Book Highlights: The 12 Week Year (Brian P. Morgan & Michael Lennington)

This book helped me achieve more in shorter time frames while ensuring that I am aligned with my long-term vision.

📙 About The Book

Title: The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months
Authors: Brian P. Morgan & Michael Lennington

🙋 Who Should Read It?

Anyone who is looking forward to being more productive throughout the calendar year by learning to plan and execute effectively should read this book.

👀 Impressions

The book is a good read for those looking forward to a more structured and productive year ahead. It encourages one to discard annualized thinking and focus on shorter time frames when it comes to planning and execution. It also presents the idea of creating a sense of urgency, which is usually felt at the end of the calendar year, more frequently by assigning deadlines to each of the action items on the 12-week year. Another idea is that it is more practical to make short-term commitments and accomplish the tasks than planning for a full 12-month calendar year. This idea also helps one overcome procrastination and get early feedback rather than waiting for the feedback and performance evaluation at the end of the calendar year.

💡 Key Points and Ideas

Most people have two lives: the lives that they live and the lives that they are capable of living and what holds them from achieving what they are capable of is not lack of knowledge, intellect, information, etc., but the lack of consistent execution.

The book has been divided into 2 parts. Part I helps understand how to achieve your goals in only weeks while Part II provides you with the specific tools and tips needed to support the ideas presented in Part I.

Part I: Things You Think You Know

• Discard annualized thinking and let 12 weeks equal a year i.e. instead of making goals and plans for the entire calendar year and evaluating your success annually focus on shorter time frames. This will ensure that you face the deadlines more frequently and with every deadline you feel the same sense of urgency to accomplish a task that you feel at year-end.
• Step out of your comfort zone and find a compelling vision with which you are emotionally connected. This will give you a reason to go through the pain of change and drive your daily actions keeping you in the game when things become difficult.
• The 12-week planning is more predictable because you can define with a higher degree of certainty the actions you need to implement each week over the next 12 weeks.
• Scorekeeping fosters informed decision-making by helping you measure how effectively you have been executing your 12-week plan. It has been found that you need to be ~85 percent effective on the top priorities of your 12-week plan to achieve excellence.
• Use the productive tension as a catalyst for positive change because quitting is not an option. Productive tension is the discomfort that comes when you fail to execute your plan.
• Learn to say NO to less important activities and focus on high-payoff activities.
• Block your time, also known as the Performance Time, each week dedicated to your strategically important tasks. The Performance Time has three main components as follows:
  Strategic Block is a 3-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week. This helps concentrate your intellect and creativity to produce breakthrough results.
  Buffer Block is usually a 30-minute block per day designed to deal with all of the unplanned and low-level activities that might cause constant interruptions.
  Breakout Block is at least 3-hour long and meant for things other than work during normal business hours to refresh and reinvigorate your mind.
• Be accountable and take ownership of your actions and results regardless of the circumstances.
• Keep your commitments because keeping commitments to others builds trust and strong relationships and keeping commitments to self builds character, esteem, and success. The 4 keys to successful commitments are as follows:
  Strong desire for results to get you through hard times and keep you on track.
  Keystone actions that will ultimately produce the result.
  Count the costs like time, money, risk, uncertainty, loss of comfort, etc, before committing.
  Act on commitments, not feelings to ensure you do the things you need to do regardless of how you feel. This is a core discipline for success.
• Live in the moment because when you’re present in the moment your thinking is clear and focused, decisions come easily, and you move with grace and ease.
• Life is about intentional imbalance. Trying to spend equal time in each area is unproductive and often frustrating. Life balance is achieved when you are purposeful about how and where you spend your time, energy, and effort.

Part II: Putting It All Together

• Accountability, Commitment, and Greatness in the Moment are the 3 principles that are fundamental to the 12-week year and that in the end determine an individual’s effectiveness and success.
  Vision, Planning, Process Control, Measurement, and Time Use are the 5 disciplines that foster consistent action.
  Together these constitute the 8 elements that are fundamental to high performance in any endeavor.
• The Emotional Cycle of Change (ECOC): There are 5 stages that people move through emotionally when changing their behavior. Refer to the image below for more details of the 5 stages.

• The 12-week year is a closed system in that it contains everything you need to succeed. It also facilitates change. When the 12-week year becomes your operating system, it supports all your other business systems, so when change comes you do not experience a massive upheaval. Instead, you can easily incorporate systems like plug-and-play software. The 12-week year as an operating system stays the same.

• The execution journey is first a thinking journey. Refer the image below to understand the thinking journey from impossible to possible to probable and finally to the given state.

• Focus on 3 time horizons while crafting your vision — the long term aspirations, the mid-term goals about 3 years into the future and the 12 weeks.
• The 5 criteria that will help you create a better 12-week plan when you are writing goals and tactics are as follows:
  1) Make your goals specific and measurable.
  2) State them positively.
  3) Ensure they are a realistic stretch.
  4) Assign accountability.
  5) Be time-bound.
• Do not rely solely on the willpower. Instead, install and apply process control that uses tools and events to create support structures that can augment, and in some cases take the place of, willpower.
• Weekly plan and Weekly Accountability Meeting (WAM) are the two elements of process control and are two steps in a three-step process called the weekly routine which consists of 3 simple yet powerful steps. The steps include the following scoring your week, planning your week and participating in a WAM.
• Keep score, take back control of your day by effectively allocating time, take ownership of your actions and results and set and keep your 12-week commitments (both personal and to others) for an effective execution of your 12-week year plan.
• Utilise the 13th week for assessing your performance and decide what if anything needs to be done differently in the next 12 weeks. The 13th week is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate your progress and success.
• Common pitfalls that you need to be aware of while creating and following your 12-week plan:
  1) You don’t take the power of vision seriously and your vision isn’t meaningful to you.
  2) Your vision is too small and doesn’t challenge you to do different things differently.
  3) You don’t connect your vision to your daily actions and your 12 week plan does not align with your long-term vision.
  4) You aren’t staying focused.
  5) You don’t make the tough choices.
  6) You don’t keep it simple and meaningful.
  7) You don’t plan each week.
  8) You include all your tasks instead of including only strategic items and commitments.
  9) You assume that each week is the same and the plan for each week looks the same.
  10) You add tactics weekly instead of first adding them to the 12-week plan first.
  11) You don’t use it to guide your day.
  12) You don’t make it part of your routine.
  13) You think that measurement is complicated or unimportant.
  14) You don’t schedule a block of time each week to assess your progress.
  15) You abandon the system when you don’t score well.
  16) You conduct business as usual rather than adopting more productive habits.
  17) You don’t focus on one thing at a time in your strategic blocks and allow distractions to steal your attention.
  18) You think being busy is the same as being productive.
  19) You continue to view accountability as consequence rather than as ownership.
  20) You look outside yourself.
  21) You miss a commitment once and give up and you fail to confront missed commitments.
  22) You don’t value your word.
• Success tips to help you benefit from the 12-week year plan:
  1) Share it with others so that you feel committed and responsible to act.
  2) Stay in touch with your vision by reviewing it frequently and updating it every time you discover ways to make it more vivid and meaningful to you.
  3) Live with intention. Resolve to be intentional in your actions to make progress on your vision. You can take a few minutes to reflect on the progress you made each day.
  4) Review your weekly score with a buddy or a small group of peers each week.
  5) Commit to make progress each week.
  6) Remember that a weekly score of less than 85 percent isn’t necessarily bad.
  7) Don’t be afraid to confront what your numbers are telling you.
  8) Work from a written weekly plan.
  9) Input your model week into your calendar.
  10) Acknowledge reality and focus on what you can control.
  11) Don’t overcommit.
  12) Go public with your commitments.
  13) Buddy up.

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