One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to “not be ashamed of what I like.”

For example, I kind of like country music, although my peeps are mostly alt-rock. I should let the country-music side of me unfold and stop just hoping a country tune will come on the radio. There is no radio anymore in any case…

But as I teed up this Pimcraft blog today I felt shame. Shame that I was such a deep-dish nerd that I care about the distinction between Whirlwind and WIG. Not only that, I even use those names for them.

I first read about Whirlwind and WIG in 4 Disciplines of Execution, by McChesney, Covey, and Huling.

(Ever notice how life uses the same “magic numbers” over and over? 3, 4, 7, 12)

The problem addressed by 4DX is this: even when you know the right thing to do, people have a hell of a time doing it.  The reason is they don’t pay attention to the 4 disciplines.

I’m not going to recap the whole book — it’s a good book, you might want to check it out — but discipline #1 has to do with distinguishing between “the Whirlwind”, which is the chaos of ordinary life in all its bewildering plethora of things to do, and the New Thing.

You have to respect the Whirlwind. After all, it pays your bills, educates your children, etc. etc. But unless you respect the New Thing as well, it’s never going to happen.

You do that by setting one special goal, a Wildly Important Goal or WIG. A WIG is a goal, but it’s also a formulation of the New Thing. Without the right WIG, the New Thing probably won’t happen either.

I decided that I wanted to put the distinction between Whirlwind and WIG right into the heart of my Weekly Review.

GTD-heads will know that this is like introducing a new section into the weekly church service. It doesn’t happen very often.

And what I did was split up the work into two days. I used to do everything for my Weekly Review on Saturday. Now I put the Whirlwind part — the “normal” analysis of the normal stuff for the week — on Saturday and then Sunday morning, after 24 hours living with the new weekly goals, I create a WIG for the week.

As I slog through the 7 Hard Problems draft my WIG has generally had something to do with the book. This current week the WIG is vomit out the chapter on “Local vs. Global”. And while I’m in the midst of the 7Hard push — the WIG for the year is essentially to finish draft 1 of the book — the weekly (and monthly) WIGs will probably devolve from that. But not necessarily.

In any case, the distinction is interesting. 4DX is a good read if you need more detail.

And let me know what you think.