Doing One Thing a Day to Reconnect to My Rhythm

The Origins of My One-Thing Experiment

When I first started playing with the concept of Sustainable Cadences, I launched two experiments: (1) I tracked how I felt as the moon moved from one zodiac sign to the next, and (2) I played with the idea of doing the bare minimum by challenging myself to do one thing per day. 

Yes, you read that correctly. One thing per day. Not one work thing. Not one personal thing. But just one thing on my life to-do list. That meant the thing could be moving my body, writing a blog post, doing a client call, or doing some meal prep. But either way, I challenged myself to do just one thing and see what happened. 

I’ll talk more about the moon tracking in another post, but right now I want to talk about the magic I discovered from challenging myself to do one thing per day. Let me start with a bit of background to help you understand what led to this particular experiment.

Why I Needed This Experiment: My ADHD Project Management Reality

I have a really hard time prioritizing work. It’s part of the bigger challenge of project management for me. The entire concept of thinking of a project and then breaking it down into small steps to execute over time is a bit of a mystery to me. Usually, if I feel like I need to do that, I call my friend Dana and book a session with her so she can gently coax the ideas out of my head to create some semblance of a plan for executing them. 

But that still leaves me to figure out what I need to do each day and when you have ADHD, that can be an unusually daunting task. My usual approach is to try to do a bunch of things to feel like I’m making progress, but we all know how that worked out in 2024. So I needed an experiment that would force me to wrestle with the challenge that is establishing priorities, not just in my business, but in my life generally.

Because if I don’t do certain life things like eat the right foods, move my body how it needs to move, or regularly tend to my emotional state, then nothing in my life works or makes any real sense, including my actual work. And that’s how this experiment came into being in 2021. 

Let’s get into the details. 

The Experiment Ground Rules

Listen, I know I’m a Virgo, but when it comes to experimenting with cadences, I don’t have any hard and fast rules. Instead, I like to create general guidelines to follow. So ya, it’s not exactly scientific, but my goal is to create enough structure for me to be consistent while leaving wiggle room for me to find a natural flow. 

For this particular experiment, I only had a couple of guidelines: 

• Do 1 thing (anything) that feels like the priority of the day;
• Try not to do anything else that you think is a priority.

It’s fine. I know what you’re thinking: “This woman is insane.” And maybe you’re right because even I’m laughing as I type this, but I swear to you that this is what I did at the end of 2021. I just stopped trying to do a bunch of things and started focusing on doing one thing really well. 

And guess what happened? I got a lot done and I learned a fuck ton. 

What Actually Happened: Surprising Results

Here’s the first thing I learned: a lot of things that felt like they were the priority of the day took a lot more time than I realized. 

For example, if the priority for the day felt like meal prep, that didn't just involve cooking a meal. It involved deciding on the meal, making a grocery list, procuring said groceries, and then cooking the actual meal. Since my only goal was to complete one priority task a day, I had the mental bandwidth to recognize everything that was involved in meal prep in a way that I’d never noticed before. 

It turned out that the priority task that I used to think took 45 minutes to accomplish took more like 3 or 4 hours.

Writing a really good newsletter was a little easier. I wrote those when I felt inspired to write. This was before I was blogging or holding myself to any sort of consistent content output schedule. Now that I have that, I’m finding that content creation, whether it be a newsletter, a blog, or social media posts is a lot more like meal prep in that it’s actually a pretty bad idea for me to create when I feel inspired. It’s much better to make it a process where I brainstorm, outline, then write the content, then edit it, and then schedule/post it. It takes way less mental energy, which makes it more sustainable.

Here’s the second thing I learned: doing one thing well each day is kind of a lot, but making it a habit to do things really well is also a big confidence booster. 

That’s because doing one thing a day and doing it well takes something. It takes focus, attention to detail, and effort. I learned that completing a priority task well each day required a meaningful amount of energy, which is something I used to trivialize back in my corporate days when I was expected to accomplish a crazy number of tasks each day. 

Focusing on getting just one thing done instead of trying to race against time to get as many things done as possible in a certain amount of hours helped me get clear about how much it actually takes to accomplish anything. And that deserves not only some celebration but also some recognition and honoring. 

Especially since I don't believe it's in our nature to jump from task to task from the moment we wake up to the moment our heads hit the pillow at night. I think it's natural for us, like all other living things, to take time to rest, and doing one thing well each day gave me that time back.

Sometimes I’d do part of the thing, get tired and nap for a bit, and then come back to it. Other times, I’d work straight through until the task was completed and then spend the remainder of the day resting. And still other times, I found I had to do some emotional prep work to get to a place where I could do the thing, so I’d spend the morning journaling, tapping, or some other tool to move whatever emotions needed to be moved so I could do the priority task in the afternoon. 

Three Major Revelations

I took 3 really big things from this experiment.

The first is that I remembered what it felt like to take pride in doing things well. Oftentimes when we’re living in capitalism’s chaos, we just jump from one thing to the next for the thrill of checking something off a list. But we never take the time to consider how well we did it. Or at least I didn’t do that often. 

I loved the pacing of doing one thing each day because it helped me build my confidence and take pride in whatever I was doing, even if it felt mundane.

The second thing I learned is that there's more to a task than just doing the task itself. There's often prep work involved. Whether that's literally going to run errands to accomplish the task or journaling/tapping through any emotional hang-ups you have about the task, there's more to it than just doing it. And that prep work takes time too.

The third thing I took from this experiment is that it’s the best way for me to reconnect to my natural rhythm. Whenever I’m moving too fast or losing myself to societal rhythms that aren’t my own, I know I can come back to this practice because it’s the ultimate reset. 

When I’m feeling unmoored, lost, or frustrated, more than any other cadence I practice, this is the one I return to so I can reclaim the time and space I need to remember myself and tend to my needs. In fact, this is the practice I turned to in December 2024 when I returned from a family trip to Louisiana for Thanksgiving completely worn out and dysregulated. Adopting that practice is what helped speed up my recovery in 2024 and it sparked the inspiration for relaunching Sustainable Cadences as a blog. 

As I take the next steps towards building up The Everyday Lawyer in 2025, I’ll be keeping this particular practice very close. 

Making This Work in Real Life

Now that I feel reconnected to my rhythm again, I don’t need to follow the one thing per day rule as strictly. Instead, I shifted the rule to be one work thing per day so that each day I know exactly which work thing I need to accomplish to move my projects forward. That thing rarely takes more than 2 hours and pretty much never takes more than 3. 

That kind of spaciousness in my day gives me a lot of room to tend to my personal needs, socialize, get myself in the right mental and emotional space I need to be in to do my best work, and work more if I feel inspired to do so without depleting myself. 

That doesn't mean I don't still encounter moments of resistance where it feels like I need to do more. Sometimes I give into those moments and spend the next day recovering and other days I make myself turn it off and go do something else I now will nourish me.

That's why this experiment and everything else you read about Sustainable Cadences is called a practice. We aren't following a predetermined regimen; we're listening to and attuning to our natural rhythm.

An Invitation to Experiment

Lots of you who read this will, for lots of reasons, find this particular experiment to be unrealistic. I don’t say that to judge you; I say it from the experience of teaching this particular cadence when I used to have a program for this practice. People really struggled with the concept of doing one thing per day. When I introduced it, eyes bulged out of heads and shoulders crept up by ears. The idea of slowing down is already terrifying for many folks so the challenge of doing 1 thing per day can feel like absolute insanity for most. 

If this is an experiment that you want to try, and I truly encourage everyone to give it a go even if it’s just for a week or two, then I invite you to pay special attention to what your resistance to it looks and feels like and what’s causing it. 

After all, this particular experiment is a level-setting practice. It’s designed to acquaint you with what it is to do the bare minimum and still move things forward. We live in a society that’s obsessed with doing the most and that touts doing the most as the only means of survival. If we want to counteract that, then we need to explore what it is to do the least, see what the results are, and see how they compare to doing the most. 

And remember, this isn’t an indefinite practice; it’s a temporary experiment designed to help you build a natural cadence map for yourself.

If you’ve got questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below. I’d love to hear how your experiment goes.