4. Focus on Wildly Important Goals

Welcome back to this short mini-course on Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• 1. Deep Work vs Shallow Work 
• 2. The Four Rules of Deep Work
• 3. Routines + Rituals for Deep Work

Here’s what we’re covering in our final lesson:

Focus on Wildly Important Goals 

When it comes to doing deep work, concentration is KING. And when we’ve got too many priorities, our concentration gets divided. As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution put it, “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”

In other words: a key habit of integrating deep work into your life is to target your actions toward a small number of wildly important goals (WIGs)…

Because when you try to accomplish everything, you end up accomplishing nothing.

The key, then, is to simplify your approach to deep work.

You do that by paring down the number of highly important goals you want to accomplish to no more than a few… These are your 1–3 wildly important goals—the outcomes you’re most excited about, find most meaningful, and would have the biggest positive impact on your life once you’ve accomplished them. 

Here’s how Cal Newport puts it in Deep Work,

This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results.

For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.

The general exhortation to ‘spend more time working deeply’ doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm.

The idea here is to let ambitious goals drive focused action and behavior.

Here’s how writer David Brooks puts it in his 2014 column for NYT – titled The Art of Focus,

If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasborg; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

Bottom line?

It’s much easier to say “NO” to shallow distractions when you’ve chosen to say “YES” to the deep work that matters most to you.

Actionable insights

• What’s your wildly important goal? What is the ONE BIG—difficult but doable—wildly important goal that you most want to achieve over the next 6–12 months?
  • Think of the one, highest leverage goal that would have the biggest impact on your life if you were to achieve it.
  • Then, write down your answer to the following question: “What’s my wildly important goal?”
• Did you write it down? If yes, you should now have a wildly important goal—a starting place to organize + execute your deep work efforts around until you’ve accomplished it.
• Next steps?
  • If you only have one wildly important goal – you’re now ready to make a plan and start taking action.
  • If you have other areas of your personal or professional life that are also a priority – identify wildly important goals for those areas as well. But keep in mind: the more goals you have, the more you divide your attention, and therefore, your ability to accomplish those goals. So cap your WIGs to no more than three.