”The 12 Week Year” is a productivity book. The main sales pitch of the book is similar to what GCPGrey’s “Themes” - that you should organize your life around 12 week “sprints” (to borrow an Agile term). To do quarterly Periodic Reviews. The method really leans into SMART Goals and recommends the use of Time Blocking.
Discard annualized thinking - Brian P Moran
This is basically a slice of the Antifragile Planning Method.
Why 12 Weeks
The idea is that 12 weeks is long enough to do something significant, but short enough to maintain a sense of urgency. It also gives you a chance to start again relatively quickly if you end up crapping out on a set of goals. It shortens the horizon of your predictions when making plans, making your predictions about the future less likely to accumulate differences to the point where your plan no longer makes sense.
This particular methodology suggests forming weekly KPIs to keep yourself accountable and motivated. It made me realized the practice of pairing leading & lagging indicators is good because Leading indicators measure strategy adherence and lagging indicators measure strategy effectiveness.
Method
From the guide.
Aspirational Vision
Do a dream boarding session. Think about the 5, 10, 15 year horizons. Think about:
- What you want to have
- What you want to do
- Who you want to be The goal here is to dream big. Make it something you really want. Don’t feel hemmed in by where you are today. This is the long-term.
36-month Vision
Back off from the long term and into the more mid-term 4 - Three-to-Five Year Goal. This should take into consideration more where you already are, and provide realistic targets. This is a refinement of the above that’s a bit more specific.
12 Week Plan
Weekly Plan
Actually turn those bullets into checkboxes and that’s pretty much your weekly scorecard, too.
Time Blocking
The 12 Week Year dines out on the concept of Time Blocking. In particular they suggest 3 kind of time blocks:
- Strategy Block - to work only tasks in the weekly plan
- Buffer Block - to work only on admin stuff (e.g. email)
- Breakout Block - to basically not work, sus.
Source
- GCPGrey’s Seasonal “Themes”
- This dude’s review of a book by the same name
- The 12 Week Year
- The official 12 Week Year training guide course materials