How to Use “The 12 Week Year” Principle to Accomplish your Goals in 2023

Photo by Kris on Unsplash

It’s already been about two weeks since the start of the new year. All through social media, I’ve been seeing vision boards, resolutions, and goals for 2023. It's wonderful that people take the time to outline the goals they aspire to accomplish before the end of the year.

I used to be one of those who judiciously outline and categorize my resolutions and goals for the year in detail. I’d create a Notion board with aesthetic pictures, fonts, and colours to make it more appealing to look at.

Unfortunately, at the end of the year, I’d end up not fulfilling up to half of the list I outlined. I thought it was just me losing momentum and interest in the things I wanted to achieve but it’s none of those.

It turns out that my approach to new year's resolutions and goal setting, in general, was myopic once I read a book that changed my perspective.

The title of this book is The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington. I came across the book on a YouTube channel in which the Youtuber talked about incorporating the principle to accomplish their personal and career goals.

From there I decided to read this 200-word book to find out more about the content.

The main principle of the book is to ditch yearlong resolutions and adopt the 12-week year method. Why take a long, unpredictable year to accomplish your goals when you can use 12 weeks to complete those goals and much more within a year? Every week counts, every day counts and every moment counts.

The 12-week year forces you to confront your lack of execution and narrow your focus to the week and more to the day when execution occurs. The idea here is that to effectively accomplish your goals, it must be a daily activity of executing those goals over 12 months.

A year is divided into 12 weeks which is 3 months, and you take those weeks as equivalent to a year. Like at the end of every year, every 12 weeks of execution, you take a break, celebrate, and reload for the next 12 weeks.

I like this goal planning more than the year-long one because it is more structured, gives room for predictability, and focuses on a few goals at a time instead of a whole list. Within the 12-Week Year, a year is 12 weeks, a month is a week, and a week is now a day.

At the time of reading this book in the summer of 2022, I started executing the principles of the book into my life and using it to get things done like learning French, working out daily, and writing 500 words daily for a review article.

At the end of the 12 weeks, I had accomplished about 70% from when I started, quite impressive for my first try.

The 12 Week Year builds on three principles: accountability, commitment, and greatness at the moment. The authors propose that commitment and accountability are synonymous as “commitment is accountability projected into the future.”

Greatness in the moment means that greatness is not achieved when a great result is reached, but when you choose to start the necessary to become great. Quite powerful words, right?

My top 3 quotes

Here I share my top three quotes from the book that I find resonate with me

• “Knowledge is only powerful if you use it if you act on it

• “Execution is the single greatest market differentiator”

• “It’s not what you know; it’s not even who you know; it’s what you implement that counts”

I recommend this book to everyone, especially the professionals, and career builders out there. The authors worked so hard to make this book as practical as they could and I believe that anyone can easily incorporate the principles of this book.

My hope is that you optimize your goals, get maximum returns, and accomplish more in a short time.

Carpe Diem.

Dee.