Lesson One: Do Something Big This Year

Cal Newport and I are opening our Life of Focus course for a new session next week. Before we do, I’m sharing some lessons this week on how you can focus better in your work and life. Stay tuned!

I think about my life as a series of projects. I think you should, too.

Projects exist in the middle space of our productive activities. At one end we have tasks, the myriad things that need doing in our day-to-day lives: filing taxes, walking the dog, doing laundry, submitting that report. At the other end are our grand dreams for our lives: to be financially independent, travel the world, build a business or raise successful kids.

Grand dreams are nice, but they’re generally not very practical. It’s easy to get excited as you think them over, but rarely does even the most compelling grand dream tell you what, precisely, you should be doing on Tuesday morning to make it come true. Their size and distance makes them poor objects for sustaining motivation.

Tasks and to-do lists suffer from the opposite problem. You can check off lots of tasks while accomplishing nothing major. Sure, the house is a little cleaner, maybe you’ve balanced your chequebook and fixed the wobbly chair in the dining room, but these, like most tasks, simply sustain your current life. They don’t take you somewhere new.

Projects act as the bridge between grand dreams and daily action. A big life goal often can be achieved in a project or two. And a project can be achieved through a coordinated series of tasks.

The Mindset Needed to Habitually Complete Projects

Being good at completing projects requires a different mindset than being merely productive (and thus being good at checking off tasks) or ambitious (and thus coming up with grand visions for your life).

Completing projects requires focus.
Focus is not just the ability to sit down and work at something hard for hours at a time; it’s also learning how to ignore all the other things screaming for your attention. Sometimes those other things are entertainment or distractions. More often, they’re legitimate tasks and work that, if you heed their siren song, will have you crashing against the rocky shore of minutiae long before you reach your ambitious destination.

It’s Time to Finish What You Start

My guess is that you already have some project ideas. Perhaps some you’ve idly thought about. Perhaps some you’ve already committed to. Perhaps some that oscillate between daydreams and serious efforts.

This year, I suggest you go ahead and finish one of them. It doesn’t need to be the largest or most difficult project on your list—but it should be something that matters to you. Make this the year that you don’t just *think* about doing it, but actually finish it.

Certainly, this is easier said than done. Perhaps you have dreamt up projects that have gone nowhere. Maybe you’ve even insisted that “this time it’s different,” and you’re finally going to complete a project you’ve been thinking about for years—only to succumb to the relentless tide of distractions in the months ahead.

We’ve all been there.

If you are looking for help with this, I encourage you to join the upcoming session of our course, Life of Focus. In it, we’ll help you set and achieve a consistent deep work target—a necessity for making sustained progress. We’ll declutter your leisure time—creating space to tackle big things. And we’ll cultivate your ability to sustain your attention in the way, and on the things, you choose.

The full three-month course is a great complement to any big goal you’ve been meaning to accomplish, but I want to leave you with one strategy you can apply today: right now, start tracking the hours you spend working on the project you have in mind.

This doesn’t require fancy software or complicated calculations. A simple piece of paper where you tally every uninterrupted hour of work towards your project will suffice.

Put the tally on your wall, on your phone, or anywhere you will look at it often. By maintaining a visual reminder of your decision to focus, you can steadily move in the right direction.

Life of Focus, my three-month course co-taught with Cal Newport, will reopen for a new session on Monday, January 27, 2025.