Must a year last 52 weeks?

New Year is an arbitrary marker for reviewing resolutions and goals for the next 12 months for business and personal life. But what if we switched this to a different time period — breaking up the year into quarters instead? Might that be just a little bit more manageable? A year is just a little too “big” to focus on properly. After the initial surge of enthusiasm in January, it’s easy to delay things until summer / autumn and lose your focus. I appreciate if you’re in farming “4 seasons = one year” makes sense, but from a personal perspective there’s a lot going for reducing this to manageable chunks of 12 weeks.

The next 12 weeks:

If you haven’t considered and planned for your goals for the next year, then just consider the next 12 weeks.

• Where is the most tension at the moment? What are you worrying about most now and feel the need to change?
• Just pick two or three goals. Not huge goals but reasonable goals. No long list to last you 12 months. You can’t change everything at once. The reason why many goals are not met is because they are not realistic.
• Take each goal and break it down into specific actionable steps that move you towards that goal.
• Break these steps down further — what must you do each day to work towards completing these steps? It’s the daily actions that lead to the big wins.
• Start each week by reviewing this list and writing each action in your diary. No longer is it “sometime”, it’s “this Wednesday”.
• At the end of each week review to see if you’re still on track. If not, why not? Make changes to your schedule to get you back on track.

“If you want to know what your future holds, look at your actions; they are the best predictor of your future.”

The WHY factor:

To get the 12 week year to work well you need to really believe in what you’re doing. If you’re doing a task and you’re not enthused ask yourself “Why am I doing this?”. In fact ignore the first answer you gave and ask yourself again, until you get to the real reason WHY. Taiichi Ohno from Toyota originally introduced “The 5 Whys Technique” back in 2006 to help explore problems that were occurring in the manufacturing process and find the root cause:

1. ”Why did the robot stop?” The circuit has overloaded, causing a fuse to blow.
2. ”Why is the circuit overloaded?” There was insufficient lubrication on the bearings, so they locked up.
3. ”Why was there insufficient lubrication on the bearings?” The oil pump on the robot is not circulating sufficient oil.
4. ”Why is the pump not circulating sufficient oil?” The pump intake is clogged with metal shavings.
5. ”Why is the intake clogged with metal shavings?” Because there is no filter on the pump.

This is great business tool for analysing why problems occurred but it’s also great to get to the overriding reason for why you need to do something. Having this reason makes the task more meaningful and increases your motivation for doing it and therefore your likelihood for success.

A few extra things you can do to help you get there

So you have chosen a couple of goals, broken them down into achievable steps, found your “why”, and scheduled required tasks in your diary. You’re feeling super motivated — a recipe for total success, surely? Well yes…and no….

• Track your actions — make sure you’re on schedule. If not ask why (quite a few times!) and amend accordingly.
• Focus on your behaviour needed to get there and not the outcome.
• Tell others about your goals — although it might make you feel a little vulnerable it really helps to make yourself accountable.

“Accountability separates the wishers in life from the action-takers that care enough about their future to account for their daily actions”. John Di Lemme

How to start

There are various tools out there to help you. A simple diary or wall planner would work as would a spreadsheet, however if you’d like more structure and prompts there are various paper planners. One of the best planners I’ve found for the 12 week year is from the BestSelf company. They offer a free downloadable 13 week PDF so maybe worth looking at to see if you like the format. It is also available on Amazon. Alternatively you can set tasks up within a todo app such as Todoist — takes a little more effort to set up but so long as you enter in deadlines it has the advantage of automatically reminding you what to do and when.

If you have found this useful then an interesting book to read for further information is “The 12 week year: Get more done in 12 weeks than others do in 12 months” by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington which goes into great depth on how to make this work for you.