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

by Brian P. Moran

The most powerful visions address and align your personal aspirations with your professional dreams. In the end, your professional vision often funds and enables your personal vision. For your vision to help you to push through the discomfort of change, you must be clear on what it is you want to create in life. Most people focus primarily on their business or career, but your business is just part of your life, and it is actually your life vision that gives traction and relevance to your business.

In our experience, nothing great is ever accomplished without first being preceded by a big vision.

Figure 13.1 The execution journey is first a thinking journey. If you think that something is impossible—it is. The most important thing is to believe that you can reach your goals.

There are three time horizons that you’ll want to focus your vision on: 1. Long-term aspirations 2. Mid-term goals, about three years into the future 3. 12 Weeks (covered in the next chapter)

When you conduct individual coaching sessions with your direct reports (and we encourage you to do these at least monthly), start the conversations with their vision. Are they making progress? Discuss their willingness to take the day-to-day actions necessary to reach it. If they are unwilling to take the difficult actions, confront them with the reality that they won’t attain their long-term vision.

When an individual is reluctant to take the necessary actions required to accomplish a goal, it is an indication that they own their current comfort more than they own the future described in their vision.

Pitfall 1: You don’t take the power of vision seriously.

Pitfall 2: The vision isn’t meaningful to you. Sometimes we are superficial in crafting our vision. We capture what we think we want—what we think we are supposed to want—rather than capturing what is meaningful to us. Visioning takes time. Keep working on it until you have something that connects emotionally.

Pitfall 4: You don’t connect your vision to your daily actions. Each day is an opportunity to either make progress on your vision or tread water. If you work from a plan that is aligned with your vision, you can be sure that you are acting on the most important things every day.

Success Tip 2: Stay in touch with your vision. Print it out and keep it with you. Review it each morning and update it every time that you discover ways to make it more vivid and meaningful to you.

Success Tip 3: Live with intention. At the end of each day, take a few minutes to reflect on the progress that you made today. Did it move you forward, or was it filled with activity that wasn’t related to your vision? Resolve to be intentional in your actions to make progress on your vision. What action will you take tomorrow?

One of the benefits that comes from applying the 12 Week Year is learning to act in the moment because that’s where the future that you will experience is being created.

In short, a 12 week plan helps you to get more of the right things done each day, and ultimately it helps you reach your goals faster and with greater impact.

Another benefit of 12 week planning is a fiercely consistent focus on the few vital actions that drive your results. You can’t effectively pursue a large number of different things in a 12 Week Year because there simply isn’t enough time to get everything done. In 12 weeks, you only focus on the minimum number of actions that are most important to hit your goal.

Typical annual plans tell you what has to be achieved but they don’t specify how. When the how is not clearly defined you lose a sense of scope and can easily take on more than you can physically execute.

Every plan should have a goal to drive results in the current 12 weeks. If the plan is for your business, this means that it should always target income to be realized in the current 12 weeks.

Many 12 week efforts are comprised of two or three goals. For example, you might have a 12 week goal to lose 10 pounds and another goal to generate $105,000 in new business. Each of these goals then becomes a planning target for which you need to write tactics. Tactics for the weight goal are specific actions you must take to achieve your desired weight. If you are working to lose weight, your tactics might include limit calorie intake to 1,200 per day and do 20 minutes of cardio three times per week. Note that these tactics start with a verb, and are complete sentences.

There are five criteria that will help you create better 12 week plans when you are writing goals and tactics: Criteria 1: Make them specific and measurable. For each goal and/or tactic, be sure to quantify and qualify what success looks like. How many calls will you make? How many pounds will you lose? How far will you run? How much income will you earn? The more specific you can be, the better! Criteria 2: State them positively. Focus on what you want to happen that is positive. For example, rather than focusing on a 2 percent error rate, you would target a 98 percent accuracy rate. Criteria 3: Ensure they are a realistic stretch. If you can accomplish the goal without doing anything differently, then you probably need to stretch more. If it is absolutely impossible, then factor it back a little. If you have never asked for a business referral in your life, a tactic like “Ask for referrals in every client interaction” might be a bridge too far. A more realistic tactic that will still be a stretch might be “Ask for a referral in at least one client meeting each week.” Criteria 4: Assign accountability. This applies to people who are executing as part of a team (if you’re on your own, the accountability is all yours). Individual accountability for each goal and tactic is critical! Everyone’s challenge is no one’s challenge. Criteria 5: Be time-bound. There is nothing like a deadline to get things started and keep them moving. Make sure to include a date by which the goal i...