The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

by Brian P. Moran

The first thing that is different with 12 week planning is that it is more predictable than 12 month planning. The farther you plan into the future, the less predictability you have. With long-term plans, assumptions are stacked upon earlier assumptions, which are stacked upon even earlier assumptions.

The reality is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to determine what your daily actions should be 11 or 12 months into the future. That is why annual plans are generally objective-based. With a 12 week plan, predictability is much greater. You can define, with a high degree of certainty, what actions you need to implement each week over the next 12 weeks. Twelve week plans are both numbers- and activity-based. They create a strong connection between the actions you take today and the results you want to achieve.

The second difference with 12 week planning is that it is more focused. Most annual plans have too many objectives, which is one of the primary reasons execution fails. The reason most plans contain so much is because you’re planning for 12 months, laying out all the things you want to achieve over the next 365 days. It’s no wonder you become disillusioned and frustrated. You end up spread too thin and diffused—not a recipe for greatness.

There will always be more opportunities than you can effectively pursue. With the 12 Week Year, the approach is to be great at a few things instead of mediocre at many things. In 12 week planning, you identify the top one to three things that will have the greatest impact, and pursue those with intensity. The 12 week plan focuses on a few key areas and creates the energy and urgency to act.

The whole point of planning should be to help you identify and implement the critical few actions that you need to take to reach your goal.

Your plan should start by identifying your overall goal(s) for the 12 weeks. The goal defines success for the 12 Week Year. It represents a great 12 weeks, and also represents intentional progress toward your longer-term vision.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” —Yogi Berra

Once you have established your 12 week goals, tactics will then need to be determined. The easiest way to do this is to break your 12 week goal down to its individual parts. For example, if your 12 week goal is to earn $10,000 and lose 10 pounds, you should write tactics for your income goal and your weight loss goal separately. Tactics are the daily to-do’s that drive the attainment of your goals. Tactics must be specific, actionable, and include due dates and assigned responsibilities.

The 12 week plan is structured so that if the tactics are completed on a timely basis the goals are achieved. Remember, in order to keep from losing your way with a 12 week focus, you will need to align your 12 week plan to your longer-term vision.

A 12 week plan is powerful. It allows you to focus on what’s important now. Remember that the 12 week plan is not part of an annual plan; that’s old annualized thinking. Twelve weeks is long enough to get things done, and yet is short enough to create and maintain a sense of urgency. For top performers, 12 week plans provide a step-by-step road map that eliminates diffusion and delays, and demands immediate action.

For actual examples of 12 week plans join the 12 Week Year community at www.12weekyear.com/gettingstarted. It’s free!

Sir William Osler, founder of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said that the secret of his success was living his life in “day-tight compartments.” What he found was that, while we plan for the future, we act in the day. To be truly effective, your daily activity must align with your long-term vision, strategies, and tactics.

In the end, you have greater control over your actions than you do your results. Your results are created by your actions. That’s why it is so important to construct plans that are not only numbers-based, but also identify specific, critical activity.

“The greatest predictor of your future are your daily actions.”

vision without action is just a dream. It is the consistent action that turns a dream into reality.

It’s not enough to have the intention of changing; you have to act on that intention for things to get better—and not just once, but consistently. As the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius pointed out: “The fall of dropping water wears away the stone.” Consistent action on the critical tasks needed to reach your goal is the key to getting what you want in life.

Your current actions are creating your future. If you want to know what your future holds, look to your actions; they are the best predictor of your future. You want to predict your future health, look at your current eating and exercise habits. You want to predict the health of your marriage, look at your interactions with your spouse. You want to predict your career path and future income, look at the actions you take each business day. Your actions tell the story.

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The starting point for an effective weekly plan is your 12 week plan. The 12 week plan contains all of the tactics you need to execute in order to achieve your 12 week goals. Each tactic has a designated week for completion, and these tactics drive your weekly plan by dictating your daily actions. The weekly plan then is simply a derivative of the 12 week plan—in essence a one-twelfth slice of the 12 week plan.

To use your weekly plan effectively, you will need to spend the first 15 or 20 minutes at the beginning of each week to review your progress from the past week and plan the upcoming one. In addition, the first five minutes of each day should be spent reviewing your weekly plan to plan that day’s activities.

A 12 Week Year creates greater focus by highlighting the value of each week. With the 12 Week Year, a year is now equivalent to 12 weeks, a month is now a week, and a week is now a day. When you look at it this way, the importance and power of each day becomes even greater.

Your weekly plan enables you to focus your actions and be great at a few things rather than mediocre at many. To ensure that you get the most from your efforts, a weekly plan is a powerful and indispensable tool.

Start each day with your weekly plan. Check in with it several times throughout the day. If you’ve scheduled a tactic to be completed that day, don’t go home until it is done. This ensures that the critically important tasks, your plan tactics, are completed each week.

In the 1960s Frederick Herzberg, an industrial psychologist, set out to determine what motivates people in the workplace. His extensive research identified the top two motivators as achievement and recognition. We contend that the only way to know if you are achieving is through measurement—that is, keeping score. A common misconception is that scoring damages self-esteem, but research indicates the opposite: Measurement builds self-esteem and confidence because it documents progress and achievement.

We all have a tendency from time to time to rationalize lackluster results, but with effective scorekeeping we are forced to confront the reality of our situation, even when it’s uncomfortable.

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.” —W. Edwards Deming

Effective measurement captures both lead and lag indicators that provide comprehensive feedback necessary for informed decision making. Lag indicators—things like income, sales, commission dollars, pounds lost, body fat percentage, overall cholesterol levels—represent the end results that you are striving to achieve. Lead indicators are the activities that produce the end results—for instance the number of sales calls, or referrals are lead indicators in the sales process. While most companies and individuals effectively measure lag indicators, many tend to disregard lead indicators. An effective measurement system will have a combination of complementary lead and lag indicators.

Ultimately, you have greater control over your actions than over your results. Your results are created by your actions. An execution measure indicates whether you did the things you said were most important to achieving your goals.

A breakdown in plan content occurs when strategies and tactics are not effective, while a breakdown in execution occurs when you fail to fully implement the plan tactics.

More than 60 percent of the time the breakdown occurs in the execution process, but usually people assume the plan is at fault and change it. This is a mistake, because you don’t know if the plan doesn’t work if you’re not working the plan.

The great thing is that every time you execute, you get feedback. If your actions don’t produce what you expected, you can make the necessary adjustments to your plan based on market feedback—but first you must execute the plan.

As a general rule, you should rarely change the plan unless you’ve been effectively completing your plan tactics and it is still not producing. You could have created an awesome plan, but you’ll never know unless you actually implement it.

if you are executing at a high level and the results you want are not coming, then it’s time to go back and adjust the plan.

Physics tells us that for every action there is a reaction, so the good news is that every time you execute, you produce something—it may not be what you expected, but something will happen. This something is market feedback, and it’s impossible to effectively adjust your plan without it. Without knowing what tactics you executed, any changes you make will be based purely on guesswork.

We urge you to strive for excellence, not perfection. We have found that if you successfully complete 85 percent of the activities in your weekly plan, then you will most likely achieve your objectives. Remember that your plan contains the top priorities that will add the most value and have the greatest impact. In other words, you only need to be 85 percent effective on the top priorities to achieve excellence!

Even with a weekly score of 65 to 70 percent you will do well if you stay in the game. You won’t accomplish what you are capable of, but you will do well. It’s important to remember that the process is not about being perfect, but rather about getting better and better.

The reality is that if you are not purposeful about how you spend your time, then you leave your results to chance. While it’s true that we control our actions and not our outcomes, our results are created by our actions. It stands to reason that the actions that we choose to take throughout our day ultimately determine our destiny.

In spite of the priceless value of time, many people engage each day on its own terms. In other words, they satisfy the various demands of the day as they are presented, spending whatever time is needed to respond without giving much thought as to the relative value of the activity. This is a reactive approach in which the day is controlling you, and prevents you from performing at your best.

To realize your potential, you must learn to be more mindful about how you spend your time. Living with clear intention goes against the powerful natural tendency to be reactive because it requires you to organize your life around your priorities and consciously choose those activities that align with your goals and vision.

When you spend your time with intention, you know when to say yes and when to say no. You are probably aware when you are procrastinating or engaging in low-level activity to avoid tackling a less comfortable high-payoff activity. When you use your time intentionally, you waste less of it and spend more of it on your high-value actions, but to do this you must be willing to be disciplined and structure your days and weeks. The best way to do this is to use your 12 week plan to drive your activity so that in the end, you set your goals for the day instead of letting the day direct you. Intentionality is your secret weapon in your war on mediocrity.

“It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” —Henry David Thoreau

Benjamin Franklin said, “If we take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”

In our opinion, the key to successful time use—intentional time use—is not trying to eliminate these unplanned interruptions, but instead to block out regular time each week dedicated to your strategically important tasks.

Strategic Blocks: A strategic block is a three-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week. During this block you accept no phone calls, no faxes, no emails, no visitors, no anything. Instead, you focus all of your energy on preplanned tasks—your strategic and money-making activities. Strategic blocks concentrate your intellect and creativity to produce breakthrough results. You will likely be astounded by the quantity and quality of the work you produce. For most people, one strategic block per week is sufficient.

Buffer Blocks: Buffer blocks are designed to deal with all of the unplanned and low-value activities—like most email and voicemail—that arise throughout a typical day. Almost nothing is more unproductive and frustrating than dealing with constant interruptions, yet we’ve all had days when unplanned items dominated our time. For some, one 30-minute buffer block a day is sufficient, while for others, two separate one-hour blocks may be necessary. The power of buffer blocks comes from grouping together activities that tend to be unproductive so that you can increase your efficiency in dealing with them and take greater control over the rest of your day.

Breakout Blocks: One of the key factors contributing to performance plateaus is the absence of free time. Very often entrepreneurs and professionals get caught up in working longer and harder, but this approach kills your energy and enthusiasm. To achieve greater results, what’s often necessary is not actually working more hours, but rather taking some time away from work. It’s not by chance that people often quote the famous proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” When we don’t take time off from work, we can lose our creative edge.

An effective breakout block is at least three-hours long and spent on things other than work. It is time scheduled away from your business during normal business hours that you will use to refresh and reinvigorate your mind, so that when you return to work, you can engage with more focus and energy.

“If you are not in control of your time, you are not in control of your results.”

The more you can create routine in your days and weeks, the more effective your execution will be. The best way to accomplish this is to create a picture of an ideal week.

The concept of an ideal week is to plan on paper all the critical tasks that occur in a typical week and organize them so you can be most productive. If you can’t fit all the things you do on paper, there is no way you will get them done in reality, so the exercise of strategically planning your week will cause you to make some hard choices about how you use your time.