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What is The 12 Week Year?
The 12 Week Year is a book written by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington. I’m going to share with you what I took from the book and how I saw concepts as a person with ADHD and an ADHD Coach.
If you click the image of the book, it will take you to Amazon, where you can find the way you like to consume books. It's not an affiliate link. You can even listen to a sample of the book there.
If I don’t get something exactly right according to your perception of the book, feel free to let me know. I’m always willing to take that into consideration, but just know the way I understood, and I am implementing it is working for my brain like nothing ever before!
What you do is take 12 weeks and plan them as though they are a year.
That would look like week 1 being month one and so on. Imagine I gave you a task and said you had a month to do it. Would you get started soon? Not likely. Now I’m going to take that same task and give you just one week to do it. How soon would you start? Sooner than the month, right?
This program gives our brain the urgency it needs.
I know I hear you. Even if it was 7 days, I would still procrastinate. It gets better. Once you have made your plan, you can focus on just one day. If planning is not your forte, it’s okay. It’s really made simple for you. The truth is, we know the things we need to do to get what we want. We just aren’t often sure how to make ourselves do them.
Before anything else, the authors ask us to write a vision for what we want.
You really want to pick something they call a Keystone goal. If you don’t know what a keystone is, it’s the stone that goes in the middle of an arch. Being there it helps the other stones stay in place. What is that thing in your life that if you moved forward in that area, all the other areas of your life would be helped?
Suggestions they made off the top of my head were:
Health & Fitness
Relationships
Spirituality
Financial
Spiritual
Business
Another I added was Hobbies, just because I have several I enjoy but don’t take the time I would like to for.
What this system helps us do is take a goal and narrow it down to daily actions.
I find myself almost needing to forget this is a 12-week process. If I just focus on today and getting those tasks done, and it makes everything seem so much more possible. As I write this, I am just about to finish Week 2.
It’s really hard to believe how time is flying. Part of the process is to score yourself daily and weekly. You don’t have to be perfect to accomplish what you want and have real wins here. I have don’t more toward my Emotional & Physical Health in two weeks than I have done in two months, for sure.
I find this process makes me more consistent and more focused than ever before.
I created a Trello board for The 12 Week Year that you can get here:
It’s free to use. I find it extremely useful to refer to several times a day as a reminder of what my daily tasks are toward my goal. It you find yourself forgetting to use tools like this while working on your goal keep in mind it could be that your vision is not compelling enough.
Make it so compelling you can’t help but think of it several times a day!
What is great is you always have your phone with you. You can pin the Trello board right to the homescreen of your phone. Click and see where you are at the for the day. Like I just did!
I will be making a YouTube video about this process step by step if you would like to check out my channel here:
Subscribe & hit the bell so you are notified when that comes out. There I would share my screen and show you how to set up you 12 Week Year no matter what your goal.
This is a highly actionable book. They aren’t discussing a theory here, but a plan to put into practice. I read it in two days and put it into action on the third. You can do the same.
I will keep you posted on my progress with The 12 Week Year on YouTube & Instagram especially.
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