Keeping the main thing the main thing is the easy half

The sentence is almost a tongue twister, which is part of why it lasts. Jim Barksdale used it throughout a career that ran through operations at Federal Express, McCaw Cellular and AT&T Wireless before he became chief executive of Netscape in 1995. At Netscape it was the first of a set of homespun rules he repeated to staff. He did not claim to have invented it. Stephen Covey printed a version in his 1994 book First Things First, and the saying seems to have circulated in sales meetings well before either man used it.

What it asks for is discipline over time. Most teams can agree on a priority in a planning meeting. The trouble starts a week later, when a large customer asks for a custom feature, a competitor ships something shiny, or an internal project becomes interesting for its own sake. Each of these is reasonable on its own terms, and together they pull the team away from the thing it agreed mattered most. The rule is a reminder to check each new demand against that agreement.

In a small company it works well. A startup with a single metric, such as paying customers or weekly active users, can test every request against it and say no quickly. The rule also protects people’s time: engineers who know the main thing do not need a meeting to decide whether a side project can wait.

Netscape itself shows where the rule gets hard. In its short life the company sold server software to businesses, gave away a browser to consumers, ran a busy web portal and fought Microsoft over the browser market. Which of those was the main thing was a real argument inside the company, and the answer shifted as Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows. Keeping the main thing the main thing is simple once the main thing is known. Knowing it is most of the work, and the saying offers no help with that part.

There is a second limit. A main thing chosen well in one year can be wrong two years later, when the market moves. A team that has learned to guard its priority fiercely may guard the wrong one. The rule needs a companion habit: revisit the main thing on a schedule, deliberately, so that changing it is a decision and never a drift.

Read that way, the line is less circular than it sounds. It says to choose one thing, protect it from daily distraction, and change it only on purpose. The first and last steps are where most of the difficulty sits.