I just finished reading this book, and it was really good!!
I’ve read many productivity books and articles over the years, and a lot of it is like “yeah, yeah I know I need to set goals and be disciplined about sticking with them.” So frankly, it was very surprising that I enjoyed this book on productivity!
While the concepts of planning ahead and executing on them are not new, I like how the authors have worked with many people and teams in practice, studied the most successful ones, and relayed common pitfalls that people encounter. I heavily identified with the pitfalls as points where I get stuck.
12 Weeks in a “Year”
The book’s official title is The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months. The whole premise is that instead of thinking about 12-month years, they recommend thinking in terms of 12-week years, so that’s four 12-week years in a calendar year.
The problem with 12-month years is that you start with lots of hopeful new years resolutions and then by February or March, you lose steam and fall off the bandwagon. You feel like you have many months to achieve those goals, so you procrastinate. As a result, you don’t make much progress on the goals all year. Then as the year winds down (like in October, November, December), you realize “oh sh*t, I need to get moving on my goals.” Then you hurry up and try to make as much progress by the end of the year. For some reason, we feel the pressure of the December 31 deadline and want to finish things before then, so our productivity peaks at the end.
Instead of waiting all year for this surge of urgency and productivity, the 12-Week Year condenses the timeline so that the “end-of-year deadline” comes up EVERY 12 weeks instead of EVERY 12 months. That’s how followers of this framework are able to get much more done in shorter, more focused periods of time.
Urgency of each day and week
The aha moment for me was when they said that within a 12-week year, a week translates to a month in the 12-month year and a day translates to a week in the 12-month year. The first week is equivalent to “January”, second week is “February” and so on. That shifted my mindset like whoa!
Because if you waste a day of work in the 12-week year, you’re really wasting a week of work in the 12-month year. And I think that a lot can be done in a week of work. Somehow, this analogy made me realize how much more precious a single day can be.
Within a single day, when unexpected distractions come up, it’s easy to say “oh well, I’ll do it tomorrow.” But that’s like postponing it one more week in the 12-month year. And pushing it off by one week sounds a lot worse.
Starting Fresh Each Year
Another thing that hinders achieving our goals is the feeling of guilt if we haven’t made progress on them. The authors emphasize how we must leave behind the past with each new 12-Week Year. You can’t feel bad or judge yourself for what you didn’t get done in the previous 12 weeks.
It’s almost like why we get so excited for the new year because we’re so optimistic and starry-eyed that we’ll be a better version of ourselves and get more things accomplished the next year.
There’s an excitement and newness that each new year brings, so that’s why having 4 mini years within a calendar year gives us 4 chances to restart again on our goals.
Greatness in Each Day
Ok there’s a quote in the book that I love.
Greatness is not achieved when the result is reached, but rather long before that, when an individual chooses to do the things that he knows he needs to do.
Brian Moran & Michael Lennington
It means that you must choose to be great every single day. Greatness doesn’t happen at some far off point in the future. It happens when you practice positive daily habits today that will take you towards your goal.
That means going to the gym today, eating healthy today, waking up at 6am today to do my daily writing (which is when I’m writing this), and so on.
Again, this book helped me realize the importance of this single day. If you have these big lofty goals, it can seem so daunting to reach them. It can feel like the progress made in a single day is insignificant and minuscule – so much so that it doesn’t even matter if you do it today or tomorrow or another day. But the authors argue that understanding this precise detail is what separates people who are great from people who are mediocre.
The people who are truly great take advantage of each single day because a great day for 7 days in a row translates to a great week, and 12 great weeks in a row translates to a great year. It seems obvious and common sense, but for me, the book laid out this connection very clearly for me to understand.
Sometimes it’s about finding the right teacher or reading the right book that explains something in a way that it finally clicks with you.
Creating the Plan
In addition to high-level theory, they provide practical steps on how to translate your goals into an action plan.
The gist is to create a 12-Week Year Plan, where you decide on a couple of big goals. Don’t pick too many they warn, otherwise you’ll be spread too thin. You can always address other goals in future years.
Another important point is that these goals should span BOTH your personal and work life. The authors believe that people can fail at their goals when they don’t take into account their personal goals because they can be at odds with your work goals. By laying everything out, you can see how all your goals work together. Their example had 2 work goals and 1 health/weight loss goal.
Under each goal, list the critical actions that are required to achieve the goal. For example, for a weight loss goal, it involves going to the gym every day. It shouldn’t be an exhaustive laundry list of all the things you could ever do to help achieve that goal. By keeping it short and simple, it makes it easier to accomplish. More detailed weekly todo lists can be made separately.
But this one-pager plan can be an easy reminder of what your goals are and the critical actions needed for them.
Common Pitfalls
Now plans are easy to make, but hard to stick with. The authors address common pitfalls in executing.
For example, if you’re not following through with the plan, it could be because your vision wasn’t strong enough. They go into a whole section on how to craft your vision and make it so detailed and tantalizing that it really pulls you forward on the difficult tasks.
Along those lines, they talk about how some of us have an action bias, where we have a tendency to just act to feel productive – even if we don’t know where we’re headed. Instead of jumping into action too quickly, the authors warn you to really think through what your vision and plan are. The upfront time spent planning can save you effort from going in the wrong direction.
Another mistake is to not have process control, which is a set of tools / events that align daily activities with the critical actions in your overall plan. This ensures that you’re spending your time on the tasks of highest strategic importance each day and not on low-value activities or busy work.
The last thing I’ll mention is that they covered the emotional cycle of change (see diagram here). Developed from psychologists Don Kelley and Daryl Connor, it talks about the normal human emotions that we go through when we try to make a change in our life such as learning a new skill. First we start off on an emotional high with uninformed (naive) optimism. As we realize more about what we’ve gotten ourselves into, we feel pessimistic. Then we plummet into the valley of despair as we go through the grueling parts of the change without seeing much results. Then if we stick through it long enough, we come out the other end with more informed optimism. We continue to rise even higher and feel even better as we reach success and fulfillment. I first heard about this model when reading an article about programming for beginners (Why Learning to Code is so Damn Hard), but I didn’t realize it is applied more broadly for any other type of skill!
Conclusion
Alright, those were some of the highlights and major takeaways from my experience of reading this book.
Hope you enjoyed this article and that you consider framing your years into 12-week years!
Since I finished reading this book in November, I decided to apply this on a mini scale by coming up with a 4-week plan for December to finish off the year strong, and start with a 12-week plan in January. I’ll see how it goes!
Check out the book The 12 Week Year here:
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.
