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

by Brian P. Moran

Execution is the single greatest market differentiator. Great companies and successful individuals execute better than their competition. The barrier standing between you and the life you are capable of living is a lack of consistent execution. Effective execution will set you free. It is the path to accomplish the things you desire.

The fact is every week counts! Every day counts! Every moment counts! We need to be conscious of the reality that execution happens daily and weekly, not monthly or quarterly.

It’s important to understand that the results you achieve are a direct byproduct of the actions you take. Your actions, in turn, are manifestations of your underlying thinking. Ultimately, it is your thinking that drives your results; it is your thinking that creates your experiences in life.

Effective execution does not happen monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually; it happens daily, ultimately moment by moment. The 12 Week Year brings that reality front and center.

The 12 Week Year presents, at a minimum, four times as many opportunities to recognize and celebrate your progress and accomplishments.

Focusing on a 12 Week Year keeps you from getting ahead of yourself and ensures that each week counts.

In our experience, the number-one thing that you will have to sacrifice to be great, to achieve what you are capable of, and to execute your plans, is your comfort.

The secret to living your life to its potential is to value the important stuff above your own comfort. Therefore, the critical first step to executing well is creating and maintaining a compelling vision of the future that you want even more than you desire your own short-term comfort, and then aligning your shorter term goals and plans, with that long-term vision.

Vision is the starting point of all high performance. You create things twice; first mentally, then physically.

The more personally compelling your vision is, the more likely it is that you will act upon it. It is your personal vision that creates an emotional connection to the daily actions that need to take place in your business.

Vision provides you with that line of sight, that emotional link, to help you overcome the challenges and execute. When the task seems too difficult or unpleasant, you can reconnect with your personal objections and vision. It is this emotional connection that will provide you with the inner strength to forge ahead in spite of any difficulties, thus enabling you to achieve your dreams and desires.

Working from a plan has three distinct benefits: 1. It reduces mistakes. 2. It saves time. 3. It provides focus.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Your weekly plan enables you to focus your actions and be great at a few things rather than mediocre at many.

The most important lead indicator you have is a measure of your execution. 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.

The weekly scorecard then provides an objective measure of how well you executed your weekly plan. 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. 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!

All of us, from time to time, will struggle to execute. The 12 Week Year system forces you to confront your lack of execution—and it’s uncomfortable, but it is the very thing that is required if you’re going to perform at your best. We call this discomfort productive tension.

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.

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.

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.

Accountability is not consequences, but ownership.

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.

It is important to understand that there is a difference between interest and commitment: When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit, but when you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.

Learning to do the things you need to do, regardless of how you feel, is a core discipline for success.

It is much more feasible to establish and keep a commitment for 12 weeks than to keep it for 12 months. At the end of the 12 weeks, you reassess your commitments and begin again.

The 12 Week Year is an execution system that helps you operate at your best each day by creating clarity and focus on what matters most and a sense of urgency to do it now.

The ultimate aim of accountability is to continually ask one’s self, “What more can I do to get the result?”

Keeping your promises to others builds strong relationships, and keeping promises to yourself builds character, esteem, and success.

We have found that top performers—whether athletes or business professionals—are great, not because their ideas are better, but because their execution disciplines are better.

True success will happen when people bound by a common vision work together for a common outcome.

The best visions are big ones. In our experience, nothing great is ever accomplished without first being preceded by a big vision.

Your vision should be big enough that it makes you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable.

The first step, then, to reaching your biggest dreams is to shift from impossible thinking to possible thinking. You do this not by asking How? but by asking What if ? What would be different for you, your family, your friends, your team, your clients, and your community? By asking What if ?, you give yourself permission to entertain the possibility and begin to connect with the benefits. As you do this, the desire intensifies and the door on your future cracks open just a fraction, but enough so you automatically begin to shift from impossible to possible thinking.

If the question of what if ? is the visioning question, then the question of how is the planning question.

Typically your passion comes from your personal vision, and passion is the energy source that helps you push through the pain of change and the valley of despair.

It is your personal vision that keeps you in the game when things become difficult.

Vision, when engaged properly, is the ignition switch and power source of high performance. It is the all-important why behind the things you do.

Vision is the starting point of all high performance.

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.

In 12 weeks, each day counts toward reaching your goals. The value of each moment is brought into sharp focus when there are only 12 weeks in your entire year.

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.

Writing an effective 12 week plan is key to accomplishing great things in only 12 weeks. The plan defines the actions that you will need to take each week of the 12 to reach your goal.

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.