towards your goals.
So those are some of the tools our listeners might be using. I think if you subscribe to the one thing, you're listening to this podcast. There are some gaps in all of them. They might be right for specific tasks. They probably aren't what we like. If you're gonna work with a one thing coach or us, I'm not gonna f always force someone to go to the 411.
¶ How to Make a 411
If they don't have an effectiveness problem, they don't need to switch their system. But if they are challenged identifying their priorities and getting them onto their calendar and executing, We'll let it try their way for a while, but then we're probably gonna move to this one and see if it doesn't work. And in my experience, it usually does.
So Chris, let's dive into the 411. Um, I'll give like a high-level overview of kind of what it is. And then since you teach to this and coach this all the time, I'd love for you to fill in some gaps on. Why it's set up the way it is from your perspective as a coach and a trainer and someone who's been living it for a very long time as well. So basically, if you just had a piece of paper, it could be digital or analog, doesn't really matter. You divide it into three rows.
In the top, you would have your annual professional and personal goals, like two columns. What are my annual goals for my work? What are my annual goals for my personal life? The middle kind of row is your monthly. And what are the milestones of those annual goals for this month, for my professional and my personal life?
So if you were gonna try to sell a hundred and twenty thousand widgets, make the math easy, your monthly goal, the milestone to feel like you're on track would be at least 10,000, right? That's how that math would work. The week is where things change a little bit. Because by the time we get to the week, it doesn't really help us. We were talking about this earlier to just write down outcomes.
You look down and I could say of those ten, I need to this week, I need to do whether that be like two and a half a week to get to that goal. Well, what does that look like? How am I going to do two and a half? What does that look like on a day-to-day basis? So we tend to work with people and say that the last row, your weekly, is activities. It's the actions you're going to take to make the outcomes happen. And that's a big step, isn't it?
Yeah. And what I commonly see is let's say in your example, they have a hundred and twenty thousand widget goal. That means this month they need to hit 10,000 to be on track. They'll go down to the week and say, well, this week I need to do 2,000 to feel like I'm moving towards my goal for the month or 2,500.
And that's where the opportunity is. It's this shift that from the outcome to hey, what's the one thing I really need to accomplish this week? Like what do I need to go do? What's gonna make the difference? How do I act differently this week so that I can achieve that 2500 to be on track for the month? And that switch is where it's powerful.
Yeah, you asked that question in the focus in question. And it might be, I need to call on our top 10 customers in the Northwest region and see what their orders are for this week or this month. And it if you ask the question right, you can get to the activities and those activities can actually go in your calendar. Whereas some vague outcome, it's really hard to block time on your calendar.
So let let's put this in the context of the ecosystem. They here, just to recap, the four one one is on one side of one piece of paper. So it is not a business plan. It is not a project management plan. It is meant to be kind of a heads-up display of all of the 20% stuff, the big rocks that you need to achieve to hit your goals. At the top level, you've got personal and professional.
Goals for the year. In the middle, you break it down to milestones for the month for each of those. And then at the bottom, each week, you look up and say, Based on my progress this year, what do I have to achieve this month? Based on my m progress this month, what do I have to do this week? And it's what do I have to do? Now it's my activity. But the four one one just doesn't live by itself in our system. Those activities at the bottom
calendared for us. They go into our schedule. We call it time blocking. And that's a big part of the context. It's the play between I know what I now need to do. Now I need to go time block when to do it. What else would you add to that picture?
I think if we circle back to some of the common challenges that we see with the systems that that people come to us that they use, one is The complexity. There's there's everything that we could do and all of the noise. And you said 80-20. That's just important to hit on again. It's the 20%. That's what goes on your four one one. It's not everything we could do. It's what's the most impactful things that we could do. So the twenty percent.
And a common challenge we see is connecting the work we're doing in the week with our goals for the month and the year. That that goal setting to the now principal. from the book lives in the four one one. And that's in incredibly powerful too. So understanding those two concepts and what's most important, not everything, and how do we connect today to tomorrow?
When people are just aiming at the week or the month or even a 90-day period, what they don't realize is because they're not working backwards from a larger goal, you can look up after three or four months and realize that you're running in circles. You're just chasing the low-hanging fruit. These are easy targets. I can hit this goal, but you're actually not making the progress thing you think. And I've seen it again and again where people, lots of activity, not as much productivity.
Yeah.
Productivity is acting on our twenty percent. This gives us a proven tool for identifying it and keeping it front and center. I love it because from a team standpoint, if I'm sitting down with someone on my team and I ask to see their 411, that's usually how we schedule our meetings together, you can look and immediately see what do they think their priorities are.
We're not dealing in the small stuff now. We're dealing with the big stuff, and that gives us an easy way to stay on the same page about our goals.
¶ What Real 411 Progress Looks Like in Practice
So Jay, just to make this a little bit more concrete, is there a good example you can think of, a client that you've worked with that you've seen this experience with the four one one?
Yeah, I'm working with an executive coaching client. She's been following the one thing for a long time. She read the book. She listens to the podcast. She even came to our annual summit. And so she's familiar with the 411, but she's never had any formal training in it. And just out of curiosity, when we closed up our February call.
I kind of wanted to say like, what's been the transformation for her? Every week, just voluntarily, she'll send me a copy of her 411. Like, here's my 411 for the week. And that provides context between our calls for her progress and her priorities. I went back and looked at our very first one in September of 2025. And if I looked at it on our annual goals, she had this jumble of personal and professional goals. She had 13
big rocks that she was chasing across those two categories. And some of them were subdivided. Her number one goal had, I believe, eight subcategories under it. So just chasing a whole lot. You fast forward to the end of February and there's only six goals. So she is more than 50% just at the high level. narrowed her focus by identifying what does matter versus all the things that she might do.
So she's actually kind of clearing the 80% out, but it took a little trial and error. And we see this. Usually I know Coach Jordan Freed that we work with, sometimes he'll say, most people will adopt this. They won't really find their rhythm until they're about 10 weeks into it.
You just practice it, practice it. It's a muscle. It gets better. Is that really a priority? I think it is. And people err on the side of including it, which is more of a to-do list style. So we look up and I'm just kind of looking at the nature of what's written down on the goal. In the beginning they were tasked They would just task. And now it's more about very specific activities or habits that she knows will drive the goals that she wants.
They went from kind of vague and aspirational to very concrete and accountable. Right. So now they're written down in a way instead of, you know, I'm going to write, like one of her goals is to write a book. I'm going to write regularly this week. It comes down to
Every day between this hour and this hour, I'm going to write. And there's a word count attached to that. So now I can ask the question, were you successful or not? We both have a measuring stick for deciding if that was going to happen. and that activity of writing for this period of time for this many words.
She knows exactly where it shows up on her calendar, and that leads up to her milestones and her annual. Then that like I look at broadly, she actually added as one of her top priorities every single week is planning. She now understands, and that's the next segment we'll get to, is the kind of the rhythm of how we build our 411s, interact with them. She knows that that twenty-minute weeding meeting every week.
where she sits down to craft her 411 is a core part of her success. And she's just not reactive anymore. Right? She's not reacting to her environment because her priorities are clear. And when your priorities are clear, it's kind of easy to say no to all the other jobs.
So a couple powerful things that she experienced as you went through that with the four one one that I think are just really important to circle back to and highlight like one, that shift from all of the things that she was could focus on and was doing down to what is we would call the twenty percent. Yeah. And that that transformation is
what we wanna see. That is something to celebrate. Naturally we find a a lot of people have an allergic reaction to that. They're like, well, wait a minute, what about all these other things? Like I s I still need to do them. And I think an important thing to say is it doesn't mean you you can't still
Give those time and attention, that those things won't happen at all. We're trying to say, where are you going to give a disproportionate amount of focus and attention? Like where do we separate the things that matter most out and knock those down and make sure that we we're not saying no to those no matter what?
Your number one is usually the place that you're choosing to refuse to lose.
There's something that's challenging at first when using the four on one in the week and the actions that you take just going small enough. Yeah. Like are we digging into the root? And it goes back to we we just are programmed to identify the outcomes that we want.
It's like I need to get here by the end of the week. Maybe we go a layer deeper and it's like there's some high level action. But the the real power in using the four on one is saying, okay, well, what's the one thing I can do to accomplish that? So how do I go a little bit deeper and get down to the root of what needs to really happen? And as you move through that from I wanna get to selling two thousand widgets this week
So okay, well what's the one thing I can really do to accomplish that? It's like well I need to make uh those calls. It's like, well, what's one thing you could really do to accomplish that? Because you've clearly not been hitting your call volume every week. It's like, oh, you know what? I need to be in a better environment because I get distracted. And it's like, all right, well, how do we create a better environment?
For you, it's like, well, you know what? I need to get to the office at eight, find that space, block that time, and create an environment for successes. Now we're really starting to get into something that's powerful, right? That's what you want to get on your four one one because that's where you're gonna move the needle.
We often call that kind of getting to the first domino. People know what the thing fundamentally they need to do. They need to make those calls in that instance. But they don't know where to start so that that becomes a regularly achievable goal for them. Yeah. So we've covered about half of the big stuff around, just to recap before we take a quick break. 411 is where we break down our 20% professional and personal goals, annual, monthly, weekly. And that helps us figure out this cadence of.
It answers the question, in order for me to achieve the goals I want this year, how do I have to behave this week? It goes from outcomes to milestones to activities, and those ultimately go to our calendar. There's another piece to the puzzle. We mentioned it at the very beginning. Anything that's not in your 20% has to live somewhere. So we teach people to kind of keep some list of their 80%. So if you can think about
Everything that matters goes on your 411. Those things get copied over at some point to your calendar. Everything else goes into your to-do list. And you mentioned it earlier, like they'll build up pressure. So we usually coach people regularly throughout the week. You're gonna time block time to knock out those eighty percent items. You're just gonna limit the time you give them. So that's part of the ecosystem. After the break, let's break down kind of how people live that on a
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Listen, you were never supposed to do it all. Extraordinary results come from doing the right things in the right order, one at a time.
¶ How To Build Rhythms
But there's a chasm between the things you know you need to do and the time you actually have to do them. We created the one thing operating system to bridge that gap, so you can do less and accomplish more. It's not another productivity course. It's a complete system to align what's most important to you with what you actually do today, this week, this year.
Whether you need to reconnect with your purpose, narrow your priorities, or just protect the ones you already have, the OS meets you where you are. You go at your own pace, and it comes with all the same tried and true tools, templates, and frameworks our coaching clients use. Go to the one thing.com slash os to learn more. That's the one thing.com with the number one slash os to learn more.
All right, everybody, welcome back from the break. We've kind of gone over some of the big ideas of what a four one one is. Now we're going to break down kind of like how you build rhythms around it so that you can use it. We call it the rhythm of accountability. Chris, break that down for us.
I think something important to understand about the four one one is So we call a living document, right? It's it's not a set it once and then run with it for weeks on end. It's something that we want to update every week. You have weekly actions in there, and each week is unique.
And it speaks to a core challenge that I see that we see with with many people is they just don't have a good regular rhythm of reflection. Right. A way to s hit pause and find time to say, Hey, what worked with this week? What were my opportunities? What do I want to continue to do that's giving me momentum and energy? What do I need to course correct on? And those small micro changes over time keep us on track with our goals. And you think about an airplane flying from New York to LA.
It's making on autopilot, it's making these small tiny corrections as it goes through uh the flight to stay on course. And if we don't make those corrections, even a one degree change in direction, you end up in Seattle by the end of your trip, right? And this is this is what we're trying to do with this weekly reflection and this rhythm is catch those small changes that we can make week over week to keep us on track.
A good example of that is if I'll get I'll leave the widgets behind. I'm trying to use the universal, right? Um, but let's just say I was supposed to um my activity would be to call on my sphere, right? My core people in my database in a TCPA compliant manner, folks, always. and generate X number of appointments is the outcome I'm looking for. Let's just say my outcome to be on pace for the month was five. I needed to generate five appointments with potential clients. I only got four.
When we reflect on our week, we might say, well, given the quality of the leads I had, four was actually a good Wii. I now have a choice. If I'm still committed to hitting my monthly goal, maybe I have to add one more to the next week and increase my activities with poorer leads. Like these aren't great leads, so I need to have more time to call more of them. to get the number of appointments I l need to hit my goals.
You have to do that math. At the end of the week, you look back, what were my results? How do I feel about that? Now I get to adjust my activities to get different results.
Just dedicating the time to ask simple questions is something I think so many people know that they want to do, just don't create the space to do it. And you can dig into it and build some some uh routine that's your own that's something you've developed, but just something so simple as, hey, am I on track or off track for the month for this goal?
What's one thing I could do differently next week? Yeah. It would take you five minutes to answer that question, maybe a little bit longer, but just starting with a ritual of reflection that you're asking questions about your goals. And the four one one is leveraged for you to have a source of truth that you can do that. And it's not all the things you could do. It's not this scorecard with 20 things on it. It's like, hey, I did the work to get clear on what matters most this month.
I'm on it's Friday, I'm sitting down, I'm reflecting on my week, am I on track, am I off track? And what what do I need to focus on next next week or do differently to get back on track or to stay ahead?
There was an acronym that I know some of us used to use in the system I grew up in for the 411. I've been doing this. Gosh, since September of 2000. Like it's crazy. It was required. It wasn't an option for me. And I was doing it with my co-author, Gary Keller. And so the standard was set pretty high. But I think I've done over 1,300 times. I've done exactly what you said.
How did I do last week? Based on that, how do I need to make an adjustment for next week for me to stay on track to my goals? But we used to say, like if we were working with a teammate, what was your goal? Great. What was your plan? Which is like, well, I planned to make this many calls on this many days at this time. Great. What were the actual actions you took? Well, I planned to do it five days, but I actually did it four days.
And then what were your results? And then I usually will ask, well, how do you feel about that? Now, you don't need a boss. You don't need an accountability partner to do that. You can do that for yourself. Like what happened this week and can I change how I'm approaching my work next week?
Let's share a prescription, if you will, of what best case would be on how we recommend you do this reflection, this rhythm of accountability. And I'd say it starts with let's assume you've built your first four one one. It starts with five minutes at the start of every day. Where you just look at this document that you've created. You don't have to make any changes or adjustments. It's just five minutes. And you do this before.
You crack open your Slack or you open up your email or you start getting rolling on your day so that you can look at your calendar, remind yourself of what's most important, and just start with positive momentum. That's step one. So five minutes, very small time investment, huge ROI.
We call that often gulps before phones. Before you get lost in your digital world, just look at what you said was important this week. It's amazing the impact that has.
Yeah, and and creating a good mental bunker for yourself, a good mental environment at the start of your day is so powerful. Like why not start your day with clarity on what's most important for you to accomplish to be on track?
Right.
It doesn't require a ton of work, it's just a few. Thought, mindset.
So what does it look like on a weekly level?
So step two would be I'd say start with thirty minutes, right? Let's let's go for consistency over intensity here. And start with thirty minutes. Find thirty minutes at the end of your week. I like Friday afternoons. Some people prefer the weekends. It really doesn't matter. I would just suggest finding this time at the end of the week before the start of the next week so you can play with the lead.
Yeah, I think a lot of people want to do it on Monday morning when they get to work. What's the problem with that?
Well, you're already behind, right? Everybody's calendars are gonna be filled up. You're gonna have a hard time if you need to coordinate with others. Like play with elite. Get out in front of the week as best you can.
And you don't know what's waiting for you when you get to work. you may not get to have that planning time. Yeah. So doing it Friday, I know lots of people do that. I've shared a million times. My wife and I tend to do it on Sunday early in the day. That's just when we both tend to regularly get together because we have to plan our family calendars as well. So there's 30 minutes. What am I doing in that 30 minutes?
So it's you're reflecting on the prior week, step one. Look back on the week. We talked about this earlier. Where was I successful? Am I on track, off track? Where maybe do I need to course correct? Go small, and then you're going to build next week's 411. If you're doing this digitally, it's create a new tab, duplicate the tab, all of your annual we uh monthly goals will pull forward and you just update the week.
Yeah, yeah.
Super easy. You're just looking at the month, each one of those goals you have for the month, asking what's the most important thing I need to get done next week.
So once I've got my new four one one built, what do I do?
Then you're going to connect your weekly twenty percent actions to your calendar. Right. Create your time blocks.
What does that look like? Give me an example.
say you have a goal to Uh spend two hours, invest two hours, three days next week making phone calls to get to your two thousand widgets goal. Got it. That's your weekly action. Then you're gonna actually go look at your calendar and put those time blocks on the calendar.
What we've seen and we added to this book after our original publication is when when people they know what they're supposed to do, when they attach it to a specific time and place, right? You're putting on your calendar, when and where am I going to do it? That's a calendar invite. Whether you're on Outlook or Google Calendar, it doesn't matter.
that increases the odds that you'll actually do it by about three times. You go from about thirty-five to thirty-eight percent to over ninety percent likely to do it. So that simple act of time blocking We're good at like looking at our calendars so that we can try to live it.
Yeah. And you're starting to gain a perspective of what's realistic next week. Not all weeks are the same. Maybe you have some other commitments and you're like, you know what? I it realistically I can't do what I thought I was gonna do. I have some fixed objects on my calendar. So then you can Go small. What what can you do? What's realistic? Kind of arrange your calendar for success. So at least you're starting with the right clarity for.
The on track off track's really important because maybe you had a sick kid the week before. You lost a day that you didn't plan for, now you can make adjustments. When we level up to stage three, we're going to the month.
¶ How to Update the 411 Month to Month and Year to Year
That's right. I'll say one more thing about the the weekly reflection. And this is true for the month too, but this is in my experience. without an accountability partner or a coach that's helping you really stay accountable to those time blocks, it's the easiest one to say no to. Yeah. And you really have to put it at a time of day where you're likely to be successful.
So if it's Friday at four o'clock after a long week and you're not accountable to anyone but yourself, are you really setting yourself up for success to sit down and do this kind of clarity work when you're exhausted? I'd say most cases probably not. So just not all time blocks are created equal throughout the day. It's probably one of the greatest ROI time blocks you can have in the week. Put it somewhere where you're setting yourself up for success.
You do yours on a Friday afternoon?
Friday at three PM. I still have some gas left in the tank.
All right, so Chris, I think we've we definitely hit the meat of it. Like those the weekly appointments with yourself to check in with your goals and your progress. If there was just one habit, that would be it. Reality is we have to update the month. What does that look like?
So what we're doing here is we're reflecting back on the month. We're saying Was I successful? Am I on track or off track for my goals for the year? And what we need to do then is update our goals for the new month. Right. So based on my goals for the year, what's most important to accomplish in the new month so that we have a fresh month on our four one one?
And it usually doesn't need to be more than three or five kind of big milestones you're trying to hit in any given month. In my experience, when I see ten, they don't get past four or five.
Yeah, I I I always encourage people when they're starting with the four one one to keep it as simple as possible and a great framework to follow is for every annual goal that you have, have one single milestone for the month. and then one weekly action you're gonna take. And it constrains you down to what is the true twenty percent of the twenty percent and earn the right.
over time as you build this habit to add other goals because sometimes naturally there might be more than one twenty percent for an annual goal in a given month. That's okay. But as you're building this habit, it's far better to start with as simple as possible.
Okay. So whatever your rhythm for your weekly rhythm, you're following it, but for the month we're gonna add some time. Fifteen minutes, it usually takes me an hour if I'm honest. We also are you time blocking when you're updating your goals?
Yeah, naturally because when you when you're doing your monthly reflection, this forty five minute in your case hour reflection, which I do also, but I try to encourage people to start small so it got it.
I just just admitting for transparency that maybe I'm a slow candidate here. Like it takes me longer.
Fair enough, but the the reason why you have some extra time is because you're not just updating the month, you also have a new week. Yeah. Right. And so we're we're week over week when we're doing our weekly reflection in the month, we're updating the week.
Now when we get to the end of the month, we have both a new month and a new week. And so we're going to go back to that same process. We connect the year to the month. Now what's the action I'm going to take in the week? Put it on your calendar.
This is also where I will time black sometimes. all the weeks. If I have a big activity that I know is going to show up every single week, I might go through my calendar. You mentioned earlier if you wait till Monday morning, if you have 20% items that are going on your calendar that require other people. The month's a good time to get ahead of that. You can start planning some of those meetings. Are these lined up correctly?
Yeah, I think you s you're speaking to something that's important to understand about the four one one is make it your own over time. Yeah. And find your system. The system you use is the one you should use. And there are some things we should watch out for, which we'll talk about here in a minute, just to protect
uh with the 411. But over time, find your system. I tend to, as a coach, teaching this, I I try to keep it in a super tight box early on so that you can form the habit. Because there's some traps to watch out for if you're not careful by keeping it simple. You build the habit, you're gonna get great value out of following that process. And then over time you can kind of loosen up the bumpers on the bowling lane a little bit and find your own system.
Yeah, like I said, I've been doing it thirteen hundred times.
Yeah.
So is that everything on the month? W or do do we do we get to tackle the year now? Because that would be the last step.
Yeah, let's talk about the year. So as we mentioned, the four one one has three sections. You have your annual goals, your monthly goals, and your weekly actions, right? Outcome, target for the year, milestone, action for the week. Naturally, at the end of the year, you have hopefully accomplished all of your annual goals and you will have to create new annual goals for the year.
That to me is the most time consumptive. That's why a lot of times we used to tell people to do like a little retreat, get on the same page if you have a spouse or a partner. What do we want to accomplish next year? But yeah, it's a little bit bigger process process to build it for the first time and at the beginning of the year because you're thinking through the whole year. Yeah. But that's all the reason to keep it simple. Don't have tons of goals.
¶ Common Mistakes
Yeah, and it's something we we should also mention that's a good practice in your four one one is week over week, month over month and through the year.
Mark.
where you're successful and you're not successful on your 411. So in the week, a great practice is market red or market green if you're doing it digitally or a strike through. Uh if you're doing it on paper, you can draw a line through however you want to do it, star it, but just acknowledge where you are successful and where you're not successful because that perspective uh is incredibly powerful.
Well, I love by the end of the month where I have almost everything crossed out on mine. Yeah. I know the little control shift X that does a strike through on my little spreadsheet. All right. So We're gonna wrap this up soon. What are some of the big mistakes people make? Like they've heard what it is, kind of what the rhythm is. You've already addressed like the number one thing they might skip is the weekly appointment with themselves.
Yeah, I'd say that's one for sure is there's just a few here to watch out for. One is not truly forming the habit and having that weekly reflection and making it something that is uh a mainstay on your calendar that you you're committed to and That can be challenging at first. So keep in mind that scale down. Like if you were just doing something this week to update your four one one and connect your calendar so you keep the momentum. I'd say that's number one.
The second one that's incredibly common because it's like gravity and you're changing behavior and shifting a new way of thinking about the 20% is your 411 creeping into a to-do list.
Right. You're just writing down everything you have to do, not the truly important
Yeah. On your on your weekly it starts to look like a glorified to do list. You know, check email shows up on your four one one. You're you it's a good signal you're you're starting to go all the the wrong direction there. It's not a to do list. It's meant to be something distinctly different.
Anything else come to mind when you're helping people build these out that is kind of a common mistake?
Yeah, another one is just overcomplicating it. We talked about simplicity a lot in this. There's there's things to do to make it your own. We talked about that. And that's an important evolution. So that's something that you find value in. But watch out for making it something it's not intended to be. Right. It isn't a project management tool. It isn't a scorecard inherently. Th this is something distinctly different. So just watch out for unnecessary complexity.
It's a focus document. It's it's supposed to be your heads up display for your most important goals. He doesn't have a lot of other jobs. Got it.
Okay, last thing is just not being clear about what success looks like. This as a coach is something that I love about the 411 because it is a view into the way people think about goals and words matter on the 411. So be specific about what success looks like. When you're writing down your goals. Naturally, we tend to be a bit shorthand because we think we're keeping clarity in our mind. But make what the words on paper are reflect as clearly as you can how you would know your success.
¶ The ONE Thing Weekly
So like you go down the whole path of smart goals, which I've already heard. But basically I like to say if someone was looking at my four one one, how would they know I was successful? Mm-hmm. If it's too general for a third party to look at your results and say, you win.
then you need to some work to do. And that usually means it does need to be time bound. It does need to be specific. It does need to be measurable. You don't have to have a list of 50 things, but that's kind of what you mean by being really specific with your goals.
Yeah, and I I use this question all the time. Just ask yourself how would I know I'm successful? If you can answer that with what you've written, you're on track.
Yeah. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. All right. Thanks for doing this deep dive on the 411, because I know so many people dive into this and they just have the wrong expectations. They don't quite know how to do it. Um What would be our challenge for the week, Chris? What would be a small challenge we could give people? They've listened to it all the way to the end. They're they really want to tackle the four one one. How can they get started?
Go get the tool first. Go get the spreadsheet. It's available for free uh and our free resources on our webpage, on our website. And so go get the tool. And my challenge to you would be to go time block. That 30 minutes at the end of the week where you're gonna build your first 411 and week over week start that reflection.
Yeah, so that resource is at the one thing dot com with the number one slash resources. Super easy to find. If you just go to the way main webpage, there is a free resources tab. And I think it's the very first resource that we have.
Yeah and keep it simple. Yeah. That's it. Don't Overcomplicate. It's more about consistency than it is about intensity.
Thanks, Chris.
Bye.
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