Book Review: The 12 Week Year
TL;DR;
This post is the first in what will be a regular series of book reviews. I absolutely love to read. I tend to read nonfiction books lately on productivity, time management, parenting, and any other topic that can improve my life. I do throw in a good fiction book from time to time and I will include reviews on those as well.
This review will be on one of my absolutely favorite time management and goal planning books called “The 12 Week Year” by Michael Lennington and Brian P. Moran. This book has helped me to plan my goals out and really design how I am going to accomplish them. Instead of a high level overview of goal setting, it really gets into the daily and weekly actions that you need to do in order to get your plan to work and succeed.
The main idea in this book is that when we plan our goals as “yearly”, we have too much time to complete them and we don’t get that urgency to complete them until we are close to the end of the year and months have gone by. Instead, the authors urge you to break your time into “12 week years”, where you plan the goals you will complete in those 12 weeks. How is this better than having 12 months?
Instead of spending 11 months procrastinating and thinking you still have time, you need to focus on your goals with the end of the “year” being at 12 weeks. This creates the sense of urgency that keeps you moving toward your goals and not putting them off.
Also, this gives you time to course correct. If you spend 11 months working hit or miss on your goal, you may realize 11 months later that you’ve chosen the wrong goal and you have wasted time. Instead, focus on your goal for 12 weeks and learn earlier that you may need to make adjustments.
This 12 week year idea also keeps you laser focused on your goal. Instead of thinking you have 12 months to complete it, you zero in on it knowing you only have 12 weeks. Having the end in much closer sight helps to motivate you to get things done.
The three principles of the 12 Week Year are Accountability, Commitment and Greatness in the Moment. Accountability is about ownership of your actions no matter the circumstances. The book suggests continually asking yourself “What more can I do to get the result?” I like asking myself this during my weekly reviews – what more can I do to get to my goals? Then I tweak my tactics from there.
Commitment is the promise that you make to yourself to do what you say you will do. Sometimes I get to Saturday and I have five household tasks that haven’t been done that I said I was going to do that week. I have had to fight myself and stop making excuses and just get them done, even if it’s 10pm and I just want to sit. As I start to build my trust in myself, I find myself having more confidence in other areas of my life.
Finally, “greatness in the moment.” The idea behind this principle is that you do not become great when you reach your goal, but instead you can achieve greatness in the moments that you choose to complete your tactics and in the steps that you take to reach your goals. Results just confirm your greatness.
What I really enjoy about this book is that it gives you practical, actionable takeaways to start working on. I read a lot of productivity books and I do not like to walk away from the book still wondering “Yeah, but how??” This book gives you the exact steps you need to take in order to be productive with the 12 Week Year framework.
First, you must choose your goals which the book refers to as your “vision”. You need to look ahead 5, 10, and 15 years and imagine where you want to be. However, since you are only planning for 12 weeks, you must not choose too many goals at once. The authors suggest 2-3 goals to begin with. These can be in any areas of your life. I have been doing this process for a while so I tend to choose a few more than 2-3. This year, since I am focusing on the 10 Areas of Life Wheel, I chose goals related to those areas.
Once you have your goals, then you need to build your tactical plan and the critical tasks that are required to meet your goals. You will track these tactical items as you progress each week.
Also, as a part of this, you determine the leads and the lags related to those tactics and goals. The leads are key performance indicators that you can measure that happen leading up to your goal and are early measurements of progress. The lags are what you can measure at the end and are late measurements of progress.
For example, let’s say you want to bench press 150lbs. Your tactical critical tasks might be to eat 120g of protein, bench press 3 times per week, research how others have increased their bench press, and meet with a personal trainer every other week. The leads are the tasks that you use to get to your goal and you can measure how well you do with them. For example, I can measure the number of times I bench press in a week or the number of protein grams I eat each day.
The lags are the end results, such as how much you bench press. This is something you can measure as well, but it occurs as a result of your lead activities.
In the 12 Week Year framework, you need to track and measure these tactics, leads, and lags to understand how you are progressing on your goals. For the example above, let’s say you’re getting to week 10 and you aren’t seeing any progress in your bench press like you were expecting in order to reach your goal at the end of the 12 Week Year. You can then go back to your critical tactics and lead tracker and maybe you see that you haven’t been reaching your protein goal daily and you’ve missed a few bench pressing sessions. Your tracker tells you what you probably already know: You aren’t doing the work you know you need to do.
This review is an activity that the authors recommend you do weekly. Every week, review your tracker for the tactics you wanted to complete, and check your numbers. Are you completing 50% of the items you said you would? 80%? 10%? Knowing this information will give you a good indication of whether or not you will reach your goals for that 12 Week Year. This review can also show you early on if you need to tweak some of the tactics you’ve chosen to track or need to add or remove tasks you are doing.
This book is a great read for someone that has many goals they want to accomplish but is not sure what process or framework to use to accomplish them. It’s also a great book for someone that likes templates and spreadsheets and the ability to track progress. I like to see the percentages every week, so if numbers are your jam, you will love this system. When I feel like I’m going nowhere with my goals and then I see that I scored a 30% that week on my tasks, I know exactly where I’ve gone off the path to my goals and I can focus on how to fix it instead of wondering why I can’t get to where I want to be.
There is a companion book to The 12 Week Year called “The 12 Week Year Field Guide”.
This book contains exercises to help you plan out and execute your 12 Week Years. It walks you through many questions and exercises to help you brainstorm what you want in life and the goals you are looking to accomplish. It also has templates for goal planning. It also describes in detail how a team might use the 12 Week Year system to achieve its goals.
What’s Next?
In my next post I will walk through the process of exactly how I plan out my 12 Week Year from start to end and also provide you with some tools to help you to do something similar.
Comment below if you’ve read this book or are planning to!
