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By the end of January or February, they find they're a bit behind, but they tell themselves they'll make it up over the next few months with a few great days or a great week “when other things settle down,” but, this lack of urgency takes its toll. With no single day requiring any specific progress, they don't worry about getting anything done from day to day. This pattern continues for months, until at some point they look at the calendar and realize that the year is almost gone and there is no book in sight.
Annual thinking is poisonous to productivity. In focusing our attention at the annual level, annual plans rob us of the urgency that consistent productivity requires. This is a big reason, among others, that most New Year's resolutions aren't worth the cocktail napkins they're written on. Action does not take place annually, it takes place week to week, day by day, and most importantly, in the moment. Every block on your calendar that says “writing” counts. Writers, especially, must not fall prey to magical thinking that assumes things “will get done later.”
Annual thinking also prevents us from focusing on the actual steps we need to take to get things done. In order to accomplish a big goal, you actually need to accomplish a lot of smaller goals. When you plan to “write a book,” you're not actually planning to write a book. What you're really doing is committing to planning, plotting, taking notes, creating characters, doing research, thinking hard about what you're trying to say and to whom, and writing a lot of sentences that appear one after the other in a particular order. Any plan that takes your focus away from those small steps that make up the journey is a bad plan.
The Solution: Shorten the Year
Originally a technique designed to help athletes achieve peak performance, periodization is a strategy for improving focus, concentration, and urgency around a specific goal. For athletes, periodization is a regimen in which they concentrate their efforts on a single skill for a limited period – often between four and six weeks. After each period, the athlete moves to the next skill. In various forms, periodization is standard practice for athletes training at the highest levels.
The promise of periodization lies at the heart of the 12 Week Year approach. The same technique that delivered for Olympians can deliver powerful results for people in their professional and personal lives, with a few modifications. Unlike athletes who can dedicate their time to training, most professionals don't have the ability to take off months to train. Most people with “real jobs” must find ways to improve while still getting their work done every day. Periodization, as it has been modified for work, helps you define what's important for you to do right now, today, so that you can crank out those newsletters, finish that play, or write the next great American novel.
The 12 Week Year system provides a structure that will help you avoid the pitfalls of annual thinking and other common challenges writers face along their journey. Most of the time the problem is not a lack of ideas, but a lack of execution – of getting the writing done. It's not even that people don't know they face an execution problem, it's that they don't know how to confront and overcome the problem on a daily basis. That's where the power of writing with the 12 Week Year comes into play.
By redefining your year as a 12-week period, the 12 Week Year shifts your mindset, encouraging you to focus on just the most critical activities that determine success, and on the daily execution of those things to ensure you achieve your long-term goals. It also creates that sense of urgency that is lost in the annual planning process. With your deadline – the end of the “year” – in full view at all times, you will have greater clarity about what is important and the sense of urgency to motivate you to do what is necessary each day.
The urgency of a 12 Week Year is healthier and more productive than the urgency experienced at the end of a 12-month year. As urgency blooms in the fourth quarter of an annual execution cycle, there is often a mountain of results to deliver in less than 3 months. That kind of stress leads to bad decisions, unwise shortcuts, as well as damaged health and relationships. On the other hand, the productive tension that the 12 Week Year creates arises from the results needed in the present moment, without the unproductive dread of delivering past results that didn't happen earlier.
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE 12 WEEK YEAR
Most of the problems that writers face in getting their writing done stem from how they plan their writing and how they go about the practice of writing on a daily basis. In the simplest terms, the 12 Week Year helps writers by improving the planning and execution of their writing projects.
As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, the 12 Week Year consists of five core disciplines that you will use to plan, carry out, and manage your writing. Your ability to use the system to get your writing done, in turn, will depend on how fully you embrace the five elements of the writer's mindset. Three are core principles of the 12 Week Year: Accountability, Commitment, and Greatness in the Moment. Two more are specific to writing effectively: Resilience and Growth. In practice, you will make the 12 Week Year work by relying on these disciplines and the writer's mindset to complete a five-step process.
Putting the 12 Week System to Work
Step 1: Crafting Your Writing Vision
The first step of putting the 12 Week Year to work is to craft your writing vision. Why are you writing? How does writing positively affect other areas of your life? What do you need to write to get where you want to go? Starting here is critical because vision is the ultimate source of your energy. Writers who don't feel a deep-seated desire to write don't get very far. A compelling vision that highlights how your writing will help you pursue your life goals will help you keep going even on days when you don't feel like writing.
Step 2: Creating Your 12 Week Plan
The second step is to use your vision to identify your most important writing goals over the next twelve-week period. Given what you want to write to reach your ultimate goals, what do you need to be writing right now, in the next twelve weeks? Your 12 Week Plan should identify just a small number of your most important goals. For each, you will brainstorm the key tactics required to reach those goals. By keeping you focused on the immediate future, and on just the most important goals and tactics, the 12 Week Year will improve your focus, help you maintain motivation, and vastly improve your productivity.
Step 3: Aligning Your Time with the Work in Your Plan
With your 12 Week Plan in hand, the next step is to determine how much time you can devote to your writing each week, when you will write, and how to use that time effectively. Everything that you accomplish happens in the context of the time you allocate to it. For many writers, the time they have for writing is limited, maybe even stolen from other priorities. Let's face it, the rest of the world usually wants you to be doing just about anything but writing. To write productively you must defend your writing sessions and make the most of the time you have. If you are not intentional about your time, then you cannot be intentional about your results.
You will start by creating a weekly schedule – the Model Week – to ensure that you can write as regularly as possible. You'll also use a simple time blocking strategy to ensure that your writing sessions are productive and as free as possible from distraction. This process will help you determine whether you have enough available time in your week to carry out your plan. If not, you may decide to lighten your plan or to find ways to carve out more time in your week. If you can't make your schedule work on paper, you won't make it work in reality. Finally, your 12 Week Plan will help you make the most out of whatever time you have for writing by making sure that you are as prepared as possible for every writing session.