For the most part, I believe your habits should be downstream of your goals, and am loathe to prescribe any.

However I do think there’s one habit that just about anyone would benefit from.

Not all tasks are created equal. There are some tasks that, if accomplished, would have dramatically more impact on your vision than others. I call these your Most Vital Task (or MVT).

I believe identifying your MVT and consistently carving out the space to complete it would represent a material improvement in your ability to make progress on your goals.

Asking the Right Question

There are a number of questions you can ask yourself to find your MVT. Some of my favorites:

• The One Thing Question: What is the one thing I could do, such that by doing it, everything else will be either easier or unnecessary? (via Gary Keller)
• The Urgency Question: If you only had a year to accomplish your 10 year plan, how would you do it? (via Peter Thiel)
• The Limiting Step Question: Of all the steps in this process, which one represents the bottleneck? How would I be able to remove that bottleneck? (via the Theory of Constraints, popularized by Eliyahu Goldratt)
• The next action question: we’ve already talked about this with Task Management. But often when you’re stuck it’s helpful to ask “what’s the next physical action I could take to move this forward?”
• The reverse engineering question: We did a version of this when we did our Vision Plans. For your yearly goal, ask yourself what needs to happen next quarter? Then next month? Then next week? And so on.

Making sure your MVT gets done.

Now that you’ve identified your MVT, how do you make sure you consistently tackle it?

This is where supplementing with other habits becomes relevant. Some suggestions you might try:

• After I get to my computer, I will put my phone and computer into do not disturb mode.
• After I turn my computer on, I will only open the one application I need to complete the MVT.
• After I turn my computer on, I will set a timer for 5 minutes (to start) and commit to single task for the duration of that timer.