#19: How To Get More Done In 12 Weeks Than Most People Can In 12 Months

Welcome to The Growth Booth, Episode 19. Now, one of the most common questions that I get asked is how do you get so much done? What's the secret to being able to really move the needle with projects and not just that, but how do you manage multiple projects all at the same time? How do you manage a team all around the world? What's the secret?

In this episode today we're going to be sharing exactly what that secret is. Just to whet your appetite a little bit, if you'd like to get more done in the next 12-weeks than most people get done in twelve months, then you're going to love what we've got for you here today because that is exactly what you're going to learn.

In fact, I'm joined by someone who I admire a lot. It's someone who has helped me a lot in my business, mainly through his book called Twelve-Week Year. If you want to find out more about this, I'll say that you can go to 12weekyear.com. We will share that link with the show notes over at the Growthbooth.com, Episode 19. This is the planning process that I've been using since around about 2015. It's based on a book with the same name, 12-Week Year, which was written by Brian P. Moran, who is on the call with me here today.

BRIAN

Yeah. Happy to be here. Glad it worked out.

AIDAN

Brian, I think for me personally, it's a win just to be able to get you here because I know how much you value your time and how much you protect your time, so thanks for tuning in here.

We were actually booked to meet in person, and I had Brian all scheduled to come to an event that we were running in March 2020 in Florida, and then that was eliminated because of the darn pandemic. This, I guess you could say, is the next best thing, and it's been a couple of years making there.

I want to dive right in. For someone who doesn't know what the 12- Week Year is, can you give the 10,000-foot overview of the methodology and why it's important?

BRIAN

Yeah, a little bit.

The 12-Week Year, it's a system to execute more effectively. What Michael the co-author and my business partner realized years ago, it's people have all kinds of great ideas. They're connected, they've got resources, and yet they're chasing these new ideas, and withstanding between where they're currently at and where they want to be or what they're capable of is not that they're missing some idea or some lack of knowledge. It's all around the execution.

And so the 12-Week Year is the execution system that just helps you implement more consistently. I would argue that it's not enough to know, it's not enough to have great ideas, it's not enough to be all connected, and that the marketplace just rewards those ideas that could implement it. The 12-Week Year is that system.

AIDAN

You know, what I found really wonderful about it, and I think this was a bit of a when the penny dropped for me was that the 12-Week Year enabled me to get alignment between goals that I have a long way in the future and what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis, those teeny tiny tasks that I wake up in the morning and do. I think that was a big one for me.

Now, obviously, there are lots of different time management systems out there, lots of different productivity systems, and so on and so forth. Is there something that you think makes 12-Week Year different from perhaps how other people typically or traditionally have approached this idea of time management and productivity?

BRIAN

Yeah. There are a number of things that make it different. It really is beyond time management. It's a goal achievement system, a lot of goal-setting systems. There's a goal achievement system, and it works whether you're talking about a personal goal or you're trying to build your business, or whether you're on a team or you're an individual. But one of the keys to it is the 12-Week Year time frame.

Our clients operate in the context of every 12 weeks as a year, and that came from an athletic training process called periodization. We looked at that. It's been used for decades in sports and has a huge effect on athletes' ability to perform and take it to a whole another level.

Michael and I looked at that and we borrowed some of the tenants of that. Our clients operate in the context of every 12 weeks out of the year because the annual cycle is just too long a time frame. It's too easy to put things off, even if it's quarterly, right. A quarter is one four of a whole. It's that mindset that says, "I've got plenty of time to get this stuff done," that is really keeping people from accomplishing more. The 12-Week Year takes that unproductive mindset and literally blows it up, where if 12 week sets the year right, there's a sense of healthy urgency to act today and not put it off.

AIDAN

I think a lot of things that I had read and sort of planning processes even that I'd studied prior to reading 12-Week Year was built around you're going to build a business plan or some kind of a plan, and it's almost like a New Year's resolution and it's going to last twelve months.

For me, that whole idea of 12 weeks meant that there just was no time for procrastination. It was something that had to be done right now, otherwise that there was no time to lose.

Why 12 weeks? Why not something like six weeks? Is that something that you explored?

BRIAN

Yeah, we did. Twelve weeks seems to be the sweet spot where it's a long enough period of time to make really significant progress, more than you can even imagine, and yet is near enough where you don't lose that healthy sense of urgency. That said, we've had some 12-Week Years where we took part of it and focused on one goal and part of it and focused on another. It's really flexible in that way as well. But anything beyond 12 weeks is just too long a time frame. It's just too easy to put things off again. You might hit the goal, but you leave all this capacity on the table. That's the difference between where people are performing what they're capable of.

It's not about working longer or harder. The 12-Week Year isn't about taking everything you do in twelve months and cramming it into 12 weeks, but it's working differently and it's more consistent with the things that really move the needle.

AIDAN

I think there are a lot of things that you cover in the book, which, by the way, I recommend everyone go and pick up. It's an absolute steal on Amazon. You can pick it up in different formats, in fact. But I think there are a lot of things that you build in there, like this process of eliminating the fluff or eliminating the things that are not mission-critical to getting to your goal.

I mean, that alone is going to help people focus and get them moving along that path of getting things happening. I know when I was thinking back to when I started using the system and I had a look and I found my Amazon receipt when I bought the book. I think it was in 2014, or 2015. Anyway, it was a while ago and I had a baby on the way. I had multiple different businesses that were growing quickly. I had lots of moving parts, and I had this energy where I was able to sort of burn the candle at both ends, but that kind of energy is not sustainable. I think one of the big things that 12-Week Year got me doing was focusing on maybe fewer objectives, but certainly really having a new value of the time that I had available and what I could spend it on.

One of the questions I wanted to ask you personally here is how many goals or objectives can you build? How many different areas of your life can you build into a 12-Week Year at one time before you think it's too much?

BRIAN

Yeah, it's a good question. The challenge is every time you add one more thing, the probability of being great at any of it diminishes significantly. It's different by individual. It's also different for individuals depending on the 12 weeks and what they're pursuing. If we just look at business, for instance, we would say one goal is better than two, two is better than three, and we start to get more than three. You're probably setting yourself up to struggle on the personal side.

Sometimes it can be simpler in that I might not need a big plan. Right. If I want to lose some weight, lose some body fat, I don't need to get a bunch of other people involved in that. It's more under my direct control. Oftentimes on something like that, there's a keystone action, one action that if you do it has the greatest effect and brings the others along. For me, if I focus on working out four days a week, I eat better so I don't have to worry about my diet. I don't have to worry about it, you know what I mean?

So, it's not a fair question in that it depends on your knowledge in the area. It depends on where your starting point is. It depends on how big a stretch the goal is. But we're always talking about less is more because we have limited capacity. It doesn't matter who you are, how big your team is. We work with $30 billion companies, $50 billion companies. They still have limited capacity. When you take on too much, you spread too thin. You don't make really any progress, which is a recipe for mediocrity.

The first thing the 12-Week Year forces you to do is really confront what's really going to matter over the next 12 weeks. By the way, 12 weeks goes pretty fast. At the end of those 12 weeks, you can work in the same area, you can choose a different area. That's how we really build on success.

AIDAN

In my own 12-week planning, what I tend to do is I have about five different areas at any one given time. I've got personal, and this will include objectives and tasks around my family, around my fitness, maybe around travel, maybe around investments. A lot of that is repetitive stuff. I want to make sure I get a couple of swims in a week. I want to make sure that I'm doing things with my kids every week and so on and so forth. They're almost like reminders.

Then I'll have an objective for 12 weeks around the e-commerce business. I'll have another around software and services, so Floathosting.com is a hosting company we've gotten. I'll always have 12-week tasks built-in there, and I love how at the start of a 12-week cycle, at least this is how I do it, I go through and I make a whole list of all the different tasks associated or things I would have to do to achieve each objective.

Then through that planning process, it sort of automatically sort of pulls them all down into "Okay, this is week one, and I've got a bunch of different tasks for different objectives in week one, then this is week two, then this is week three." I think it brings clarity to the chaos, just having a massive to-do list.

BRIAN

Yeah. Oh, it absolutely does. It'll challenge upfront to say, okay, do you have the capacity to do all of that? Right. Some of the things you mentioned, if I can build routines around those now, it's not so difficult. I swim on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I know that I got the time blocked out, so they may be in my plan, but they're already part of my weekly routine. The business stuff, though, tends to be less that way because you're taking new ground. You're having to do things you haven't done before. There are more new activities there and it's really easy to overwhelm yourself.

AIDAN

I find it also helps me personally for building in new good habits in my life because if I've got an objective to read a certain number of hours each week or something like this, if I just don't have that and I don't see it, then it's almost like I'm not reminded of it. Then eventually after a 12-week cycle, it's almost become a habit. I'm kind of getting these incremental gains that keep adding on top of each other one another sort of week after week, cycle after cycle. I think that's an amazing upward cycle to be in.

One of the questions that I get asked all the time, Brian, is how do I go about outlining the tasks for an objective if I don't know what those tasks are? What's your recommendation for someone who asks that kind of a question?

BRIAN

When you plan, it's kind of like two approaches. One is I'm familiar with the area. I kind of know some of the things I need to do. If I'm in sales that I've sold before and I'm selling the same stuff, a lot of those activities are going to be similar.

Every 12-Week Year there may be some new things I'm trying. If I'm pioneering new ground, then I'm going to go out and look, "Has anyone else done this? What did they do?" and learn as much as I can. But the one thing you have to remember, whether you're pioneering new ground or not, there is no perfect plan. Every plan you write is flawed. The only way you know is you got to go out and execute it and then pay attention and measure it so you can make adjustments.

If I've never done it before, again, I'm pioneering new ground, then the thing I want to do is put my best plan together, my best thoughts, and go succeed or fail as fast as I can with that.

AIDAN

One of the other things that I really like about the book is your ability to plan for the unexpected or to plan for the miscellaneous. Could you share with our listeners what that looks like and how you do that?

BRIAN

Okay, well look, there's always stuff going to happen. If you create a plan, this is the challenge with five or six goals, right. Even though some of them may be personal, some of them may be business, if you create a plan that accounts for the bulk of your day, you're really just setting yourself up for that to blow up.

Because there are day-to-day things, there are emergency things, there are things that are going to happen that you had anticipated. If you have no margin in your day, that stuff starts to snowball. Right? You don't get it done today and then tomorrow there's even more to do and next week there's more to do, and so that's a really quick way to bury yourself.

That's why we talk about less is more, so that you have margin built in so that as things change. But also, you're never going to go more than 12-weeks before you stop the world and you reassess what worked, what didn't work, where the marketplace changed, what's different? Reconnect with my vision. Lock and load again.

The 12-Week Year is a much more fluid way of operating than the traditional way of annual plans broken down quarterly and monthly and weekly.

AIDAN

One of the things that I always add in now is this idea of a buffer block, which is something that can be used to take care of these miscellaneous things that just happened to appear or an email that you weren't expecting or something breaks down and you've got to attend to it. I found that they give me this enormous peace of mind because it's not like I've got 13 hours to get everything done and that's it.

Maybe I'll plan out 10 hours of work and I'll have 3 hours of sort of buffer built in there for the unexpected. I think what a lot of people don't really realize is that the 12-Week Year is something that is just as effective for people who are working a day job as it is for a solo entrepreneur who's out there building their own business.

In fact, I would say it's almost more necessary for the people who have less time because the less time you have, the better you need to sort of protect it and manage it.

BRIAN

Yeah, absolutely.

That buffer block is really designed to deal with the low-level activities that there's a never-ending extreme of those and we sometimes think, well, we'll knock those out of the way. The problem is there will always be more of those to do than you have time to do it. If you don't carve out time for it and know which ones you absolutely have to do and which ones you don't have to do, then if you're not clear on that, then you're just this hamster on the wheel. You're working hard, you're sacrificing all these personal areas and you're not moving the needle at all. That buffer time is a way to deal with the emails and the voicemails and the things that need to be done, but they're not high pay-off activity tasks. Candidly, they can eat up your entire day if you're not mindful about how you manage them.

AIDAN

I find that also the things that people tend to do when they just want to feel busy or maybe they're lacking willpower or they didn't have a good sleep the night before or they just burnt out, those kinds of tasks are easy to gravitate towards because that's just easy the kind of thing that you can do without getting into a state of deep work or anything like that.

I think it's a slippery slope when you don't sort of allocate time specifically to do them. Another trap I see all the time is someone who's got, and I slip into this myself, is just having the email open and replying to an email instead of having a specific time or a couple of times in the day when I'll actually do it, it becomes like this interruption force that wreaks havoc on my best-laid plans.

What would be a mistake that you see people making, perhaps, especially on their first go-through of creating a 12-Week Year plan?

BRIAN

The biggest one is they take on too much because they're used to planning annually, and they're also used to planning conceptually. We plan tactically, and so you really start to see the magnitude of the work and the plan accounts for that. But people still have because they've done it forever a certain way. They still have this tendency to take on way too much. And then what happens about week four or five? They're overwhelmed. And instead of going back and really deciding, okay, what are they going to focus on? What's going to stay in the plan? What's going to go? They just bail.

And so, nothing changes, nothing gets better. That is by far the biggest mistake people make.

AIDAN

I've definitely seen that myself. One of the things that I've always liked about the planning process that you've created here with your partner is that you can see it visually. There are different ways to sort of present it. Obviously, you could do it on a spreadsheet, you could do it on a piece of paper at your desk.

But when you see the weeks week by week by week and what you've got to do in each given week, sometimes I've got a list which is this long, 20 different things or 30 different things on one week, and the next week I might say, "Oh, wow, next week I only got ten things on my list," be able to sort of visually see that I can push things around. But then also it allows me to allow and plan for the time when I'm not going to be working.

Next week, for example, I'm going to be in New York with my wife on a vacation, and I don't want to have all these tasks hanging over my head. With the 12-Week system, I can sort of push some of the things that would have been the next week to the previous week or to the following week. It's not going to upset me where I would be in 12 weeks' time.

BRIAN

Even ten tactics in your weekly plan is an awful lot if it's truly tactics because that's way different than a to-do list. I got a separate to-do list that has 40 things on it, but that's not what's driving my day and my week, right. My week is driven by my weekly plan, which is just a derivative of my 12-week plan like you said. I'm very focused on that 12-week plan.

As a company, we plan as a team, our leadership team. We have two goals, that's it. We've mapped out all the tactics for it, and everything else that we're going to work on is secondary. If there's time, I get to it, but I'm not going to burn myself out chasing too many rabbits. I'm going to really focus on these two areas, and that's what we're doing as an organization to nail that because that's what really changes the trajectory and that's where you get your best results.

It's not a lot about a little here and a little there and a little here and a little there. You're diffused, you're overwhelmed, you're stressed, and you don't really make any progress. You don't build any momentum. The 12-Week Year is just the opposite. Let's pick one or two areas. Let's really go after it.

By the way, we don't do everything we can think of from a tactical standpoint. We're still looking for the critical few, the least number of actions. We call them tactics to accomplish the goal. But whatever it takes, it takes, right. The marketplace kind of determines that.

What do you got to do to hit the goal, and then that's our relentless focus on those things. If nothing else gets done outside of that, I'm fine with that. If there's other stuff that gets done, that's okay. As long as this stuff still gets done.

AIDAN

I've just pulled up my 12-Week Year here in front of me now, and I can see that on average, I've got about 15 tasks in any given week. It looks like about five of them are sort of personal objectives and a lot of those personal ones seem to sort of repeat week after week.

I've probably got about five that are personal to me and my family and my fitness, my health, and so forth, and then maybe approximately ten that are spread across a few other projects. I mean, that's sort of a ballpark of fortunate in some regard in that I do work for myself. I do have a very flexible schedule. I feel like having worked through 12-Week Years since 2015, I've been through a lot of cycles now, and I don't know about you, Brian, but I find that some of the same things keep coming into the same 12-Week Year, cycle after cycle after cycle. Is that something that's normal?

BRIAN

Depending on your goals. Right. So there are certain there are two types of activities, really, Aidan, there are activities that drive the core economics of your business. If you're in business or even kind of the core economics of your health, let's say. I'm going to work out. I'm going to take my superfoods, I'm probably going to track my food intake if I'm serious about my health. Those things are probably going to show up in every plan I write.

There may be similar things in the business that drive the economic engine. There are other tactics, other goals, sometimes that are more about capacity building.

I'm building a new piece of software or I'm bringing an assistant on board to free up some of my time. Those things are more project-based, and those may change. You may have 12-week plans that don't even have any of that in them, but you've always got to be driving the economic core if you will. A lot of the economic core, it typically doesn't change 180 degrees in 12-weeks, so it's not like "This 12-weeks, I'm going to do this. The next 12-weeks, something totally different." There tends to be some overlap there.

AIDAN

Yeah. If you're training for a marathon, that training plan could go through multiple 12-week cycles. If one of your tactics is to get out and pound the pavement a few times each week, then that's going to be a tactic that repeats itself cycle after cycle.

BRIAN

Yeah. It's possible that the distance increases or maybe not. It might be 6 miles three times a week. That may show up in a number of 12-week plans.

AIDAN

Right. Some of the specifics. Yeah. Do you ever put other people's objectives on your 12-Week plan? I'm talking about this from a leadership standpoint. If you've got people on your team and you know that they need to do a certain thing by a certain time, do you put things or reminders on your own plan to make sure or check in to see someone else's progress?

BRIAN

Yeah, good question.

If I'm a leader, I'm going to have tactics in my plan about what I'm doing with them to influence them. I don't have tactics in my plan that describe what they do. Does that make sense?

Let's say I'm a sales manager and my folks need to make 50 outbound calls a day. I'm not going to put heavy trap make 50 outbound calls a day because that's their tactics, not mine. I'm going to write something about what I do to oversee that. They're making 50 outbound calls a day.

AIDAN

Something I've been doing, and maybe this is more of a reminder. There are some tasks that I need to do on a monthly basis or I need to oversee.  One of them is the monthly accounting. I don't do the monthly accounting myself, but on my 12-week plan, every four weeks, I have this. I guess it's almost like an alert or reminder, and it's kind of like, well, we need to make sure that the accounting has been done.

Then I've got someone else's initials next to it, almost assigning them as an owner. But maybe that's just combining...

BRIAN

That doesn't work so well. It should be what you're going to do. You're going to meet with that person to ensure accounting is complete for the month, something like that. Now, the one caveat to that would be if we truly have a team plan, like our leadership team, we plan as a team. We have one set of goals. Some of the actions have my name, some have Michael's, some have Judy's, some have Angie's, that type of thing. That's different, right? That's a true team plan...

AIDAN

Right. What you're saying there is the 12-Week Year you could also apply to teams as opposed to an individual planning process?

BRIAN

Yeah. And you could have both. You could be part of a team plan and also have an individual plan.

AIDAN

Yeah. I like that. That's not something I've done. I've had a lot of my team go through and create their own 12-Week Year plans, and I've got mine. I sort of make sure that in some ways they're aligned, but it's not a process I've actually sat down and done. That's absolutely something I'm going to be adding to my plan to get planning on.

BRIAN

Yeah. I can help you with that, because if you're truly operating as a team it makes sense if their goals are truly individual, right. In other words, everything that's going to be done to hit that goal is done by them, then you don't need a team plan for that. But if there are other people going to contribute to hitting that particular goal, then the team plan is a better approach.

AIDAN

This has been wonderful, Brian, and I know that we're only just scratching the surface, but I'm also aware that time is valuable here. I do appreciate you have come on here. You mentioned something right at the beginning, which I thought was really important and that it was something along the lines of execution is what really gets results, and you could do all the planning you like, but if you don't execute, then nothing is really going to happen.

You also mentioned less is more. I think that's a big thing about don't try to do too much it's better to at least start out with something that's manageable, and on that execution note, if you're listening to this podcast right now, head over to episode number 19 on thegrowthbooth.com which is where you can get show notes. You can see a transcription as well. You'll see a link out to 12-Week Year which is Brian's website where you can find lots more resources.

The one thing I would recommend you do is head over to Amazon and grab a copy of Brian's book because it is absolutely golden. It's a treasure trove of info and if you're anything like me and you like to be productive but in a smart way that allows you to get more done and really align those short-term tasks or the long term objectives, then in my mind, it really is the best system out there.