Take it one week at a time. To guide you on your journey to completing your tactics and meeting your goals, you’ll need weekly plans. Your weekly plan encompasses your strategies and priorities, your long-term and short-term tasks, and your commitments in the context of time. It helps you focus on the elements of your plan that must happen each week to keep you on track with your 12 Week Year goals. Your goals in turn keep you on track with your vision. Everything is powerfully aligned.
“Start each day with your weekly plan,” advises Moran. “Check in with it several times throughout the day. If you’ve scheduled a tactic to be completed that day, don’t go home until it is done. This ensures that the critically important tasks, your plan tactics, are completed each week.”
Keep track of your efforts, not your results. You’ve probably heard or read the mantra “What gets measured gets done.” It’s true: Measurement drives the execution process. After all, can you imagine the CEO of a large corporation not knowing the numbers? As the CEO of your own life and business, you need to know your numbers. But don’t measure your results (how many pounds you lost or how much commission you earned)—instead, measure your level of execution (the extent to which you stuck to your diet and exercise plan and the number of sales calls you made).
“You have greater control over your actions than your results, and your results are created by your actions,” explains Moran. “To measure your execution, you need to know to what degree you followed through on each week’s tactics. This allows you to pinpoint breakdowns and respond quickly. Unlike results, which can lag weeks, months, and in some cases years behind your actions, an execution measure provides more immediate feedback, which allows you to make game-time adjustments much faster.”
Block your time. The 12 Week Year is designed to help you spend your time with more intention. That said, many of us engage each day on its own terms. In other words, we satisfy the various demands of the day as they are presented, spending whatever time is needed to respond without giving much thought as to the relative value of the activity. Moran says you can regain control of your day through time blocking.
“Basically, you block your days into three kinds of blocks—strategic blocks, buffer blocks, and breakout blocks,” he explains. “A strategic block is uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week. During this block you accept no phone calls, no faxes, no emails, no visitors, no anything: You do only the activities on your plan. Buffer blocks are designed to deal with all of the unplanned and low-value activities—like most email and voicemail—that arise throughout a typical day. Breakout blocks provide free time for you to use to rest and rejuvenate.”
Finally, says Moran, embracing the 12 Week Year will help you rethink your multitasking ways. If you’re accustomed to sending emails during meetings, juggling texting conversations, and rushing from one place to the next, you’ll be shocked by how much getting focused on what matters most will change your life.
“Most people look back and realize that with all their efforts to not miss anything, they were missing everything,” says Moran. “They see that nothing was getting their full attention, not the important projects, not the important conversations, and not the important people.
“We must all remember that the current moment—the eternal right now—is all we have,” he adds. “The future is created now; our dreams are achieved in the moment. Consider Olympic great Michael Phelps: He didn’t achieve greatness when he won the 18th gold medal or when he won his first. He achieved greatness the moment he chose to put the effort into his training. Results are not the attainment of greatness, but simply confirmation of it. That’s why the 12 Week Year is so pivotal. It provides a structure that helps you do the things you need to do to be great.”
For more information visit www.12weekyear.com.
