You have two lives: the one you’re currently living and the one where you’ve fully engaged your unique skills and talents and accomplished amazing results in your personal and professional lives. This second life encompasses your wildest dreams for your future. You’re highly productive, and the results of your efforts have lifted you above the competition. So why aren’t you living this life now?
What holds you back from achieving your potential is a lack of a structured plan to accomplish your goals. When you implement the concepts of The 12 Week Year, you’ll strive to achieve one goal at a time for 12 weeks, and you’ll get more done in less time.
You’ve heard people say that knowledge is power, but this is not wholly accurate. Knowledge without action is just a bunch of ideas, and change doesn’t happen from ideas alone. The key to reaching your creative and productive potential is execution. When you consistently execute on your knowledge, you move from average achiever to top performer.
In your personal and professional lives, you tend to set goals based on an annual plan of attack. New Year’s resolutions begin in January and aim to create the desired change by the end of the year. Likewise, organizations set productive goals annually and tend to do annual reviews of their progress. This view is called “annualized thinking” and actually hinders your progress.
Annualized thinking creates a perspective on your workflow that there is all the time in the world to meet your year-end goals. This idea becomes your mantra until you reach October, when suddenly your deadline begins to loom.
Most organizations achieve 40% of their productivity in the last 60 days of the year because of the “end-of-the-year push.” Employees suddenly become focused on only those tasks that lead to the intended results, and a new sense of urgency motivates their productive output.
But why wait a whole year to feel this heightened level of productivity? Rather than redefining your workflow at the end of the year, redefine your timeline to shorter periods to encourage high productivity every day of the year. This idea is the definition of periodization and the backbone of the 12-week year.
Periodization means taking long-term goals and restructuring them into progressive steps to be taken during focused 12-week periods. When you focus for 12 weeks on maximizing one aspect of your annualized plan, your deadline is always in sight, which helps you push past your productive limits and motivates you to achieve more immediate results. Learning the 12-week plan of attack is easy, but implementing it is hard. Therefore, to successfully move through an optimized 12-week plan, you must form a significant connection with your goals.
The 12-week plan includes five disciplines for how to create and reach your goals and three principles to help you maintain the right mindset as you move through the process.
A compelling vision is your idea of your best life. Whatever you envision for your future, whether it’s a bigger status in business, a higher income, or more satisfaction in life, your vision should be significantly greater than your current life. When you imagine a world where you have everything you want, no matter how outlandish, you’re more emotionally invested in making that future come true. And emotional investment is needed to help push through the struggles encountered along your journey to bring your future to fruition.
An emotional connection with your long-term goal encourages you to do what is necessary to achieve it. You also activate the part of your brain responsible for cognitive reasoning, and it will begin forming new pathways based on your vision. Your heightened thoughts begin the process of strengthening your beliefs, which helps quiet the part of your brain that triggers fear of change and failure.
Your vision must be big enough to activate both parts of your brain because without the fear, you won’t be pushed to achieve your greatest potential. Your compelling vision will evolve through four stages of belief:
Impossible: Your vision won’t seem reachable when you first dream it because you won’t know how to make it happen. But you don’t need to know how yet. The question to ask first is, “What if everything I wanted came true?” This question starts your neurons firing and forming pathways of possibility.
Possible: The more you continue to imagine all the benefits of your new life, the stronger your neural pathways regarding that life become. As those pathways strengthen, your belief in your dream strengthens until you feel like you could actually attain it.
Probable: After you move into believing your future is probable, you start to focus on how you can achieve it. The steps you begin to develop to achieve your vision become your plan of attack. And with a good plan, you start to truly believe your dreams will come true.
Given: You now see exactly what to do to shape your life into what you want it to be. And you believe your dream is inevitable because you can see exactly how you will get there.
To create your vision, set three levels of goals. Your long-term goal will include the improvements you want to make in your spiritual, personal, professional, financial, and relational arenas of life. Dream big about the life you want to truly trigger your brain to react.
Once you have your long-term vision, think about what you need to accomplish over the next three years to make that dream a reality. Which objectives need to be accomplished first, and what are the steps needed to achieve those objectives? Be as specific and detailed as possible.
Finally, when you have your short-term objectives and necessary actions in place, you’re ready to set your first goal for your first 12-week plan. You should only focus on one or two goals within each three-month period, so make sure the goal you choose is appropriate as a jumping-off point to achieve the other goals down the line.
There are several advantages in the 12-week year over the 12-month year. Those advantages include increased predictability, increased focus, and an improved structure in your workflow.
You create more predictability when you’re only looking three months down the line. Your plan becomes action-based because you’re able to envision exactly what you’ll need to do over the next 12 weeks, instead of making assumptions about behaviors six, eight, or 11 months from now. And your focus on one goal, rather than multiple objectives, supports this predictability.
Finally, the shorter timeframe and more narrow focus help you break down the necessary tasks into weekly, then daily, steps. Your plan becomes structured to optimize your time and energy.
Each week and day become important when you shift your focus from year-long progress to three-month progress. You know you can’t have too many unproductive weeks if you only have 12 to accomplish your goal. Therefore, you start to live more in the moment because you’re clear on which steps you need to complete that day to make progress the next day.
Write your 12-week goal and plan of achievement on paper so you can ground it in reality and refer to it when needed. Use the following criteria:
1. Make your tasks specific and measurable. Your actions need to be quantified and qualified so they can be analyzed to track your progress over the 12 weeks.
2. Keep your tasks positive. Write the goals in a way that promotes wins rather than losses. Rather than state, “Reduce errors by 25%,” write, “Increase success rate by 75%.”
3. Set tasks that stretch your abilities. Challenge yourself enough to stay motivated and execute at a high level but manageable enough to not frustrate your efforts.
4. Promote accountability. Take ownership of your process to ensure you follow through on the plan you’ve created.
5. Create deadlines. Set clear deadlines for when each task needs to be completed. Deadlines motivate you to work harder and keep you accountable.
A solid weekly routine is needed to guide your actions and keep track of your progress so you’re always moving in the right direction. Three aspects of process control will help you move forward on your journey to greatness: a weekly plan, peer support, and progress measures. The latter is a separate discipline and will be discussed in the following section.
After you determine the steps required to achieve your 12-week goal, break them down into weekly goals.
Your weekly plan should clearly dictate which tasks are required daily to generate the necessary results and foundation for further progress. Take time at the beginning of each week to go over the plan, and after one week, use this time to review the progress made the week before. With a strategic schedule, you’ll never question what you should be doing, and you’ll have a sense of urgency to perform the necessary tasks because of consistent deadlines.
Form a peer-support group to motivate you and keep you accountable. When you know your work will be evaluated by others, you’re more likely to work harder to produce high-quality results.
You can’t know if you’re progressing toward your goal if you don’t evaluate your progress along the way. The beauty of the 12-week plan is that you don’t have to wait until the end of the year to check your progress. You’ll have this information after three months to either improve upon or build on during the next 12-week period. Furthermore, you’ll be able to see how far along in your process you are and make any necessary adjustments.
Track your performance by tallying the number of tasks you’ve successfully accomplished each week. Score your progress using two different measures: lag and lead indicators.
Lag indicators are the end results of your actions, or your main goal for the 12 weeks. Lead indicators are the actions taken to reach that goal. For instance, if you set a goal to increase your organization's income by 12%, your percentage increases experienced each week are your lag indicators. The lead indicators for your 12% increase would be more sales calls, increased product development, or increased marketing tactics.
Both indicators help you measure how well you’re working toward your goal. If you’re not on track, you have the data needed to determine whether the problem is with the process or the execution. The following example helps clarify this process:
Without proper measures, you can’t get the feedback required to optimize your efforts. Don’t look at low scores as failures, but rather markers pointing to a need for improvement.
The world is full of distractions that steal your focus from high-priority tasks. In fact, studies show that most workers lose 11 hours of productivity a week because of the time it takes to refocus after bouncing back and forth between work and distractions.
There are three blocks of time you should schedule into your weekly plan to help you stay focused: strategic, buffer, and breakout blocks.
The strategic block is one three-hour chunk of time per week dedicated to your 12-week plan. During this block, you commit to only working on priority tasks. Spend a few minutes reflecting on your vision to help sharpen your focus, and spend another few minutes reviewing your plan and progress data to see how you’re doing. The rest of the time should be put toward the necessary daily tasks to reach your weekly goal.
The buffer block is a time to work on the miscellaneous activities that disrupt your workflow. When you group these activities into one chunk of time, you reduce the frustration of constant interruptions and the time wasted when you perform these tasks at random moments. Check emails, answer phone calls, meet with employees, read the news, and respond to communications for 30 minutes to one hour once or twice a day depending on the nature of the activities.
The breakout block is a three-hour period of rest to allow your mind and spirit to rejuvenate. Rest is essential for maintaining a strong focus when you’re working. If you don’t recuperate, you’ll burn out and give up on your plan. At first, start with one breakout block a month until you’re confident you have a strong work ethic regarding your 12-week plan. After that, schedule these weekly. Take a hike, watch TV, spend time with friends and family, or engage in other activities that relax you so you can come back to work energized and focused.
Your model week is an elaboration of your weekly plans of attack. At the beginning of each week, after your reflection, peer-support meeting, and measurement analyses, write down everything you have to accomplish in your work and personal life that week. Then, add those activities to your weekly calendar.
First, schedule your strategic block on a day you know you’ll have the time to focus for three hours. Then, schedule your buffer blocks each day. If you are including a breakout block that week, pencil that in. Finally, schedule the rest of your activities, including the 12-week plan activities, for each of the seven days.
Make planning your model week a routine. You’ll be more organized and focused for success if you intentionally manage your time on a weekly basis.
Now that you know the five ways to reach your goals, let’s look at three principles to help you stay focused. Accountability is your recognition that you control your future by making the right choices. But too often, people make excuses or blame circumstances for their failure to accomplish their goals. Stop looking outward for motivation and validation and take ownership of your fate.
Here are four ways to build more accountability in your life:
The most important aspect of exceptional execution is a commitment to execute. Accountability is the ownership of your actions, and commitment is a promise to perform those actions. When you commit and follow through, you not only gain discipline, confidence, and self-respect but also trust in your discipline, which breeds willpower.
You can develop a strong sense of commitment if you develop the following components:
Promises are either explicit or implicit. Explicit promises are those you’re aware of, such as promises made to yourself or verbalized to others. Implicit promises are assumed behaviors based on types of relationships: a partner’s fidelity, a parent’s love, or a boss’s support and leadership. When you lose trust in someone, or vice versa, it’s because either an explicit or implicit promise was broken.
The problem is that each promise comes with two different kinds of intentions. The stated intention is the verbalized commitment you make. You’re aware of your intention to follow through, or else you wouldn’t have made the promise. But below the surface are hidden intentions, or the costs related to your stated intention. Subconsciously, you know what following though will cause you to lose, and you unknowingly fight against your best intentions.
There are a few things you can do to decrease the power of these hidden intentions:
To create a better work-life balance, you tend to multitask to engage with more activities. But when you engage with everything, you’re really engaging with nothing. Accept that you can’t do it all, and learn to intentionally imbalance your energy so the most important tasks are being completed.
Success is not a destination but how you work through the journey to get to the destination. You become great the moment you prioritize what’s important to create the life you want. Let certain responsibilities go and put your energy into the tasks that have a real impact on your life.
The small steps you make toward your goal in the moment will combine to create your magnificent vision. The end result is merely a manifestation of your greatness to date.
Your first 12-week period is the most important one because it will show you what you’re made of and teach you how to be more successful in the future. You’ll experience your first encounters with emotional resistance, impatience for results, confused or overloaded goals or plans, and the pull of your familiar life.
But if you can overcome these obstacles, you’ll have more confidence to continue working toward your goal and reaching it. And you’ll also have your progress data to help you revise your next 12 weeks for greater success.
Your first 12 weeks will unfold in the following way:
(Shortform note: The 12 Week Year is organized into two sections. The first provides the theoretical basis for the actionable steps to create your 12-week plan, and the second provides the actionable steps. For this summary, we’ve chosen to group the theoretical concepts and actionables under each topic for ease of understanding and implementation.)
What would you accomplish if you had your full potential at your disposal? How would your life change if you were functioning at your highest level? You most likely have skills and abilities far beyond what you currently use and desires you’ve yet to realize. These aspects are part of your “second life,” or the life in which your true talents are recognized and dreams achieved. In this second life, procrastination is a thing of the past, you’re not driven by fear, and you’re confident in your ability to achieve success. So if this life is already yours for the taking, why haven’t you started living it?
The concepts provided in The 12 Week Year will help you claim that potential by helping you increase your productivity so you can do more in less time and gain better results. You have the power to tap into your best self every day, and the actions required are not difficult. But the process isn’t easy because what’s been holding you back from this higher self is fear and a lack of motivation. Learning to adjust your routines to push past fear and increase motivation and performance requires a major shift in your mindset and behavior.
The adage knowledge is power is a bit of a misnomer. Knowledge alone doesn’t lead to success, nor do talent or luck. You use your knowledge to strengthen your talent and remove the need for luck through successful implementation of your ideas. You can have groundbreaking ideas all day long, but if you don’t implement them, they’re just thoughts.
Execution is the key to greatness, and consistent execution of your skills and knowledge is what lifts you from average achiever to top performer. Consider the example of obesity in America.
The knowledge you gain in this summary will not be new. These ideas have been written about in various ways. What you will learn is a successful plan of attack for how to execute that knowledge. You’ll be given clear instructions for how to change your life today to tap into your best future.
You can use these concepts to improve both your professional and personal lives by generating greater results from your actions. Along with increased success, other benefits of the 12-week program are decreased stress, increased confidence, and improved self-esteem.
Society tells us that changing our actions leads to better results. This advice is not completely wrong, but the focus is. A shift in actions without a shift in mindset only leads to marginal improvements. To truly reach your full potential and achieve your goals, you must change your perspective about the nature of work.
Real progress cannot be made when you base your execution plan on attaining yearly results. However, most businesses set annual goals and create 12-month plans for increasing profits and productivity. You also do this in your own life. You set New Year’s resolutions on January 1 and commit to changing your life by December 31. But this type of thinking hinders your success and wastes valuable time during the year.
Annualized thinking is when you set a goal for the end of the year and believe you have all the time in the world to achieve it. December is beyond comprehension at the start of a new year, so you have no sense of urgency in working toward your goal. You dole out the required steps to achieve your goal over several months, and if you get behind in your plan, you reason you still have months ahead to catch up. This thought becomes the mantra for the rest of the year, and months go by without any implementation of actions that lead to change.
You also assume that despite your lack of efforts during the year, something significant will happen at the beginning of the last quarter to jumpstart your progress. You continue to put off important actions while you wait for this magical surge in productivity to appear in October.
A surge in productivity definitely happens in the fourth quarter, but there is nothing magical about it. This surge is called the “year-end push,” wherein the timeline for your plan to come to fruition reaches the final phase, and the proximity of your self-imposed deadline fills you with a new sense of urgency.
For many companies, the last 60 days of the year define their yearly success. Employees are suddenly laser-focused on the tasks required to meet their goals, and procrastination and superfluous activities fall to the side. In fact, most businesses increase production and output by 30% to 40% in the last quarter.
Although December 31 is an arbitrary deadline, it’s still a deadline, and studies show that people are more capable of accomplishing important tasks when there is a ticking clock. Deadlines redefine your work routine by promoting motivation and accountability. And the knowledge that you can relax once you’ve crossed the finish line is a big motivator. All your hard work and excessive effort will be rewarded when the year is up, and you can celebrate and look forward to a fresh start in the coming year.
But why wait until November to feel this surge in productivity? Why not create a life where these deadlines and sense of urgency are the norm daily, weekly, and monthly. This shift in time frame is the essence of periodization.
When you embrace periodization, you change your long-term year-long plans of attack to shorter periods focused on maximizing one important skill at a time. The most important aspect of periodization is how you think about your productivity. When you begin to think in shorter periods of achievement, your actions become geared toward super-charged output achievement. This increased output is supported by an immediate and reachable deadline, and the ensuing results are what are known as breakthroughs.
Your ability to concentrate on what is most important to achieve your goal increases as distractions, less important activities, and procrastination decrease. Your improved focus and output help deepen your insight on what you’re capable of accomplishing and fills you with confidence. In this way, you intentionally push past the limits you believed you could achieve and tap into your greatness.
Short-term achievement accumulates into year-long success. Instead of waiting until December to measure your progress and the success or failure of your efforts, you can ensure you end the year higher than you started because you’ve monitored your progress in 12-week increments.
When you truncate your annualized plan into three months, all the hustle and excitement of the year-end push now happens four times a year. Your deadline is always in sight, so you lose the mantra of “there’s still plenty of time” and get busy immediately. If you have a slow week, you might be able to make it up the following week, but you know you can’t have too many bad weeks if you’re going to be successful at the end of 12 weeks. This mindset makes every day important and the need to produce results every week vital.
The other benefit of the 12-week year is the relaxation and celebration you look forward to after all your hard work. You now have four opportunities to reflect on your achievements and take a few days off to recharge. And when you come back, you have a fresh slate to begin another 12 weeks of heightened activity. If your first 12 weeks didn’t work out like you’d hoped, you don’t have to wait another year to see whether you’ve improved. The next 12 weeks are an immediate opportunity to attain better results or build on the momentum of your previous success.
You can implement parts of the 12-week year as you see fit, but understand that the full benefits of the system only occur when the execution system is applied as a whole. When all of the elements that guide your thoughts and actions are combined day after day and week after week, the results compound to help you achieve your most optimal level of performance.
You will be more equipped to succeed in your 12-week process after your initial use of the techniques because you’ll know what to expect. You’ve also experienced greater results than you thought were possible, which gives you hope for the future. Make the 12-week year your personal operating system for every aspect of your life.
In the chapters that follow, you’ll learn the eight elements that underpin this execution system. These elements have been broken down into two groups to help you see how they support your execution system. The disciplines of vision, planning, process control, measurement, and time use guide your behaviors during the 12 weeks. The principles of accountability, commitment, and greatness in the moment guide the changes in mindset required to effectively execute the 12-week plan.
One of the most important requirements of increasing your execution is a clear and compelling vision for what you want your future to be. This vision is necessary because the process of executing at a higher level is simple but not easy. What stops so many people from doing it is the hardship of going through the steps of change. Changing your behavior is uncomfortable because you're pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. When this happens, your brain activates your fight-or-flight response. Unfortunately, flight is the easier choice than pushing through the discomfort to fight.
Although you’ll work within the confines of 12 weeks to achieve higher productivity, the cumulative outcome must be life-changing in the long term to keep you motivated. If you don’t have a compelling vision of your future, you won’t see the benefit of reducing your comfort level as you work toward it.
Your compelling vision should be of a life significantly better than your current life. Otherwise, why put in all the work if you just want to stay in the same place. Imagine a future where you have everything you want. Think about your life goals. When you consider your goals, you can get a better idea of what you want the rest of your life to look like, which helps you create a plan. And a plan that is attached to your vision of your life is one you’re emotionally connected with.
Emotional connection with your vision of the future is key to reaching your full potential because you’ll do what is necessary to attain a goal you care about. You’ll begin the process of optimal execution when you set this life vision because you know exactly what you need to do to get to where you want to be, and your actions will align accordingly.
You go through two modes of creation when you work toward a goal: the mental planning and the physical labor. Get clear on your compelling vision to become clear on how to implement the necessary behaviors to realize it.
A compelling vision not only helps create passion for your life and work but also changes the physiology of your brain. When you start to work toward something greater than your current state, part of your brain called the amygdala activates and sends fear signals through your body. The amygdala is meant to protect you from dangers in your environment, and moving into uncomfortable territory is perceived as a danger. You will experience fear, confusion, and doubt and be triggered to abandon your efforts.
But there’s another part of the brain that activates when you create a compelling vision. This part is called the prefrontal cortex, and it counterbalances the fear with passion. The prefrontal cortex lights up when you dream about the possibilities in the world, and this activation sends signals to your neurons to form new pathways for behavior. Scientists call this process of building new behavior pathways neuroplasticity. The more you think about your amazing future, the stronger the connections become until they are fully functioning new pathways of beliefs.
Those strengthened beliefs create strengthened actions. Therefore, you can reduce the effects of fear and doubt by continuing to develop your compelling vision and become passionate about achieving it.
Enjoy yourself when you decide to form a compelling vision. This part of the process is benign by nature. You haven’t committed to any actions yet, and you haven’t wagered any of your comfort at this point. You are merely dreaming, and you shouldn’t be afraid to dream big. Envision a future you feel passionate about and that encompasses your deepest aspirations. You can’t achieve greatness if you can’t envision magnificent things. If your vision isn’t big enough to make you uncomfortable, you’re not pushing your desires to the edge.
If your vision is significant enough, you will experience four different beliefs regarding it as you formulate your plan to achieve it: impossible, possible, probable, and given.
When you envision something beyond your wildest dreams for your future, you’ll believe that attaining it is impossible. You’ll say, “How in the world could I ever make that happen?” This is the wrong question at this point in the process. The correct question is, “What would my life look like if this vision actually came true?”
The reason it’s important not to worry about the how at this point is that there’s no possible way for you to know. If you knew how to make it happen, you would have by now. And when you realize you don’t know the how, you’ll start to adjust your vision to something smaller and seemingly more accessible, which will hinder your ability to grow exponentially. Henry Ford said something to the effect of whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right. If you believe your goal is unattainable, it will be. So release the restrictions on your imagination and ask, “What if?” This will help you move to the next stage of possible.
You shift the thought patterns in your mind when you start to wonder what your life would be like if you accomplished your goals. As you envision the benefits of this new life spiritually, emotionally, professionally, and financially, the vision becomes more real and your desire deepens. All it takes is a tiny shred of belief to make your dream feel possible, and when you’re comfortable with the possibility of achieving your vision, you begin to believe it’s probable.
The moment you believe your vision is no longer a pipe dream but something that could very well be achieved is the right moment to ask, “How?” The question of how to make your dream a reality is the motivation that jump-starts the planning process. And once you start to plan, you begin to truly believe, which takes you to the last stage.
You don’t doubt whether you’ll achieve your vision of your future. You now believe fully that you will because you’ve gone through the steps of determining how to reach it. This powerful mindset places you squarely in your future, and the rest of your life falls in line with that belief.
Separate your vision into three different levels: long-term goals, short-term goals, and immediate goals. This last level represents the goals and processes of the 12-week plan, which will be explained in a later chapter. The first two levels are designed to keep your motivation for change moving forward and provide the information you need to develop a strong 12-week plan.
You can use the tools in this section to promote vision-building and successful implementation of the necessary processes in your company. Talk to your subordinates about their goals, visions of the future, and plans to achieve them. Review their visions with them on a one-on-one basis frequently to ensure they are staying on track with their actions.
After your employees are clear on their personal visions, bring them together to form a team vision. Go through the long-term goals and short-term goals, and find out what their ideal work life and environment look like. Then, decide as a group the best strategies to make those visions a reality.
Some questions you might ask your team are the following:
Avoid these common errors in working toward your vision, and use the supportive elements to enrich your chances for success.
Don’t:
Do:
We all have dreams, but sometimes the fear of not knowing how to make them happen causes us to diminish our goals.
What does your perfect future look like? Be specific regarding job, income, and social life.
What steps have you taken to date to achieve this life?
What are some things that hinder your belief that this life is possible for you?
How can you use the guidance in this section to help you learn to believe in your dream and start working to make it happen?
Many people believe that simply having a compelling vision is enough. They sit back and wait for the universe to provide what they need to succeed. But the universe only responds to what you do, not what you dream about. You must act to achieve your full potential.
A compelling vision requires a compelling plan of action. You can’t navigate a new life if you don’t know which path to take to get there. Planning has three advantages that help you stay on track to reach your short- and long-term goals. You can work out all the mishaps you might face along the way when you take the time to plan on paper before you start to act. And as you reduce your mistakes, you save precious energy and time because you won’t waste either backtracking to fix errors made during a typical trial and error period. If you start to plan and end up somewhere you don’t want to be, you can readjust your plan without risking wasted capital.
You sharpen your planning skills when you focus your plan on 12-week production cycles. A 12-week plan has several advantages over a year-long plan:
1. You Increase Predictability
You can’t possibly predict every action you'll take over a 12-month period, so any plan made over this amount of time will be based on assumptions. Assumptions only allow you to guess at where you’ll be and what is possible at a certain point in your process. In contrast, a 12-week plan removes assumptions because the time frame is short enough for you to make accurate predictions of your future actions. After you set your vision for the future and break it into bite-sized behaviors that accumulate into the bigger picture, you will clearly see what tasks need to be accomplished first.
2. You Increase Focus
When you reduce your goal into bite-sized segments of action, you no longer have to manage multiple objectives at once. A year-long plan will include many different tasks that compose the overall goal, but too many objectives lead to confusion and inactivity because you’re trying to do too many things at once. When you train your focus on one or two actions at a time, you can tackle each task with a high degree of success. Each successful completion of your 12-week plan sets you up to build on that success in the next 12 weeks.
3. You Develop a Strong Structure for Your Work
How you structure your plan determines your level of execution. Lengthy plans tend to involve too much theory and not enough practical application. In contrast, 12-week plans create clear tactics for accomplishing your goals within three months, and those tactics become your daily and weekly responsibilities. Tactics must be action-oriented and involve deadlines for each one. Within these time constraints, you’ll be able to follow your structured path toward your goal one action at a time with a sense of urgency.
Now that you have your long-term vision and short-term goals determined, it’s time to start writing your first 12-week plan to begin the journey of achievement. Without a solid plan, you may become impatient with your results and rush your behaviors to get to the end faster. This action will lead to gaps in your process that can critically hinder your success.
Even if you know what you need to do, writing it down makes your actions more concrete and helps you stay on track when life’s distractions threaten your focus. With a solid plan, you ensure you’re living each day in the moment and proactively working on the right tasks, rather than reactively working on whatever comes your way. A plan helps you create the triggers for your actions, instead of waiting for life to trigger your actions.
Within the 12-week plan, a week now takes the place of a month, and each day accounts for a week. Through this lens, you can see how important each day and week are to your overall plan, and your daily activities become more important than your long-term objectives. Your plan of action for these activities should not be considered a glorified to-do list. Your plan should be an intentionally structured step-by-step process for how each day of work will lead to your weekly goal, which eventually leads to the completion of your overall 12-week goal.
You need to think of your plan like directions for a road trip. If you’re driving cross-country, missing turns, gaps in location, and misordered directions will get you lost every time. Likewise, a plan that skips necessary steps, overloads one task with too many objectives, and places actions in an unfavorable sequence will not lead you to your desired results.
Also, your plan needs to be actionable, not merely a set of ideas and wishes. Imagine a direction on your map that said, “Point the car west to get to California.” If you’re starting in Iowa, you’ll have no clear route to follow and will waste time guessing. Be specific in the actions needed to reach your goal.
Your plan can relate to either your short-term goals or long-term execution. Short-term goals might be a specific level of income, number of clients for your business, a certain weight, or new skill for your personal life. Long-term execution goals might be a college degree, larger staff, new operating system, or long life. With execution goals, your immediate efforts become focused on building a predetermined future state. Regardless of which type of plan it is, you must have a clear target you’re aiming for within the 12 weeks.
First, you need a clear goal. Your 12-week plan might have more than one goal, but don’t overwhelm your efforts by trying to achieve too much too early. Remember, a 12-week plan is just one part of the process. You will continue to build more 12-week plans from the foundation created by the previous plan.
When you have a clear goal, list the various tasks that will help achieve that goal. At this point, list all that come to mind. You will refine the list later to only the most important ones, but you won’t know which they are if you don’t exhaust all the possibilities first.
Both your goals and tasks should follow these criteria:
1. Make them specific and measurable. You need to quantify and qualify your actions so you’ll be able to measure the success of your results.
2. Focus on the positive. Write your goals and tactics in a language that promotes wins, not avoids losses. Rather than “reduce error rate by 25%,” write, “Increase positive outcomes by 75%.”
3. Push yourself, but not too far. If your goal is too easy to reach, you’re not pushing your success enough. If it’s too hard, you’ll become frustrated.
4. Promote accountability. If you’re working alone, own your process. If you’re working as part of a team or leading a team, assign responsibility to individuals. Ownership promotes follow-through. This topic will be elaborated on in a later chapter.
5. Set deadlines. Set clear time parameters for when each goal and task should be achieved. This means detailing the day or week by which specific progress needs to be made.
You don’t need to figure everything out perfectly to begin writing your plan. Refer to your long- and short-term goals to get a good idea of what you need to accomplish without overanalyzing your strategy. You will check back in with your plan throughout the process using measures, and adjustments can be made at any time.
At the top of the page, write your first 12-week goal. Then, list the most significant action required to start the process, and specify which week this action will take place and the daily activities required within that week to achieve it. Continue with the rest of the tasks and weeks through 12.
You can bolster your chances of success by making a list of actions you anticipate experiencing difficulty with and how you will manage those difficulties. When you hit those snags, you’ll know what to do without panicking.
Taking the requisite time to plan may seem like a waste of time, but the time spent will save you time in the future. A solid plan of action can save 20% of the time normally required to complete a task without a clear path forward.
Make sure to avoid these common mistakes when you write your plan:
Often, the hardest part of making significant changes in your life is knowing where to start.
State your vision for your future and three things that need to happen in the next three years to make it a reality.
What are two things you can start to do today that would help you reach those short-term goals?
How will these actions disrupt your current life? Name two sacrifices you’ll have to make.
Why is your vision important to you, and how does that make going through these sacrifices worth it?
Your actions are what create your future, so if you want an idea of what your future looks like, examine your current actions. You can’t completely predict how your future will turn out, but you can determine how successful you’ll be while working toward it.
At the beginning of each week, review the progress made the week before and your plan for building on that progress in the coming week. Also, make a weekly plan, and check it daily to ensure you’re clear on what duties must be accomplished that day. Once you determine what those duties are, don’t stop your day’s work until they’re done.
You’ll also check in throughout the day to make sure you’re still focused on the right task and the timeline of your week still makes sense. If it does, keep moving forward. If not, review the plan to restructure the activities necessary to achieve the week’s goals.
To ensure you don’t lose faith or momentum during your execution, you need progress measures to support your efforts. These supports are important because striving for a higher level of achievement means performing actions that are new and challenging. You can generate enough willpower in the beginning to push through the discomfort of these actions, but willpower wanes. A solid system of support will help uplift you when your motivation is lacking.
You can develop a good process control system by creating a positive weekly routine. Three elements are necessary for a successful weekly routine: a weekly plan, a weekly accountability meeting (WAM), and a weekly scoring system. The next chapter will cover the scoring system.
Your weekly plans should be clear breakdowns of your overall 12-week plan. The tasks and benchmarks you aim for each week are mere elaborations of those listed on your main schedule of tasks. Don’t add new tasks to the weekly plans based on new interests or a sense of urgency. If you’re going to change the tasks for one week, change them on the main plan to keep the pacing of each priority action in order. In this way, you make sure each week is strategically organized to develop the main goal.
Just like in your 12-week plan, write each goal at the top of your new week, and list the specific actions that will happen daily throughout the week. Check in with this plan every morning and a few times throughout the day to make sure you’re staying on track and meeting your deadlines.
| Week 4 Plan (Score: ___%) |
Goal 1. Increase sales by 10%
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Goal 2. Double number of clients
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Goal 3. Lose 15 pounds
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You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help when starting a massive endeavor like striving to realize your vision. Studies show that you are seven times more likely to succeed in your efforts if you surround yourself with supportive individuals. Find two to four people you trust to meet with each week to review your progress. Ideally, these people will also be working through their own 12-week plans. If you’re in a business organization, finding these people will be easier. If not, make sure the people you invite to your WAM (Weekly Accountability Meeting) are aware of your vision, goals, and process so they can be useful sounding boards.
The purpose of the WAM is to promote ownership and consistency in your plan execution. This meeting should happen at the beginning of each week and last for approximately 20 to 30 minutes. Here’s a sample agenda:
When creating a successful weekly routine, be sure to avoid these common errors:
You gain valuable information about how to execute more effectively when you keep track of your execution progress over the week. Use a weekly scorecard to track your stats for how well you’re performing. With these data, you can make informed decisions about how to adjust your plan or process to attain better results. Without an objective measure of execution, you can’t know whether you’re doing what is necessary to meet your 12-week goal and future vision.
Some believe that keeping score is demoralizing because you’re forced to recognize failure. But the opposite is actually true. You can focus on what you’re doing right, rather than wrong, to boost your confidence and willpower. Statistical data are devoid of emotion. All you see is the raw facts of your outcomes.
To effectively track your execution progress, use two different measures: lag indicators and lead indicators. Lag indicators measure results, such as dollars earned, pounds shed, sales made, and pages written. Lead indicators measure the steps taken to achieve those results, such as marketing tactics, exercise routine, number of sales calls, and hours spent writing. You need to balance your focus between each type of indicator to gain an accurate measure of success.
Most people naturally keep track of their lag indicators. It’s human nature to measure how well you’re meeting your desired goals. Whereas you do want to keep an eye on your overall progress, you will grow more when you focus your measurements on your lead indicators.
Measure your lead indicators each week by calculating the percentage of tasks completed. Divide the number of tasks completed with the number intended to get the resulting percentage of success.
The next step is to determine whether this low rate of success is due to a faulty plan or poor execution. You should be able to look at your weekly plan to see if the strategies and tactics predicted actually combine to achieve the result at Week 12. If not, change your strategies. However, you can only know whether your plan is faulty if you’ve sincerely put effort into optimal execution. If you look at your plan and know you didn’t attempt to execute to the best of your ability, the blame is on you, not the plan, and you can adjust your behavior accordingly for better execution.
Far too often, people abandon the plan without an earnest effort to execute it. They think their failure to achieve means the plan is not good, but they’re not being honest about their behavior. You’ll feel discomfort when you start to score your execution because it’s human nature to avoid negative feedback. When you aren’t brave enough to admit your flaws, you scapegoat the mission to protect your self-esteem. This process is so common, researchers call it productive tension.
Productive tension occurs when you know you aren’t living up to your potential. You feel guilty about your inactivity, so you take the easy way out by quitting. However, productive tension can be a useful tool if you embrace the discomfort. You can use the tension to spur resilience and commit to working harder.
You don’t have to strive for perfection in your weekly execution. If you execute 85% of the time, you'll still be on track to achieve the outcomes you want. Even if you only execute 65% of the time, you can still succeed if you stick to the plan and commit to executing a little more every day. But you must know how effective or ineffective your current execution is before you can adjust your plan of attack.
The more you perform these measures, the faster you’ll be able to judge your progress and make the necessary adjustments. Keep the measures for results and execution separate. You may not have lost any weight during one week, but if you succeeded in completing 100% of your tasks, you’re still making progress. When you’re deeper into your 12-week plan and notice you still aren’t losing enough weight to make your goal, you may need to adjust your plan. But you won’t know where the problem lies if you don’t execute faithfully.
It won’t be easy to adjust your thinking to view execution as a measure of success instead of results. But your future is created by what you do today. If you want to know where you’re going, you have to be able to see where your actions are leading you. Your scorecard helps you predict your future by measuring your current progress.
You want your company to perform well and produce at a high level, and keeping scorecards for your team’s progress is a good way to ensure it is. The focus on lead indicators is even more vital in a workplace setting because it helps you understand whether your team is working efficiently and where someone is falling behind.
Too often, bosses want to judge their employees’ performance on end results. When they fail to meet your expectations, you both feel disappointed. And a disappointed workforce is a demotivated workforce. Avoid these negative consequences by remembering that measures are merely feedback on the success of the process, not a tool to punish your workers.
When you look at lead indicators, you’ll get a clear picture of how hard your team is working to achieve their personal and team-related goals. If they’re scoring high and the plan is legitimate, you know successful results are sure to follow. If they’re scoring high and not achieving the desired results, your expectations for the 12 weeks may be too high or missing important steps. Use the scorecard to evaluate your system, as well as individual performance.
Another good aspect of the scorecard is it will show you who may need support for the tasks they’re accountable for. If one of your employees scores below 60% two weeks in a row, don’t jump to the conclusion that they aren’t working hard enough. They may just be overloaded and require assistance to accomplish their weekly tasks.
Avoid these common errors related to measures:
Use these tips to strengthen your measuring practice:
You must invest your time wisely to accomplish your tasks successfully. You, like everyone else on the planet, are used to feeling like you just don’t have enough time to do everything you want to do. But the truth is, this belief is usually a defense mechanism against facing the truth—you don’t manage your time well. Effective time management is often the difference between average achievers and high achievers.
People who have accomplished amazing feats in business, sports, or other arenas do not have more time than you do. They merely made better choices about how they spent their time, which is the foundation of good time management. Your choices from one minute to the next dictate how well you use your time.
Studies show that most people waste more valuable work time in a day than they realize. This time is wasted dealing with the various distractions people and technology throw your way while you’re trying to work. One study found it took 15 minutes for workers to get back to their tasks when they stopped to check emails or text messages. Another found that 28% of the average employee’s day is spent managing interruptions in workflow and time taken to refocus. In a 40-hour work week, that’s 11 hours of time wasted.
When you allow distractions to flow in and out of your workday, you leave the success of your efforts to chance. Your day controls you, rather than you controlling your day. You respond to whatever requires your attention in the moment and waste precious energy and mental power on activities that don’t matter. This makes it so much harder to concentrate when you turn back to your real work.
Part of the problem is the fear and effort that come with working on high-payoff activities. Those tasks that challenge us the most require energy and intense focus, and you may feel uncomfortable pushing past your familiar limits. But those high-payoff tasks are also what will lead to amazing results in the future.
You must be willing to choose strategic actions over comfort if you truly want to be a success. You will only achieve your future vision if you sacrifice comfort. Your focus needs to shift to the most important tasks that serve your goals. And you must protect the time you work on those tasks.
Organize your day around the priority activities that will lead to your desired results. You know when you’re procrastinating or wasting time, so you must learn to say “no” to distractions and “yes” to active focus. One way to do this is by developing blocks of time dedicated to various tasks.
Performance time is a term used to describe periods of total productivity. You can separate your day into specified periods of activity to gain the full advantage of performance time.
You have the ability to concentrate for three hours without distraction each week. When you plan your weekly strategy, build in this three-hour block and commit to doing only priority tasks during this time. Don’t take phone calls, check emails, or read the news. Don’t visit with co-workers or daydream about lunch. Focus completely on the task at hand for three hours to harness the full power of your creative and intellectual capacities.
You waste more time trying to eliminate distractions completely than if you set aside time to be distracted. A buffer block is a set amount of time dedicated to miscellaneous activities that take your attention away from work. When you group these activities into one chunk of time, you reduce frustration with constant interruptions and alleviate the stress of having these tasks lingering in the background.
Success is not just about working hard all the time. You must allow your mind to rest and recharge so you can always work with your fullest creative and intellectual capacities and focus. If you work without rest, you'll burn out and diminish your cognitive capacity. Schedule at least three hours of downtime each week. Step away from your work and engage in something relaxing and frivolous. You will be re-energized and ready to tackle more when you return.
The following are some strategies for how to spend each performance block efficiently:
Strategic Block: This block is dedicated to accomplishing the tasks that lead to your vision. You should take a few minutes to reflect on your vision to connect emotionally with it and review your progress in working toward it. Take the next few minutes to review your measure data to see where you’re growing and still need to do more. If there are areas still lagging in productivity, take a few minutes to diagnose the problem. After these tasks are done, you should have 2 to 2.5 hours left to work on the necessary tasks for that week.
Buffer Block: Use this time to check emails, call family or friends, hold office hours for your staff, respond to messages, read the news, or do any other activity that threatens to interrupt your workflow.
Breakout Block: Spend time with family and friends, go hiking, read for fun, watch TV, or take a bath. These three hours are your time to get away from work and re-energize your body, mind, and soul.
Another way you can capitalize on your time is by focusing on reducing the areas in which you are weak. Reducing your weaknesses that hinder your progress is not an unworthy cause, but eliminating weakness is not the same as building or maximizing your strengths. If you are confronted with your weaknesses more than your strengths during your work, you’re probably not working on the right things.
Time never stops, so you can’t create a strategic plan without incorporating time into it. You learned already that breaking your time into three chunks of activities is effective in reducing wasted time. You’ve also learned the importance of setting a weekly plan to accomplish your 12-week strategic tasks. When you combine these elements, you create your most optimal week for not only successful achievement of your goals but also successful management of your time.
Your model week is a blueprint for how you can manage the tasks of your strategic plan within the confines of other daily and weekly responsibilities. You do this by first designing your week to incorporate your performance blocks to increase your productivity and then adjusting it to serve the greater purpose of scheduling the necessary activities for your 12-week plan.
First, make time at the beginning of the week for reflection, planning, and peer support. Then, pencil in your strategic block on a day when you know you’ll have the time to focus for three hours on your priority tasks. Next, schedule your 30-minute or hour-long buffer blocks for each day. Scheduling these at the same time will train your brain to switch focuses without effort. If you know you have a lot of miscellaneous activities each day, schedule one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
You want to schedule your breakout block next, but a word of caution: Until you've successfully operated within the confines of your 12-week plan long enough to meet your goals each week, you might consider scheduling a breakout block every other week or once a month. This strategy can help prevent a loss of focus until you trust yourself enough to stick to your schedule.
After your blocks are scheduled, add in all of the other important tasks you have for the week, whether personal, professional, or obligatory. These may include lunch meetings, sales calls, individual check-ins with your employees, picking your children up from school, or dinner at your in-laws. Whatever you know is coming that week, put it on the schedule.
When you look at your model week, you will see little time left over. Whereas this reality may feel overwhelming, you’ve set a commitment to work through the process of reaching your vision to reach your full potential. You must accept that sacrificing free time and comfort are required for success.
You know when you’re at your best during the day. You might wake up ready to go, or you might need time to cleanse your mind and ease into work. Whatever your lifestyle dictates, create a standard routine that you follow faithfully each day.
You should create this routine when you sit down to plan your weekly activities. When you do this work at the start of each week, you’ll be able to see whether your plan makes sense. If you can’t find space for all the activities you want to accomplish on a calendar, you won’t be able to accomplish them in reality.
Make the hard choices about what you must do versus what you want to do. Your goal is to master one aspect of your overall vision during a 12-week period, so you must be intentional and realistic about which tasks you need to accomplish each week to keep your momentum and execution levels high. With an intentional plan, you’ll feel more in control, more confident, and more relaxed about the week ahead and more likely to stay the course.
The most important thing the blocks and model week do is give you a reality check on what you can accomplish. So many people believe they can do it all and work day and night to catch up with everything on their plate. They focus on what they can do quickly to get it out of the way, which puts the important tactics needed to achieve their goals on the backburner. But greatness only happens with intentional focus and strategic time use. If you want to truly experience a breakthrough in your life and career, you must be willing to organize your time efficiently and let go of the notion that you can do it all. Some things will fall through the cracks, but those things should never be the tasks required to change your life.
Avoid these common errors in allocating your time:
(Shortform note: For more on time management, check out our summary of Eat That Frog.)
It’s not possible to remove distractions, but knowing which distractions to look out for can help you manage them.
What are the two ways you currently distract yourself from work?
Do you feel you are able to control how much time you spend on these distractions? Why or why not?
Why do these distractions or any others appeal to you or serve your life?
If you knew these distractions were stopping you from accomplishing your dreams, what changes would you make in how you use your time? Be specific.
Now that you know the five disciplines to reach your goals, let’s look at three principles to help you stay focused.
You will experience more success and pride in your work if you hold yourself accountable for following your plan. The nature of accountability is often misunderstood. You’ve heard managers say that they need to hold their employees accountable. You’ve heard lawyers say that criminals must be held accountable for their crimes. You’ve said that you're more productive when someone holds you accountable. These phrases convey accountability as some form of punishment or mandate applied to one person by another, but this is not accurate.
Accountability is a personal action. You hold yourself accountable when you make the choice to do what is needed. Accountability is the recognition of freedom of choice, not actions performed under duress. When you do something because you have to do it, the task feels like a burden, and you likely only put forth enough effort required to complete the task. But when you do something because you choose to do it, you're more empowered to perform the task to the best of your ability.
To truly be accountable, you must release your beliefs that things in the external world have control over your life. You can’t wait for the market to improve before you decide to invest in your company. You can’t wait for the right job to improve your life. External factors can’t shape positive results in your life. You are the only person able to create the life you want through your actions, but you must be honest about who you are and how you act to begin the process.
Take ownership of your life to understand what is required of you to change it. Embrace accountability in choice to improve your production and personal interests. When you realize your choices create your path to success, you’ll see greater possibilities for your future and gain the courage to try new things to bring them to fruition.
You can only start being accountable for your life when you stop looking outside yourself for the answers. Society is full of examples of victimhood. We blame people, circumstances, our parents, the government, and corporate America for why we aren’t able to thrive in life. When you blame others for your lack of success or make excuses about why you can’t do more with your life, you limit your potential to only what others allow you to achieve.
Being accountable means understanding that you control your own fate. Life will happen to you whether you want it to or not. Tragedy strikes, you don’t get the results you want from your actions, people don’t respond the way you wanted, or you fail at something important. You can’t control these things, but you can control how you respond to them.
When you’re accountable, you stop looking for blame and start looking for solutions. Failures and barriers become challenges to surmount, not roadblocks that stop your progress. Take a moment to think about all the reasons why you haven’t reached your vision before. What did you allow to derail your beliefs or efforts? What external forces did you blame for your inability to succeed? You’ve given away your power to forces out of your control for too long. Make the decision today to start owning your choices so nothing will ever stop you from achieving your full potential again.
The following are four ways to encourage accountability in your life:
Pay attention to when the little voice in your head starts to whine. Listen for excuses, and notice when you’re settling for less than what you know you can accomplish. When you experience these sensations, turn your focus to what you can control right now, and move toward those factors ready to act.
When you start to complain about how unfair life is, you start to believe life is unfair. Your despair can turn into depression, wherein you believe the world is against you. Keep your thoughts positive to breed a positive attitude.
You can’t continue to do the same thing and expect to get different results. If you want a different life, you have to lead a different life. Be willing to change your habits and behaviors so you can make the right choices that lead to new results.
The people in your life influence you more than you think. If you consistently interact with negative people who blame the world for their problems, their attitude will infect you. Find people who own their destinies, and model this ownership to the victims in your life.
You’ve already learned that accountability is not something to hold people to, but this is worth stating so you avoid the trap of using the term to represent failures with your workers. When you use people’s shortcomings against them, they’re more likely to adopt a mindset of victimhood. In addition, you leave them little room for them to own their processes of feedback and adjustments in actions.
You can have consequences for your employees if they’re dropping the ball, but you must give them space to learn from their mistakes if they’re going to take ownership and develop solutions. The following are some ways to support positive accountability in your organization:
Avoid these errors when approaching the concept of accountability:
Remember these tips to stay accountable:
You have accepted personal accountability and decided to make positive choices to achieve your vision of your life. Now, you have to follow through because intent without action is worthless. The most important aspect of positive execution is a commitment to execute. A commitment is a promise to follow through on your accountability, or a promise to perform future actions. When you commit to your work in business and follow through, you foster trust, respect, and greater productivity. When you commit to your actions in your personal life and follow through, you foster discipline, confidence, and self-respect.
The simple act of committing to your plans is life-changing. Your sense of self and success grows the more you continue to show up and do the work. But it’s too easy to break our promises when situations become difficult. If you only do what you say you'll do when things are easy, you’re not truly committing to your work or life.
The following components are required to develop a strong sense of commitment:
The benefit of the 12-week year is the reduced burden of committing to your work. It’s easier to commit to 12 weeks of working hard than it is to 12 months of unceasing labor. When the 12 weeks are over, check in with your commitment level and adjust accordingly for the next 12 weeks. This process empowers you for greater achievement and growth, and you need both to reach your future goals and full potential.
Commitments are both personal and social in that you make promises to yourself and promises to others. You don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep, but too often, that’s exactly what happens. Both types of promises create emotional consequences when broken. When you don’t follow through, you either feel like a failure or you experience a loss of integrity.
Think about how it feels when someone doesn’t keep a promise they made to you. You stop trusting that person completely, feel hurt, and think less of them. You don’t want to feel these things about yourself or have others think them about you. When you understand the underlying ideas involved in a commitment and what to consider before making it, you can learn how to keep from breaking it.
When you make a commitment, you’re stating that you have an intention to do something in the future. But there are two types of intentions inside each commitment: stated and hidden. Your stated intentions are like the top of the iceberg poking out of the water, which is only about 10% of the total mass. The hidden intentions are like the 90% of the iceberg below the waterline. In your life, you can call this the “waterline of consciousness.”
You’re fully aware of your stated intentions. You intend to lose weight, you intend to make extra sales calls, or you intend to take your spouse on their dream vacation. But these stated intentions are in conflict with the hidden intentions. Under the surface, your subconscious has other intentions, such as not wanting to give up pizza or leisure time for diet food and exercise, not wanting to work late or be too exhausted to enjoy the weekend, or not wanting to spend a lot of money or take the time off of work to travel. These hidden intentions conflict with your stated ones, and because you’re unaware of them and their power, they often win the battle and keep you from following through.
To successfully keep your promises, you must become aware of the corresponding hidden intentions for each stated intention you make. You can often discover your hidden intentions by looking at the costs associated with the promised action. Only when your stated intention is greater than your hidden ones will you be able to reconcile the conflict in your favor.
All commitments you make to yourself are explicit. You understand the circumstances and your thoughts, so you’re fully aware of the agreement you’re making. But between you and another person, there are explicit and implicit commitments.
Explicit commitments are those spoken to another, what is often called “giving your word” to someone. Implicit commitments are assumed actions based on what is expected from specific relationships: a parent’s love, a partner’s fidelity, or a leader’s guidance and support. Most issues that arise in relationships are because trust or hearts have been broken due to a failure to uphold either explicit or implicit promises.
The following strategies are ways to ensure you keep your promises to others:
You’re always allowed to say no when someone asks you to commit to something. You may be afraid of disappointing people or letting them down, but those feelings are less significant after a “no” than they are after a broken promise. Train your mind to evaluate the costs of each promise before you make it. If the costs are too great, renegotiate or say no.
Also be aware of your psychological excuses for not keeping your commitments. There’s a difference between finding excuses for why you can’t follow through and trying your best to attempt to follow through but falling short. Don’t tell yourself the action is too hard or unlikely to make a difference. The act of trying is often more important than the result. Commit to trying your best to keep your word. Even if you don’t succeed, you know you still acted with integrity.
Every time you make your best effort to do something, you build faith in yourself and confidence that you will always work hard to keep your promises. That trust will motivate you when keeping promises feels like a struggle or too large to manage.
Avoid these common errors regarding commitments:
You have good intentions when you commit to certain actions, and when you feel emotionally attached to those actions, you’re more likely to follow through.
Think about the different arenas in your life, such as family, community, spirituality, financial status, and health. What would a breakthrough in these arenas look like? Choose two and be specific.
What actions are required to achieve those breakthroughs? List two or three for each one.
What sacrifices would accompany those actions and overall breakthrough achievement? List two or three for each one.
Which actions are you willing to sacrifice and commit to so you can have a breakthrough? List any that apply and elaborate on why.
You can be great if you can be present in the moment. But you often have so many responsibilities, it’s hard to know where to put your energy and how to get the mental downtime you need to thrive. You multitask to make sure you engage with everything you need to get done, but by engaging with everything, you aren’t truly engaging with anything.
When you spread your attention too thin over multiple directions, you aren’t fully applying yourself to any task. You’re overworked, overconcerned, and overtired. Burnout is a likely result, and in the end, you haven’t mastered anything, just become mediocre at several things. To be truly great, you need to allow your body to catch up with your mind. When you're mentally in the same place as you are physically, you're living in the moment. And your true potential lies within this moment.
You can’t change the past or live in the future, but that doesn’t stop you from defining your worth by some end result you believe will signify success. Greatness isn’t achieved when you reach your final destination. Greatness represents the efforts made along the journey to get there. You become great the moment you decide to do the work to reach your goal, and the end result is merely a tangible marker of your greatness.
There’s a fine line between greatness and mediocrity when it comes to how you live your life. You maintain a mediocre level of achievement when you continue to do the same things over and over again day in and day out. You start to become great the moment you make a concerted effort to push past your normal routine and add value to your day.
You have the ability to be great, and you start by striving for more, creating a plan to achieve your goals, and being disciplined in your actions. You can change your life by simply making the choice to start executing at a higher level. Don’t be content with the life you’re living. Strive for the life you’re capable of living for 12 weeks, and reap the rewards.
Much of what challenges your ability to be present is your attempt to create a work-life balance. You struggle to find a balance between work, family, friends, community, health, and personal time, so you decide to give equal time and energy to each avenue of your life. But when you do this, you overextend yourself and become frustrated and joyless. The problem is that success cannot be achieved by balancing your time in each area of life. Success happens when you intentionally create an imbalance in how you spend your energy.
Different moments in life will require different amounts of energy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The purpose of intentional imbalance is to put your energy where you want it to go, rather than feeling like you have to dole it out evenly.
The 12-week year is a process that helps you intentionally put your energy in one or two areas at a time. When you focus on a few key aspects of your life for 12 weeks, you’re able to remain present with your focus and make great strides in that area.
It’s up to you to decide how to divide your focused energy. Sometimes a full plan will be best, and sometimes a focused activity is better to optimize first. Either plan works if you commit to the necessary actions, but you’ll need to accept that your ultimate goal is not going to be reached in one 12-week period. Each 12-week period will improve one aspect of your plan so you can eventually achieve the immense overall result. Let’s look at another example to help cement this concept:
The secret to maintaining success over each 12-week period is to celebrate the victories along the way. You’ll be more confident and satisfied the more you acknowledge your progress, which is the underlying magic of the 12-week year. You no longer have to wait until the end of the year to feel good about your work because you’ll generate growth and successes every three months. Use that success to strengthen your belief in yourself and resolve to continue reaching great heights.
Look at the seven arenas of spirituality, relationships, family, community, health, private life, and professional life, and rate each one on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “complete satisfaction” with where you currently are. Focus your energy on whichever arena receives a low score to start the process of improvement.
Your first 12-week year is the most important one you’ll have. You should not only consider it your first opportunity to grow in your life and career but also as a learning experience to set up your next 12-week year and all those that follow. The disciplines and principles you’ve learned are all that are required for you to get started with your first 12 weeks of goal achievement. But before you can have a successful first 12 weeks, you should get clear on the barriers that will try to thwart your progress. When you know what barriers to look out for, you'll more successfully maneuver around them and increase your chance for success.
Change is hard, and you’re hardwired to resist it. Resistance to change and the effort required is akin to the monster hiding under your bed as a child. When you ignore it because you’re too afraid to confront it, the power of that monster grows. But when you turn on the lights and expose the underside of your bed, you see that the monster is not as big as you thought or not there at all. Learn to face your fears in the light of day so they don’t grow to exponential proportions and paralyze your progress.
You are also hardwired to choose the road most taken, or the easiest, most comfortable way of getting somewhere. Why climb the mountain when you can take the tram to the top? But when you skip the more challenging journey, you miss out on opportunities for growth and to prove what you’re made of. Don’t short-change your growth by choosing immediate results over long-term benefits. The recommendation of setting a clear compelling vision is the key to overcoming this barrier. When you feel yourself choosing the easy route, your vision is what helps you understand the effort required to reach it so you can move through the discomfort.
Studies show that the advantages gained in planning your strategy to reach your goal are weakened when there are too many strategies to manage. You will encounter too many obstacles, a lack of time, and an abundance of costs when you try to change several things at once. One goal that may seem hard but achievable on its own is suddenly drowning in a sea of debris from all the other goals. And if your goal or actions feel too big, you won’t attempt them. The beauty of the strategic block is that you focus on one thing at a time. This reduces the magnitude of the task, which makes it feel more manageable and keeps you motivated. Make your actions small and the measure of success achievable so you'll feel confident each time you accomplish them.
Your old life will still surround you as you try to reshape your behaviors for success. Your old triggers will still be there to challenge the power of your new triggers. And because the old triggers are familiar and comfortable, you easily fall back into your old ways. One way to thwart this is to use old triggers to activate new triggers, rather than trying to replace them. For instance, if you always read the news while drinking coffee, make coffee time your buffer block. When you incorporate your new system into the confines of your life, you align your new behaviors in a natural way. This reduces the conflict with your old environment and makes you more likely to follow through.
You have received all of this information already, but having the steps reiterated will help you remember them in sequence and their significance.
Step 1: Create your compelling vision and connect emotionally with it.
Step 2: Set your first short-term (three-year) goal toward achieving that long-term vision.
Step 3: Determine the steps involved in reaching that short-term goal.
Step 4: Build a 12-week plan for accomplishing those steps.
Step 5: Build a model week for how you will achieve the necessary tasks.
Step 6: Use the first day of each week to measure your progress and plan the coming week.
Step 7: Follow through.
Steps 1 through 4 should happen before the 12 weeks begin. When you're fully organized, that’s when you start your 12-week journey.
Your first four weeks will be all about building the habit of following your plan. Focus on the fundamentals of the 12-week year, and follow them to the letter. How you move through these first four weeks will determine the success of the other eight weeks to come. This month is when you want to hone your execution skills and manage your barriers.
The second four weeks will lack urgency, so staying motivated and committed is vital in the second month. Your routine is already established, and the ending is still a ways off. But at this point, you have some good measures of your lead and lag indicators and can use them to determine what’s working and what isn’t. These weeks are when you want to make significant adjustments to either your plan or execution so you can finish strong.
The last four weeks are when you start to see the results of your work. You may not be exactly where you want to be, but the fact that you’ve made it this far is a measure of success if you’ve been hitting a score of at least 85% a majority of the time. You’ve created new ways of thinking and approaching your work, and you have what you need to learn from this experience and increase your efforts for the next 12 weeks.
Even if you didn’t hit your intended goal completely, chances are you made significant progress and have experienced some of the personal and professional benefits of your new system. The week after the 12-week plan ends can be used to finish up any loose ends to help reach the full goal. You can also use it as a period of reflection to assess your satisfaction with the process and your efforts. Finally, you should definitely use part of the 13th week to acknowledge your achievements, big or small, and celebrate.
If you’re in business, the 13th week is a good time for an action-review meeting to look over the separate efforts made by your employees that contributed to the overall goal. Use this review to begin planning your next 12 weeks using the information about what worked and what didn’t.
Whether in business or in your personal life, use the end of the 13th week to set a new goal for a brand new Week 1, and write your action plan. As you accumulate more 12-week periods of success, you'll be surprised by how much you’ve accomplished and how close your vision is to becoming a reality. You can start living your full potential the moment you choose to implement this process. Don’t wait for the perfect time. Choose to be great now.
The guidance provided in The 12 Week Year lays out everything you need to start achieving more today.
How interested are you in incorporating the 12-week plan into your life? Explain your answer.
If you wanted to incorporate only a few of the concepts, which resonate the most with you?
How would the 12-week year both improve your life and detract from it?
Are you willing to sacrifice comfort and familiarity to achieve better results in your life? Why or why not?