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

by Brian P. Moran

Twelve weeks is long enough to get things done, and yet is short enough to create and maintain a sense of urgency.

In the end, you have greater control over your actions than you do your results. Your results are created by your actions.

Consistent action on the critical tasks needed to reach your goal is the key to getting what you want in life.

The weekly plan is a powerful tool that translates your 12 week plan into daily and weekly action.

Weekly plans allow you to structure your activities so that you are focused on both the long-term and short-term tasks that are truly important.

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.

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.

One of the key reasons sports are so stimulating is that we keep score.

Measurement builds self-esteem and confidence because it documents progress and achievement.

Scorekeeping functions as a reality check, providing performance feedback and insight into your effectiveness.

“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.

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.

The element you have the most direct control over is the execution of your tactics.

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.

The best way to measure your execution is to work from a weekly plan (based upon your 12 Week Plan) and evaluate the percentage of tactics completed.

For the 12 Week Year we’ve developed a tool called the Weekly Scorecard.

With the weekly scorecard you measure execution, not results.

You score yourself on the percentage of activities you complete each week.

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.

Instead of scoring their performance, they distract themselves with other things that seem important in the moment.

We call this discomfort productive tension.

The other way is to use productive tension as a catalyst for change.

It’s important to remember that the process is not about being perfect, but rather about getting better and better.

Take time to establish a set of key measures that include lead and lag indicators and, most importantly, be sure to score your execution.

We call this Performance Time and find that it is the best approach to effectively allocating time that we have ever encountered.

There are three primary components of performance time: strategic blocks, buffer blocks, and breakout blocks.

Strategic Blocks: A strategic block is a three-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week.

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.

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.

The very nature of accountability rests in the understanding that each and every one of us has freedom of choice. It is this freedom of choice that is the foundation of accountability.

“Accountability is not consequences; it’s ownership.”

The only things you control are your thinking and your actions. But those are enough if (and it’s a big if) you are willing to own them.

True accountability actively confronts the truth, it confronts with freedom of choice and the consequences of those choices.

When you understand that true accountability is about choice and taking ownership of your choices, everything changes.

The only person who can hold you accountable for anything is you, and to be successful you must develop the mental honesty and courage to own your thinking, actions, and results.

Commitments are a powerful part of the 12 Week Year. An ability to make and keep commitments improves results, builds trust, and fosters high-performance teams,

“Commitment is an act, not a word.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.” —Peter Drucker

A definition of commitment that I like is “the state of being bound emotionally or intellectually to a course of action. .

From this perspective, a commitment is a conscious choice to act in order to create a desired result.

Here are the four keys to successful commitments: 1. Strong desire: In order to fully commit to something, you need a clear and personally compelling reason.

2. Keystone actions: Once you have an intense desire to accomplish something, you then need to identify the core actions that will produce the result you’re after.

3. Count the costs: Commitments require sacrifice. In any effort there are benefits and costs. Too often we claim to commit to something without considering the costs, the hardships that will have to be overcome to accomplish your desire.

When you face any of these costs, it is extremely helpful to recognize that you anticipated them and decided that reaching your goal was worth it.