The Free-Time Formula

14Seven‐Day Action Plan: The Value of One Action Step

There is incredible value in taking direct action.

In fact, the smallest and seemingly most insignificant actions are inherently more valuable than the eighteen new things you learned but did nothing about.

In your quest to acquire more free time, achieve your most important goals, and live a more prosperous life, the only strategy that ultimately matters is the one that creates the results you want—and, ideally, in the shortest amount of time possible.

Every other strategy you could adopt is, therefore, not as valuable and deserves little or none of your attention.

A single action that pushes you directly toward your goal builds momentum. It gets the ball rolling and knocks down the wall of inertia standing between you and what you want most.

As a productivity coach, I have worked with many high achievers who fall victim to the same traps as the rest of us. One of the most common traps is valuing activity over productivity, busyness over progress, and nonsense over results.

We come to believe that if we stay busy enough, surely something important is getting done, right?

Unfortunately, no. Being busy only leads to being busier.

In the process of valuing activity over productivity, you will accomplish some important tasks, but at a huge cost: increased stress, fatigue, burnout … you know the drill.

Your mission in everything you do is to identify the single action that is the very next most important task to accomplish. That ...