Turning Resolutions into Reality: A Deep Dive into the '12 Week Year'

What is the '12 Week Year'? How does it work? And does it work? I answer all these questions.

When I feel stuck, I turn to books.

Sometimes the books teach specific skills I could benefit from mastering, like marketing or sales—my bread and butter.

Other times, I pick up books that market themselves as the ultimate solution for stuck people: self improvement books.

I can't tell you how many self help books I've read over the years, but I binge them when life isn't heading the direction I want.

Experience has taught me that most books in the genre are trash. 99% of the books out there are filled with useless drivel. But that 1% can make an enormous difference. So I keep coming back to the genre.

I was binging on self help YouTube videos when I came across the audiobook for the ‘12 Week Year’. Since a couple of videos I watched were people reviewing their experience with the program, I was curious to see if I could glean any benefit from it.

The premise of the ‘12 Week Year’ is simple. Long term goals, like New Year’s Resolutions, are almost impossible to follow through on. The book claims that the main reason people don't follow through on their goals is that an entire year is too long to stay focused, maintain motivation, and avoid overwhelm. If you are going to achieve your yearly goals, it often comes from a huge push in the last three months when the pressure is higher.

Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, authors of the ‘12 Week Year’, argue that the best way to get around this issue is to set goals to be achieved in 12 weeks (3 months) that will help move you closer to the vision of where you’d like to be 1 year from now, 3 years from now, and 10-20 years from now.

The Process

Moran and Lennington insist the first step—defining your vision—is the most important step. Figuring out your vision will help you understand your “why”—the reason you are pursuing these goals in the first place. You want to envision your future 10-20 years from now, 3 years in the future, and a year from today. What does that look like for you?

This step was a breeze for me because I have a very clear vision of where I’d like to be in the near and distant future. In the near future, I’d like to become fluent in Italian and get a job. A long term goal is to make writing my career.

Having a clear vision of my future made the next step of coming up with 1-3 goals even easier. All I had to do was modify my wishes into SMART(ish) goals (SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). For example, for the goal to become fluent in Italian, I specified that I want to be able to understand at least 50% of the media I consume in Italian, be able to hold a basic conversation in the language, and be able to write short sentences to get my point across.

After creating specific goals, the next step is to figure out the daily and weekly tasks that make reaching the goal inevitable. Going back to the learning Italian example, I set daily learning tasks like “Practice Duolingo for 10 minutes” and larger weekly tasks, like “Record myself reading my Italian copy of Pride and Prejudice aloud every Tuesday”.

I used Notion to help me organize my day. I like that with Notion it’s very easy to rearrange things and organize things the way that makes sense to you. You’re definitely going to want to have all this written down somewhere that will be easy for you to refer back to.

Another tip is to figure out about how much time it will take you to complete a task and write that down as well. It makes planning your day much easier. Personally, I cannot work on a set schedule, I need a little more flexibility in what I do. By writing down how long it takes for me to complete a task, or writing down how long I want to work on a specific task, I can see in the moment, “Oh, I have 10 minutes of free time right now, that means I can work on my Duolingo but can’t dedicate this time to working on my Substack, which requires 25 minutes.”

Starting the Program

I took a couple of days to plan my 12 Week Year because I didn’t want to start in the middle of the week. I set three goals: a language goal, a goal for this publication, and a goal to get a job.

The day before before I planned to begin my 12 Week Year, I got a job!

That meant I could erase all the daily and weekly tasks related to getting a job, but it also meant I’d have less time to complete the rest of my tasks—and less energy, too. For a moment, I contemplated giving up on the 12 Week Year and trying again once my body has acclimated to the job, but almost as soon as that thought popped into my head, I dismissed it. I still want to be fluent in Italian, and I want to continue to grow this publication so that I can write full-time, and I don’t want to wait any longer to make my dreams a reality.

Week 1 Results

I've now been working on my 12 Week Year for a week and a half. I've managed to accomplish at least 95% of my daily and weekly tasks, meaning I'm on track—sort of.

At the end of each week, I review the efforts I made and make small course adjustments to ensure I'll hit my goal.

I realized during my review on Saturday that I needed to make a few adjustments to my daily and weekly schedule. One of the things I refined was my Italiano practice. I realized I was not retaining what I was learning and was struggling to speak and write the language. I took a few language-learning tips from a couple polyglots on YouTube, and altered my practice using their suggestions. So far, it seems to be helping.

I have been faithfully working on this publication all week. I have something exciting planned for this publication’s first year, and I’ve been working hard to set that up. My other efforts to grow this have had little effect, but I’m not discouraged.

My new job is more than 40 hours of work per week, so I’ve been pretty exhausted. I go to bed somewhat early so that I can wake up at the crack of dawn. I have about 2 hours after waking before I have to get ready for work, and I use that time to accomplish as much as I can. I’ve come to accept that I won’t be able to do anything after work because I’m too mentally drained to even watch TV.

Even so, I’m making lots of progress towards my goals, and I’m still able to do a decent job of taking care of myself.

Maintaining my health is a high priority for me. When I started this 12 Week Year, I worried that it was just another toxic productivity program that it would negatively impact my health. I’m happy to report that this has actually taken less energy and effort than I expected.

The key, I’ve found, is with the plan. Because I spend a few minutes going over my day in the morning, and because I already have my daily and weekly tasks written out, I don’t have to do much thinking about what to do next. Because I have a limited amount of time to finish my to-do list, I tend to stay focused on the task at hand. Sometimes I stay so focused that I finish all my tasks early and can relax, which amazes me.

Any Questions?

Is there anything you want to know about the ‘12 Week Year’, or about my experience with the ‘12 Week Year”? Let me know in the comments.