A New Approach to Annual Planning
A New Approach to Annual Planning
Using 12 week periods to yield more results
Hey friends 👋🏻
2020 has finally come to a close. It was an interesting year, to say the least.
And, this means it's time for annual planning and review. Personally, I've always had a terrible relationship with my annual goal setting. I always start off the year with these huge goals but then end up forgetting about them by the end of the first month. And for the longest time, I ended up being anti-annual planning.
Well... recently I stumbled upon a cool book called the 12 Week Year (12WY) which offers a new way of thinking about planning. The book goes on to mention how annual planning is flawed and that 52 weeks is too long a period for our minds to grasp. It leads to month after month of procrastination until the last couple of months (crunch time). Then we really turn on the jets and get to working super hard so we can redeem ourselves for our over unproductive year.
Instead of this, the 12WY proposes a 12 week period where you focus on 1-3 goals of your life and prioritize them over everything else. It's a large enough amount of time to get a load of stuff done, but not enough time to have more than a couple of bad weeks. This allows you to focus intensely on a couple of areas of your life over the course of a year period and make significant results during each 12WY.
I'm personally in the process of applying it to my life for the first time ever but the idea is relatively straightforward. If you want to try it out for yourself here's the gist:
Create a vision for accountability and direction
Choose 1-3 goals based on your vision
Determine the tactics (daily, weekly, ad hoc) that need to get done
Plan the tactics that need to get done each week
Take part in a weekly accountability meeting (WAM)
Grade your week based on how many tactics you were able to complete (ie. 67% or 4/6 tactics)
Repeat until the period is done
Hopefully, this helps and let me know if you end up trying the 12 week year out in your own life! For more info check out the book here or get some free resources on their website here.
🔖 Quote
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw
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▷▷ Mike Hanna
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