Forgotten But Focused: A Lesson from James K. Polk

The To-Do list on my iPhone has 91 items. This is the result of an applied effort in the last couple of months to get down from what was about 150 items last summer. Even now, if I knock off some of the long-term “wish list” stuff, like “Climb Mt. Washington” and “Clean the Basement”--you know, the stuff that will either happen on its own or never happen at all--I’m down to maybe 75 items.

Some things are seasonal, like “Buy anniversary card,” and just appear as reminders once a year. So, they stay on the list but aren’t especially onerous. That gets me down to maybe 50.  I know, to a GTD disciple, 50 items is the subset of a sublist of a master list of an uberlist—hardly a list at all. Still, 50 To-Dos does seem like a lot.

Last summer I clipped a Peggy Noonan column, “To-Do List: A Sentence, Not 10 Paragraphs,” from the June 27/8 Wall Street Journal. In it, she suggested to President Obama that Clare Booth Luce had it right in 1962 when she told President Kennedy that “a great man is one sentence.”

“He preserved the union and freed the slaves.”

“He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War.”

There’s no mistaking those.  Noonan went on to suggest that Obama was trying to do too much and, in the process, was missing “The Sentence.” (Her suggestion for Obama was: “He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror.”)

It all reminded me of the way Daniel Walker Howe portrayed President James Knox Polk in What Hath God Wrought. Now, there's a guy you don’t think about every day--James K. Polk. But talk about focused and driven—a guy built for "The Sentence."

Polk told his secretary of the Navy that he would have "four great measures" of his administration: Settlement of Oregon with Britain, the acquisition of California, a reduction of the Tariff, and the permanent establishment of the Independent Treasury.

How did Polk do? Howe concludes, “Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States ever had.” He picked two big foreign policy and two big domestic goals, stayed focused, and achieved them in one term.

Unfortunately, Polk’s “Sentence” may go something like, “No matter how good a President you are, you can’t escape America's historical ignorance of the period between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.”

Polk’s extraordinary focus reminds me of the trick an old boss taught me, way back before every desk had a computer and every pocket a PDA. He would take a 3-by-5 card at the start of each quarter and write down his 3-6 goals for the quarter. Then he would leave it in the corner of his desk where he could see it constantly, or carry it in his pocket when he was traveling.  Every day he'd gauge if what he was doing contributed to one of those goals; if not, he’d stop and, as he said, get back to work.  Given that our mind tends to limit us naturally to 3-7 items in any evoked set (from toothpaste to annual goals), this turned out to be incredibly good advice.

I suppose, for each of us, "Our Sentence" gets written every year in a variety of ways. Personally, I’m not looking for anything as grandiose as “he freed the slaves," or even "he acquired California."  I just don’t want it to be “He never had less than 90 items on his To-Do list.”

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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