12 Week Year: Skyrocket Project Completion By Shrinking Your Year

Have you ever set yearly goals and then put off working on them because you had plenty of time left? Did you actually accomplish them? The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months* can help you break through that barrier.

I have set yearly goals for 5 years now. I go through all the effort of envisioning what I want, breaking it down into projects, and putting it into my planner. And then I blissfully ignore everything, in spite of monthly reviews, until it comes to be about August, and I realize that I am not going to get everything done. Talk about a morale killer!

I knew I needed a better way. So I picked up this book.

What This Book Will Do For You

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months* is going to shake up the way you plan and work towards goals.

It compresses the time frame of your goals, eliminating the procrastinating based on the feeling “I have plenty of time.” As the author says, “The barrier standing between you and the life you are capable of living is a lack of consistent execution.” The 12 Week plan will make you consistently work toward your goals.

The book also teaches you how to measure your progress on the goals with two different types of indicators, and it gives you the baseline percentage for success. If you see that you only did 50% of the actions that are required to bring your goal to completion, you know you need to change your execution. As the book author says, “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.”

Book Summary

There are several reasons why we don’t reach our goals. The first is that we don’t take consistent action on them. The second is that we don’t measure how we’re doing.

By shrinking your year to 12 weeks, you end up seeing the end very clearly, and you have to take daily consistent action to hit the goals. There is no room for slack: you can’t ignore a project for 8 weeks and expect to get it done in the 12 week timeframe.

Measuring how you’re doing has you look at concrete things to keep you on track. The system asks you to keep score of how you’re doing. So let’s say you decided you would walk 5 times during the week in support of your losing weight goal. However, you only walked 3 times. This gives you a 60% completion rate, and will not get you to where you want to be.

• “While we plan for the future, we act in the day.” Planning is about where we want to be; action is what we do to get there. The book talks about how to get that smaller plan by shrinking the year to 12 weeks instead of 12 months. It provides examples of how this has changed companies and people.
• “Consistent action on the critical tasks needed to reach your goal is the key to getting what you want in life.” With year-long plan, the temptation is to push things off because there is a perception of having plenty of time to accomplish the goals. This leads to an end-of-the-year scramble. The book shows how to consistently act to move toward the goals.
• “An effective measurement system will have a combination of complementary lead and lag indicators.” It isn’t enough to glance at the performance and make a snap judgement. By determining how to measure your progress through action, you will find your lead and lag indicators. This lets you know how well you’re doing in a concrete number.
• “Accountability is the realization that you always have choice.” We can choose to work toward our goals or not. It is completely up to each of us as individuals. If we choose not to work toward the goal, we have to accept the price of missed goals.

And as a final word: “If you work under the belief that you can eventually get the important things done by first working through the urgent ones, you will likely never get to the strategic stuff.”

A Word Of Caution

I found this book heavy on theory; I also got tired of the tedious lecturing on accountability. I wanted to put these items into action, but this book does not have a quick start section, or for that matter even forms that you can fill out to put this into practice.

It was a worthwhile read, but I found I had to take it to the next step. There will be more about this next week, in the article where I show you how I simplified the system.

Want To Try?

If you want to give the principles of the system a try, you can do so over a week long period. Set a goal with a definite end measurement. Then break the goal down over the seven days, and work on it each of the days. Make sure to write down whether or not you hit your daily action!

Next week I will be talking about how to simplify the system, along with my results from my first 12 week plan.

Reader Information

208 pages, about 4-6 hours to read

Book: The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months*
Author: Brian Moran
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN-13/ASIN: B00CU9P31K