The 12 Week Year

Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, 2013

These are mostly paraphrased notes and quotes from the book so I can more quickly review concepts. All credit
goes to the authors.

Part I: Things you think you know

Redefining the year

Discard annualized thinking: in every industry, people are more motivated and productive at year end due to
deadlines.
Periodization: focus on something specific in each period.
12 week year: forces you to confront lack of execution sooner, “end of year” motivation more frequently,
ensures each week counts.

The emotional connection

A compelling personal vision creates passion to overcome challenges and execute.
We are wired to resist change and postpone greatness: brain’s amygdala reacts negatively when facing
uncertainty and risk. While this helped our ancestors not get eaten, it also prevents us from progressing
when we don’t know how to create the future we want.
The prefrontal cortex can counteract this effect simply by imagining greatness in our futures. More
importantly, neurons rewire depending on your thoughts. Thinking about your compelling vision, or
anything, fires and strengthens the same neurons that would be involved in actually achieving the vision.
This applies to everything from athletes to business.
Therefore crucial to create an inspiring vision and learn to stay connected with it.

Throw out the annual plan

 Plan is absolutely essential:
1. It reduces mistakes.
2. It saves time.
3. It provides focus.
12 week planning is not quarterly planning. Every 12 weeks stands alone.
More predictable than annual planning. Long term plans rest on assumptions stacked on
assumptions, so annual plans are objective based and can’t determine specific actions. 12 week
plans strongly connect actions taken today with specific results you want.
More focused. Annual plans fail because too many objectives result in chaos and poor execution.
12 week plans pick 1–3 things with greatest impact, create energy and urgency to act.
Setting goals: start by identifying overall goals for 12 weeks that will define success of the 12 weeks and
represent intentional progress toward long term vision.
Break goal down to individual parts and create daily tactics for each part. Tactics are specific,
actionable and include due dates and assigned responsibilities.
Plan is structured so if the tactics are completed on time, the goals are achieved.

One week at a time

Consistent action on the critical tasks needed to reach your goal is the key to getting what you want in life.
The weekly plan then is simply a derivative of the 12 week plan—in essence a one-twelfth slice of the 12
week plan.
Spend the first 15 or 20 minutes at the beginning of each week to review your progress from the past week
and plan the upcoming one. In addition, the first five minutes of each day should be spent reviewing your
weekly plan to plan that day’s activities.

Confronting the truth

Measurement builds self-esteem and confidence because it documents progress and achievement.
Effective measurement:
demands our attention and causes us to respond more immediately, increasing the likelihood of
success.
captures both lead and lag indicators. Lag indicators represent the end results, lead indicators are
the activities that produce the results.
Most important: an execution measure indicates whether you did the things you said were most important
to achieving your goals.
If you are not hitting your goal, you need to know whether it is due to a flaw in plan content or in execution.
Most often plans fail due to execution failure, but people assume it was a bad plan and change the plan,
which wasn’t the problem.
Weekly scorecard: evaluate percentage of tactics completed each week to score execution. You measure
 execution, not results.
Productive tension: discomfort felt when plan forces you to confront your lack of execution. To resolve
the tension, people either stop using the system or use it as a catalyst for change. The key is to increase
your execution. It won’t start perfect; even 65% might be reasonable if you stick with it.

Intentionality
How we spend our priceless time determines our success. Structuring time helps you waste less of it and
set your goals for the day instead of letting the day direct you.
Blocking your time: instead of trying to eliminate interruptions, block out regular time each week dedicated
to strategically important tasks (“performance time”).
Strategic blocks: 3 uninterrupted hours one or more times a week to focus 100% on preplanned
tasks; concentrate intellect and creativity to produce breakthrough results.
Buffer blocks: 30–60 minutes once or twice a day to deal with unplanned, low value activities like
email and chatting. Grouping these together increases efficiency dealing with them and gives you
greater control over the rest of the day.
Breakout blocks: 3+ hours during business hours, starting once a month, spent away from work on
things other than work to refresh your mind. Getting caught up in working longer and harder leads to
performance plateaus, killed energy and enthusiasm.
The more you can create routine in each day and week, the more effective you will execute.
Create ideal week on paper with all tasks prioritized. If you can’t make it work on paper, it will never work in
reality. Schedule most important activities during your prime time.

Accountability as ownership
Accountability is not consequences, but ownership. It is a character trait, a life stance, a willingness to own
your actions and results regardless of the circumstances.
All of us have a tendency to look outside of ourselves for things to change and improve. It’s easy to
become a victim of outside circumstances, spending time and energy hoping and imagining what our lives
would be like if the world around us were different, believing that these are the keys to improving our
results. The truth is you don’t control any of these things. The only things you control are your thinking and
your actions. But those are enough if (and it’s a big if) you are willing to own them.

Interest versus commitment

We all know intuitively that an ability to keep commitments is fundamental to effective execution and high
performance, but many of us fall short of our commitments on a regular basis. It seems that when things
 get difficult, we find reasons why we can’t keep our promises and we shift our focus to other activities.
Often our interest wanes when things get tough. It is important to understand that there is a difference
between interest and commitment: When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when
circumstances permit, but when you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.
Keys to successful commitments:
1. Strong desire: clear and personally compelling reason meaningful enough to get you through the
hard times.
2. Keystone actions: many activities might help with your goal, but usually there are one or two key
actions that ultimately produce the result. Focus on those.
3. Count the costs: identify benefits and costs before you commit so you can consciously choose
whether you will pay that price. Then later when you face those costs, you can recognize you
anticipated them and decided reaching your goal is worth it.
4. Act on commitments, not feelings: Learn to act on your commitments or you won’t build any
momentum and will get stuck continually restarting or giving up. Learning to do the things you need
to do, regardless of how you feel, is a core discipline for success.
With the 12 Week Year you are not asked to make lifetime or even annual commitments, but rather 12 week
commitments. It is much more feasible to establish and keep a commitment for 12 weeks than to keep it
for 12 months. At the end of the 12 weeks, you reassess your commitments and begin again.

Greatness in the moment

In our efforts to not miss anything, we unwittingly miss everything. Our attention is spread over various
subjects and conversations, and when we strive to do so much, we actually apply very little of ourselves to
any individual activity. We feel stressed out, burned out, exhausted, frustrated, and disconnected. In the
end, this approach practically guarantees that we will be mediocre by virtue of the fact that nothing gets our
full attention, not the important projects, not the important conversations, and not the important people.
You can’t change the past or act in the future. The current moment—the eternal right now—is all you have.
Right now, you can affect what happens to you for the rest of your life. The future is created now, our
dreams are achieved in the moment.
Results are not the attainment of greatness, but simply confirmation of it. You become great long before
the results show it. It happens in an instant, the moment you choose to do the things you need to do to be
great.

Intentional imbalance
Life balance is achieved when you are purposeful about how and where you spend your time, energy, and
effort. At different times in your life you will choose to focus on one area over another, and that’s perfectly
fine, provided it’s intentional. Life has different seasons, each with its own set of challenges and blessings.
To decide what to focus on, start with your vision, then rate yourself in the seven areas of life balance
 (spiritual, spouse/partner, family, community, physical, personal, and business).

Part II: Putting it all together

The execution system

Three principles
Accountability: What more can I do to get the result?
Commitment: Accountability projected into the future; ownership of a future action or result.
Greatness in the moment: Greatness happens the moment you choose to do the things you need to
do to be great, and each moment you continue to choose to do those things.
Five disciplines
Vision: compelling picture of future; business vision aligns with and enables personal vision,
ensuring powerful emotional connection that promotes sustained commitment.
Planning: clarifies and focuses on top priorities and needed actions.
Process control: tools and events that align daily actions with critical actions of the plan, ensuring
more of your time spent on right actives.
Measurement: anchor of reality, combines lead and lag indicators.
Time use: Use time with clear intention or you won’t be in control of your time, and therefore you
won’t be in control of your results.

The emotional cycle of change

It’s helpful to understand the process we go through emotionally when faced with change, so we won’t be
derailed by it.
1. Uninformed optimism: Fun, see all the benefits but haven’t yet experienced any costs.
2. Informed pessimism: shift to negative state where benefits don’t seem as real or important and the
costs of change are apparent. You start to look for reasons to abandon the effort.
3. Valley of despair: All of the pain of change is felt and it seems easy to go back to the old way. You
want to quit because you’ll go back to the fun first stage. This is where having a compelling vision is
critical. Wanting passionately to reach your vision, combined with commitment and the tools and
events of process control, is the way through the valley to the next stage of change.
4. Informed optimism: Likelihood of success is much higher; benefits of your actions are starting to
bear fruit and the costs of change are lessened because your new thoughts and actions are
becoming more routine.
5. Success and fulfillment: Benefits of your new behaviors are fully experienced and the costs of
 change are virtually gone. The actions, which at the beginning were difficult and uncomfortable, have
now become routine. Every time you complete the cycle, you build not only your capacity, but also
your confidence.

Establish your vision

The most powerful visions address and align your personal aspirations with your professional dreams. In
the end, your professional vision often funds and enables your personal vision. For your vision to help you
to push through the discomfort of change, you must be clear on what it is you want to create in life. Most
people focus primarily on their business or career, but your business is just part of your life, and it is
actually your life vision that gives traction and relevance to your business.
The best visions are big ones. In our experience, nothing great is ever accomplished without first being
preceded by a big vision. All of the great accomplishments of mankind from medicine to technology to
space travel to the World Wide Web were first envisioned and then created. All of your big personal
accomplishments must also be preceded by big visions. So we challenge you to dream big and imagine true
greatness for yourself. Your vision should be big enough that it makes you feel at least a little bit
uncomfortable.
Vision will seem impossible. If it were so easy, you would have done it already. Don’t yet ask “How?” but
ask “What if?”. What would be different for you, your family, your friends, your team, your clients, and your
community? By asking “What if ?”, you give yourself permission to entertain the possibility and begin to
connect with the benefits. As you do this, the desire intensifies and the door on your future cracks open
just a fraction, but enough so you automatically begin to shift from impossible to possible thinking. Once
you see your vision as possible, then you begin the shift from possible to the next level: probable. You
make this shift by asking the question that we avoided earlier: “How might I?”. The final shift needed in your
thinking to create an effective vision is to move from probable to given. This shift happens naturally as you
begin to implement the planned actions.
Three time horizons to focus on
Long term aspirations: Think about all of the things that you want to have, do, and be in your life.
What is most important to you physically, spiritually, mentally, relationally, financially, professionally,
and personally? How much time freedom do you want? What income do you desire?
Three year vision: Based on your long-term vision, what do you want to create over the next three
years? Describe in as much detail as possible what a great personal and professional life would
look like three years from today. The more specific you are at this stage, the easier it will be to
create your 12 week goals and your plan.
Vision is the power source of high performance, the all-important why. It gives power to conquer fears,
take bold consistent action, and live a life of significance. The shift in thinking from seeing vision as fluff to
seeing it as fundamental will pay huge dividends. When you understand the true power of vision, you will
want to spend more time connecting with your own vision to begin to free yourself from the self-imposed
limitations that have held you back.
Questions that uncover the degree of ownership
Why are the elements of your vision important to you?
 What will you be able to do if you reach your vision that you cannot do now?
What will be different for you, your family, your friends, your peers, your clients, your community, if
you reach that goal?
Are you willing to commit to the actions needed to reach your vision?
Who have you shared your vision with?
How often have you looked at your vision since you wrote it?
What actions do you have to take to make progress on your vision and reach your 12 week goal?
What risks or barriers exist that may get in the way of you reaching your vision and goals?
How can I best support and help you achieve your goals and vision?
Common pitfalls
You don’t take the power of vision seriously.
The vision isn’t meaningful to you.
Your vision is too small.
You don’t connect your vision to your daily actions.
Success tips
Share it with others.
Stay in touch with your vision.
Live with intention.

Develop your 12 week plan

Effective plan structure: A good plan starts with a good goal. If your goal is not specific or measurable,
the plan that you write will also be vague. The more specific and measurable your 12 week goals, the easier
it will be to write a solid 12 week plan.
Criteria 1: Make them specific and measurable. For each goal and/or tactic, be sure to quantify
and qualify what success looks like.
Criteria 2: State them positively. Rather than focusing on a 2 percent error rate, you would target a
98 percent accuracy rate.
Criteria 3: Ensure they are a realistic stretch. If you can accomplish the goal without doing
anything differently, then you probably need to stretch more. If it is absolutely impossible, then
factor it back a little.
Criteria 4: Assign accountability. This applies to people who are executing as part of a team (if
you’re on your own, the accountability is all yours).
Criteria 5: Be time-bound. Make sure to include a date by which the goal is to be reached, or the
tactic is to be executed.
Write your 12 week goals (not too many), and write answers to: Why is your 12 week goal important to
you? If you hit it, what will be different?
Write your 12 week plan, the roadmap to reach your goals. Don’t overanalyze the content of your plan.
Don’t be concerned that your plan isn’t perfect—there are no perfect plans. Once you have a good plan,
your execution of the tactics will help you to learn what works best so you can refine your plan from there.
Ask yourself: What actions will you struggle with? What will you do to overcome those struggles?
 Common pitfalls
Your 12 week plan does not align with your long-term vision.
You aren’t staying focused.
You don’t make the tough choices.
You don’t keep it simple.
You don’t make it meaningful.
Success tips
Share it with others.

Installing process control

If you are going to achieve what you are capable of, you can’t leave it up to willpower alone. Process
control uses tools and events to create support structures that can augment, and in some cases take the
place of, willpower.
Weekly plans: not a glorified to-do list; rather, it reflects the critical strategic activity that needs to take
place that week in order to achieve your goals. It is not something that you create each week based on
what happens to be urgent at the time. On the contrary, the weekly plan is populated with the tactics from
the 12 week plan that are due that particular week. This process ensures that the weekly plan contains only
those actions that are strategic and critical in nature. Because the weekly plan is driven by the 12 week plan,
which is connected to your long-term vision, you can be confident that the actions it contains are, by
default, the most important actions of the week. If these tactics get done, you’ve had a great week; if not,
you’ve lost a week. Having this level of clarity each week is not only powerful, it’s life changing.
Peer support: The WAM (weekly accountability meeting) is a critical element of process control. It’s a
short meeting that is typically held on Monday morning after everyone has had a chance to plan their week
and it lasts approximately 15 to 30 minutes. This is not a punitive session where we try to hold others
accountable and dole out negative consequences or tongue lashing for those who are faltering. The WAM
is used to confront breakdowns, recognize progress, create focus, and encourage action.
Individual report out: Each member states how they are tracking against their goals and how well
they executed. Here are four areas to focus on:
Your results for the 12 Week Year to date.
Your weekly execution score.
Intentions for the coming week.
Feedback and suggestions from the group.
Successful techniques: As a group, discuss what’s been working well and how to incorporate these
techniques into one another’s plan.
Encouragement
The weekly routine
Step 1: Score your week
Step 2: Plan your week
Step 3: Participate in a WAM
Keeping score
In the best measurement systems, there are lead indicators and lag indicators.
Lag indicators are the end results, and your 12 week goals are the ultimate lagging indicators. If you
are tracking progress towards your goals, then you are tracking lag indicators.
Lead indicators are the things that happen early in the execution process. They are the things that
drive the lags. Most people are pretty good at tracking the lag indicators, but the opportunity for
growth is usually the greatest with the lead indicators. A good lead measure might be the number of
calories that you eat daily or weekly. Another might be the number of workouts you have each week,
such as miles jogged. In general, the more frequent a measure is, the more useful it is.
Write the lead and lag indicators for each of your 12 week goals.
The thinking shift is twofold. First, is the shift to embrace measurement and not to shy away from it, as is
so often the case. The second thinking shift is to focus more on the actions than the results. Remember,
you have greater control over your actions than you do your outcomes. Your outcomes are driven by your
actions.

Take back control of your day

Study found after being distracted from serious mental tasks by things like emails or instant messages, the
typical Microsoft worker took an average of 15 minutes to get back on their original task. Another
concluded 28 percent of the average professional’s time in a day was spent on interruptions and
associated recovery time! That’s about 11 distracted hours in a 40-hour week!
Spending leisure time and doing comfortable tasks is undoubtedly healthy in moderation, but when we
consistently choose comfortable activity, we are dooming ourselves to lives lived far short of our
capabilities. To become great, you must choose to allocate your time to your greatest opportunities. You
will have to choose to spend time on the difficult things that create your biggest payoffs. To be great you
will need to live with intention. That will require you to be clear on what matters most, and then to have the
courage to say no to things that distract you. You will need to guard your time intensely, delegating or
eliminating everything possible that is not one of your strengths or does not help you advance your goals.
Many people spend significant amounts of time and energy attempting to eliminate their weaknesses. In
general, striving to reduce the weaknesses that limit your results is worthwhile and noble. Everyone has
weaknesses that they need to shore up to be successful; however, a weakness will rarely become a
strength. If you are not in a role that plays to or magnifies your strengths, you are probably in the wrong
spot.
Truly outstanding performers have gone a step further and work to what we call their unique capability.
Unique capabilities are one or two things you do absolutely the best. They also tend to be the things that
you enjoy doing. Whether you know it or not, your unique capabilities are responsible for your greatest
successes and joys throughout your life.
To be your best, you must intentionally align your time and activities with your strengths and your unique
capabilities.
 You won’t reach a breakthrough if you are not willing to change how you currently allocate your time. To
get different results, you will have to do things differently and do different things.
Model work week: Create a picture of a highly productive week using time blocks for your critical activities.
The intent is to first design a week that allows you to be your most productive, and then to begin to adjust
your actual schedule to align with your model week.
Strategic block sample agenda:
Reconnect with your vision: 5-10 minutes. Review your vision and assess your progress.
12 week review: 10-15 minutes. Review your metrics. Look at your results against your goals.
Inspect your weekly execution score and your lead and lag indicators. Are you executing at a high
level and is it producing? If not, what can you do this week to improve?
Assess performance breakdowns: 10-20 minutes. Is there a breakdown? If so, what is the root
cause? Do you need to adjust your plan, or just execute better?
Work on plan tactics: 2–2.5 hours. Use this time to complete tactics from your 12 week plan.
Other examples: read book, online course, plan for the next 12 week year (in week 12 or 13)
Buffer block sample agenda:
Review and respond to email.
Listen to voicemail and respond as needed.
Make necessary outbound calls.
Follow up on to-do list items.
Take quick meetings with staff to answer questions or to plan follow-up.
Organize and file work in process and completed items.
Identify any new to-do list items and record.

Taking ownership
Four things you can do to foster greater accountability and get more of what you want in life:
1. Resolve never to be the victim again. You cannot achieve a life of significance if you continue to give
your power away. Notice when you are making excuses and settling for mediocrity. Focus on the
things you can control. Accountability is first a mind-set, then an action. To live your vision, take
ownership of your thinking, actions, and results.
2. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Feeling sorry for yourself produces nothing but self-pity and, if you do
enough of it, depression. It’s okay to be disappointed and sad when things don’t go your way, but
don’t let that linger and turn into self-pity. Learn to manage your thinking and your attitude.
3. Be willing to take different actions. If you want different results, then you need to be willing to do
things differently and do different things. If you want something you don’t currently have, you need
to do something you’re not currently doing. Taking action will not only change your outcomes; it will
also change your attitude. I’ve found that when I’m feeling discouraged, one of the quickest ways to
change my outlook is by taking action.
4. Associate with “Accountables.” Who you associate with matters. Stay away from victims and
excuse makers. Treat that mind-set like a deadly, contagious disease. Nurture relationships with
people who are accountable. If you have important people in your life that are excuse makers, be a
 positive influence; have them read this and model accountability.
Write actions you will take to foster greater accountability.

12 week commitments
Skipped this chapter for now.

Your first 12 weeks

Skipped this chapter for now.