How ‘The 12 Week Year’ Strategy Can Increase Productivity

Here’s a fantastic book you should read immediately. It’s a called “The 12 Week Year” by Brian P. Moran. We were told about this gem by our business mentor Greg Atkins. We been having some fantastic results because we have been applying the simple ’12 week year’ strategies in our own lives and business.

The strategies in this book basically help you condense what you would do in 12 months into a 12 week period.

Applying “The 12 Week Year” Strategy

We have just started using it in our business seriously, we played around with it for the first month. Now have read this book twice each.  There is a stark difference in our focus from before reading the book and of how we achieve our goals.

The book basically takes you step by step how you set this thing up for yourself. And it’s very, very straightforward. It’s not a huge book. There’s a couple of hundred pages at the most. It’s a very, very quick read.

You could probably read it in an afternoon and evening if you got a couple of hours to spare. But the concepts we believe are really, really powerful.

The main concepts of ’12 Week Year’

Break Down 12 months into 12 weeks

Our main take away from reading this book is that it allows you to focus on a much shorter time scale. Which allows us to keep the momentum up, to keep the enthusiasm up, and  keep the targets in sight. We noe review things on a much more regular basis and break things down into weekly targets or even granular level break them down into daily targets.

All you’ve got to remember then in a normal year you’ve got 12 months, then your weeks and finally your days.

You’re breaking down what you would do in 12 months into 12 weeks. So every week counts as a month and every day counts as a week in the old type calendar. You’re not expected to do four times as much work. However, the productivity you get’ll from applying this, whetherin your business or your personal life, you’ll get a huge benefit from it.

Keep track, a record, and score yourselve

This is it allows you to be self-critical of how you’re going. After you’ve completed the task of the week, you review your task, and then see how well you’ve done by marking yourself. The book goes on to explain in great detail why people like successful athletes are so successful is they keep track, a record, and score themselves. Which we fail to do a lot of times in business.

Monitor things like Lag and Lead Indicators

A lag indicator would be, say, you’ve got a goal in 12 weeks to lose half a stone. That would be classed as a lag indicator because the actual thing will not be achieved until the 12 week period is elapsed.

A lead indicator is a much shorter time frame. It would be, say, on a weekly basis we are going to go to the gym three times and cut down my calorie intake to 1,500 calories or whatever it is. If you’re doing that on a regular basis for 12 weeks, then surely you’re going to lose weight and get closer to that target level. So it’s very, very clever.

We love the thing where you’re mark yourself for how you feel you’ve achieved. We started doing this. We’ve been doing it for about two weeks properly now. The first week we tried it and we was in my own marking quite subjective to how you mark things.

But we were achieving about 65% achievement of what we’ve set myself to do for the week. The author recommends to score about an 85% level, and that is why you really can achieve excellence.

You definitely need to read one of the best books we’ve read in a long time. We are applying it in our personal lives and to our business. We would highly recommend, you read the book as soon as possible and start applying these techniques.

Nicky and Dave