The One Thing You Can Actually Control

What a Stoic philosopher knew about priority lists

“Make the best use of what is in your power,
and take the rest as it happens.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion

One month into my new job, I had a page full of handwritten priorities, a growing list of tasks team members were dropping on me, and a portfolio of clients I was still getting up to speed on.

I sat with it all in front of me and felt the weight of how much there was.

The old instinct surfaced immediately: work around the clock until it’s done. I recognized it the way you recognize a habit you’ve worked to break. That version of me would have touched everything at once and finished the month exhausted, having moved everything a little and nothing very far.

Instead, I stopped.

I returned to timeboxing, a time management practice with a simple rule: schedule your most important work before anything else can claim the time. I laid everything out and asked one question: What is the most critical piece to focus on right now?

The answer was the workflow that everything else depended on: how our team tracked work and communicated progress.

Our project management system had become a source of muddy timelines and unclear ownership. As the bridge between our external clients and internal team, I could see exactly what it was costing everyone. Every unclear deadline. Every dropped handoff. Every hour spent trying to figure out what was supposed to happen next.

I could also see roughly forty other things I wanted to help with.

That’s the adjustment that doesn’t show up in a job description: learning what’s actually yours to touch.

Back in the Trenches

My previous roles were strategy. This one is execution.

The difference on an ordinary Tuesday is significant. My mornings start fast, with multiple channels to catch up on before I can pass updates to the internal team, whose daily work depends on them. There’s an underlying tension to it. A constant check: is anything getting missed?

In a director role, you’re standing above the current, watching the water move. In this one, you’re in it.

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d missed that. The texture of actual work. The satisfaction of something done rather than directed.

But being back in execution also means being back in close range of every fire. And my instinct, built over years in senior roles where being indispensable everywhere was part of the job, is to move toward all of them.

That instinct needs regular correction.

What Epictetus Knew

Epictetus taught Stoic philosophy in ancient Rome. His most enduring idea is also his simplest: most of what we try to control isn’t ours to control at all.

He opens The Enchiridion with a distinction that sounds simple and isn’t. Some things, he writes, are up to us. Others are not. What’s up to us: our own judgments and attention. What’s not: outcomes, other people’s responses, the fires burning in someone else's lane.

The dichotomy of control isn’t about passivity. It’s about precision.

When I stopped and laid everything out on the page, I wasn’t ignoring the other problems. I was making a deliberate choice about where my attention could actually do something.

Where the Compass Points

When I bring One Focus to my work right now, it doesn’t ask me to ignore what I see. It asks me to be precise about what I can actually move.

• What’s mine to touch right now, and what am I reaching for out of habit?

• If I could only do one thing this week that would make everything else easier, what is it?

• Can I trust that staying in my lane is enough?

One month in, the answer is yes.

Not because I’ve stopped seeing the fires. But because I’ve learned that the most useful thing I can do is not always the most visible thing.

What the Culture of More Gets Wrong

There’s a version of ambition that confuses motion with impact.

It looks productive and responsible. You’re aware of every problem, looped into every conversation, indispensable in every room. But if your attention is everywhere, it’s really nowhere. And the work that only you can do goes undone while you’re busy touching everything else.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: by staying in my lane, I ended up moving more than I would have by reaching beyond it.

Fixing the workflow didn’t just clean up project management. It reduced the confusion-generating questions. Fewer questions meant clearer paths for the internal team. Clearer paths meant fewer dropped handoffs with clients. I didn’t solve those downstream problems directly. I solved my one thing, and the ripple did the rest.

This is scarcity versus sufficiency with focus.

Scarcity says: cover more ground. Be visible everywhere. If a fire is burning and you can see it, you should be fighting it.

Sufficiency says: do your one thing with full attention. A well-placed contribution moves more than a scattered one.

A Small Practice

Before you open your calendar or your inbox this week, write down one thing.

Not a list. One thing. The work that, if it got done this week, would make the most difference — to your team and yourself.

Then protect the time for it before anything else can claim it.

You can still respond to fires. You can still show up. But the one thing goes first.

That’s timeboxing as philosophy: decide what matters before the day decides for you.

See you next week.

P.S. What’s the one thing on your list that keeps getting pushed down by everything else? What would it mean to put it first this week?