1. What Is This Course and How Does It Work?
One Big Win is designed to help you do two things:
Achieve a major personal victory during your spare time, over an eight-week period, using the “Block Method”
Achieve any future goal using this approach
The Block Method is the simple, universal productivity method I described in my ebook, How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged. This course assumes you’ve read How to Do Things already, and have a basic grasp of the Block Method.
If you haven’t read HTDT yet, not to worry — it can be read in an hour or less, and its method can be implemented right away. Your first task, in that case, is to give it a read, because from here on in we will assume you have.
NOTE: You can find a copy of How to Do Things in the Resource section of the course. This section can be found at the very bottom of the lesson list. Download a file called "How to do Things v1.0.pdf"
The role of the Block Method in One Big Win
As you know (if you've read How to Do Things) the Block Method is a way of working in short, intentional, uninterrupted sprints of 25 minutes.
A single Block is easy to achieve, yet it represents a significant unit of work in any project. One Block consists of enough focused effort to complete a minor task, move any major task one good step forward, or knock off a whole list of tiny tasks.
Because even the largest goals (e.g. write a five-book fantasy series, launch an online business) are always made of smaller tasks, virtually any goal can be achieved by making some number of Blocks.
This means Blocks can be thought of as a sort of “effort currency.” You can essentially buy lasting improvements to your life — even things like degrees, businesses, and skills — by making them out of Blocks. Blocks are building materials for your life situation.
Fixing the wobbly faucet in the kitchen might require one single Block. In less than a half hour, you’ve earned a more pleasant kitchen experience, every day, perhaps for years.
Setting up a budgeting app, such as You Need a Budget, might take 6 or 7 Blocks. Upon completion, you inherit lower baseline stress levels, a greater sense of control over your life, and enough waste might be prevented to effectively give yourself a raise.
Completing your first short story might take 25 Blocks. Aside from the completed story, you’ve inherited a new identity, crossing over from a dabbler/dreamer to a real writer with finished work to point to, and the confidence to produce more.
I call this idea -- the fact that every goal can be achieved in some number of Blocks -- the Principle of Finitude. There’s a galaxy of possibilities for your life out there, each of them only one stack of Blocks from where you stand right now. Any given achievement sits at the top of a staircase with a finite, countable number of steps.
Just one Block is powerful. A stack of them can be life-changing.
In this course, you’ll choose a good-sized personal goal (one requiring between 24 and about 100 Blocks) and use the Block Method to step your way right up to its completion.
Putting Blocks together
When you’re building something big out of Blocks, you need more than just the willingness to make a lot of Blocks. You need some project management. You need clear blueprints, to make sure you build all the necessary parts. You need to budget your materials and time. You need a construction schedule, to ensure it gets finished on time. It's also helpful to have a community of fellow builders, building things alongside you, to inspire you and hold you accountable.
That’s what One Big Win is designed to provide: the scaffolding and supports needed to build larger, life-changing things out of Blocks.
Overview of how this course works
The One Big Win course, excluding this introductory section, is eight weeks long. Essentially, you will choose a goal, get clear on what actions it entails, and complete it by making the required Blocks, all over a period of eight weeks.
For that eight weeks, you’ll be making Blocks towards your goal wherever you can fit them into your schedule. If you can only manage 3 or 4 per week, you’ll select a more modest goal. If you can do 10 or 12, you can select a more ambitious one.
The eight weeks of the process are divided into four equal “stages” of two weeks each. (The Preparation section, which you’re reading now, is to be completed before the eight-week period begins, but it’s not very long. You can get through it in about an hour or two.)
Stage 1 (weeks 1-2) is about defining your goal clearly, making a plan of attack, and getting some Blocks in early.
Stage 2 (weeks 3-4) is about establishing your Block-making routines, sorting out the inevitable problems, doubts, friction points, and question marks, and getting your Big Win to about half done.
Stage 3 (weeks 5-6) is about beginning to close things out. Beyond the halfway mark, it’s all about elimination: wrapping things up and crossing things off.
Stage 4 (weeks 7-8) is about getting your goal to a true “done” state. We want to avoid compromises and loose ends, so in Stage 4 you’ll focus on finalizing and polishing.
Each stage contains a handful of lessons to illustrate key concepts, and a few tasks to get your project to the next step. These lessons and tasks take you through the arc described above. Do the lessons in order.
Throughout the eight-week period, you’ll also be encouraged to connect with other students through the Discussion Forum. This is optional but many people find it valuable. You'll receive an email explaining how this works around the beginning of Stage 1 (see below for dates).
If you scroll to the bottom of the course, you'll find a section called Resources. Here you can find optional resources, including an FAQ page and guides to helpful productivity techniques. It’s the only part of the course you don’t need to do in order. I’ll refer to specific resources, when relevant, from within the main lessons of the course.
When does the eight-week period start?
The current cohort will begin Stage 1 on Monday, April 14, 2025. Plan to begin the Stage 1 lessons that day, or close to. (If you want to start on a different date, that's fine -- see below.)
Between now and April 14, you should do all the lessons in this Preparation section, which should take maybe an hour or two in total. (Or two to four Blocks, if you’ve already got your timer out.) It’s fine to do it all at once.
The main lessons are organized into stages. If you're doing the course along with the group:
Stage 1 begins on April 14, 2025
Stage 2 begins on April 28, 2025
Stage 3 begins on May 12, 2025
Stage 4 begins begins on May 26, 2025
These are all Mondays. You will receive email reminders about these dates, but you should also put them in your calendar. (You can opt out of email reminders any time).
Start the lessons for each stage on or around those dates. It's best to do the lessons early on in each stage, then go on to working on your project with the rest of the time.
Can I start the course at a different time? Or take longer than eight weeks?
If the group start date doesn't work for you, you can begin Stage 1 on whatever date you choose. You will then begin Stage 2 two weeks later, and so on.
Depending on when you begin, there may not be many other students doing it concurrently. That means the discussion forum may not be very active, which may or may not be important to you.
Two things to know if you want to choose your own start date:
Decide on a DEFINITE start date. It must be absolutely clear which day you will begin Stage 1. The whole course proceeds from this date. Select your date any time during the Preparation stage.
Give yourself only the eight weeks. One Big Win's method is arranged around four two-week stages, and the point of the course is to learn to complete a significant goal in a constrained timeframe.
In any case, you have permanent access to the course, so that you can use it for future goals as well.
I have some holidays / busy periods coming up. How can I do a huge project now?
The point of this course is to achieve a goal in your spare time, without interrupting your life to do it, or “clearing the decks” beforehand. We're prone to delaying our goals forever, under the belief that we’ll have fewer obligations in the future. The Block Method allows for serious progress to be made in small bits of time alongside the rest of your life.
Still, if you have major obligations during the course period, you do have some options. Check out the FAQ in the Resources section for tips on accommodating pauses or breaks in your campaign.
Do I need any supplies?
You’ll need a pencil and paper for some of the tasks. You’ll also need a timer of some sort, for making Blocks.
I also recommend assigning either a manilla folder or a clipboard to your project, to keep your plans and notes in one place.
There are quizzes?
Yes! There are a few short quizzes along the way. They take about two minutes and are designed to reinforce a few concepts central to the One Big Win method.
What's with the beach imagery?
Beaches are nice to look at, and also emblematic of dreams, possibility, and freedom.
Who are you anyway?
Most of you know me, but in case not: my name is David Cain, author of the long-running blog Raptitude, where I write about the inner details of being human in the modern world.
What do I do next?
Go on to the next lesson, The Philosophy of One Big Win.