# The 12 Week Year — Chapter-14: Develop Your 12 Week Plan - **Source**: /library/The 12 Week Year/source-file.pdf - **PDF pages**: 81–95 - **Pages without text**: 88 --- Chapter 14 Develop Your 12 Week Plan This chapter will guide you through the development of your first 12 week plan. Before you create a 12 week plan, you must define and commit to your vision. If you have not already done so, be sure to work through Chapter 13, “Establish Your Vision,” to prepare you to set an effective 12 week goal and to create a solid plan to reach it. Planning Is Beneficial Unless your job is mostly reactionary in nature, it’s hard to argue against the value of planning. Planning enables you to allocate your time and resources to your highest-value opportunities, it increases your odds of successfully hitting your goals, it helps you to coordinate your team, and it creates a competitive advantage. In spite of the proven benefits of working from a plan, not everyone does so. One reason for this is that many people have a bias for taking action. While an action bias can be a good thing, it can also get in the way of effective execution. We can get impatient, and want to get on with things too quickly. An effective plan takes time to create, and it requires some hard work. It may seem counterintuitive, but by taking time to plan up front, the overall time and effort to complete a task can be significantly reduced. Another reason that many people don’t work from a plan is that they have a belief that goes something like, “I already know what I need to do, so I don’t need a plan to get it done.” On the surface this may seem reasonable, but unfortunately there is almost always a gap between what people know and what they do. For example, many people want to get into better physical shape, and virtually all of them know that it takes a healthy diet and exercise, but, sadly, most people don’t ever become more fit. That’s because simply knowing what to do just isn’t enough. The world is noisy, the unexpected happens, distractions arise, our innate desire for comfort tugs at us, and we lose focus on the things that we know we should do. That’s why to increase your odds of success, one of the most powerful things you can do is to create, and work from, a written plan. Twelve week planning isn’t just valuable for business. A well-written plan can positively impact almost any area of your life. J.K. McAndrews tells this short story about his son and the 12 Week Year. My son Kevin is a senior at LSU and a couple of years ago he was really struggling with balancing his time between school, fraternity, and his job with the football team. Over Christmas break that year I taught him the basic principles of the 12 Week Year and beginning with the next semester he developed clearly defined goals with strategies and tactics to support them. Since then he sends me a weekly plan every Sunday night and even added his own wrinkle by finding an inspirational quote that will motivate him for that particular week. His grades have improved, and, more importantly, he has had a better focus on his goals, is more organized, and has definitely come to understand the term greatness in the moment. Game Changer Operating in the 12 Week Year execution cycle creates an increased premium on the value of time. In 12 weeks, each day counts toward reaching your goals. The value of each moment is brought into sharp focus when there are only 12 weeks in your entire year. One of the benefits that comes from applying the 12 Week Year is learning to act in the moment because that’s where the future that you will experience is being created. Living your life in the moment, however, can be done in two very different ways—either reactively or proactively. If you are reactive in the moment, you risk taking suboptimal actions because the primary drivers of your actions are input triggers—the phone rings, the email dings, a new task appears, someone knocks on your door, and off you go. It is difficult in the moment to know what your highest value activities are because you are typically not choosing between good activity and bad activity; you are choosing between higher value and lower value activity and that ranking often isn’t clear in the moment. That’s why 12 week planning is so beneficial. With an action-based plan, you don’t have to rely on input triggers to initiate your actions; instead, your plan triggers your actions. Your action choices are made proactively at the beginning of the 12 weeks when you create your plan. In short, a 12 week plan helps you to get more of the right things done each day, and ultimately it helps you reach your goals faster and with greater impact. Another benefit of 12 week planning is a fiercely consistent focus on the few vital actions that drive your results. You can’t effectively pursue a large number of different things in a 12 Week Year because there simply isn’t enough time to get everything done. In 12 weeks, you only focus on the minimum number of actions that are most important to hit your goal. You also benefit from 12 week planning because of the short time horizon. Uncertainty is reduced due to the shortened time frame, and as a result you can plan effectively at the action level. Annual plans are typically not action-based because it is nearly impossible to predict the action needed four or more months out. This is a profound benefit of the 12 Week Year. Due to increased uncertainty, most annual plans are objective-based and cannot be executed as written. Typical annual plans tell you what has to be achieved but they don’t specify how. When the how is not clearly defined you lose a sense of scope and can easily take on more than you can physically execute. The daily and weekly how’s of a 12 week plan are what makes it execution-friendly. When you get down to action-level granularity on your plan, you are setting yourself up for success. Here is how our friend Patrick Morin describes his experience with 12 week planning. My passion for the 12 Week Year began with a challenge to drop 38 pounds that just wouldn’t go away. The Period Goal, Strategy, and Tactics fit perfectly into solving my nagging weight problem and also gave me exactly the right tools to prepare for a triathlon. After reaching my goal, and buzzing with my new fitness, I looked around for other ways to apply the 12 Week Year. At that time, we were raising money for a new start-up company in the healthcare industry. We had started in earnest in January, writing all the required documents, and preparing the product. The process was taking longer than we had anticipated and we continued to have to fund the company internally. It was straining both resources and patience. It seemed to me that this would be the perfect place to implement the 12 Week Year. On a Monday in early July, I gathered the senior staff to plan it out. The critical objective was pretty clear—in order for the idea (and the company) to survive we would have to finish the Private Placement Memorandum and raise the money in the next 12 weeks. The economic climate at the time could best be described as “dismal.” Investors, in general, were hard to come by and this would require a Herculean effort. The vision for the company was clear, the next step was to create a 12 week plan to acquire funding. We had to forget the previous six months’ slog and focus only on the 12 weeks ahead. Using the battle cry “every day is a week,” we finished a 100-page PPM in the first week. We got it to our legal team for review and a week later, we were green-lighted. That’s when the real energy kicked in. Reaching out to a network of hundreds of people that were personally known to each of us, we found a critical mass of people willing to step in and we closed the first round on October 10th! The energy created around this effort continued through our development efforts and each of our projects took on its own 12 Week Year. The company’s cadence was remarked upon by investors, employees, and officers alike. A Good Plan Fosters Solid Execution Imagine driving cross-country with directions that have turns out of order, combine several instructions into one, and leave out big chunks of the trip. You’d probably want to smack the person who created those directions, and would either stop to get better directions or give up and go home in frustration. That may sound silly, but I bet that you would be surprised by how many people create business plans just like those bad directions! We see plans all the time that are missing steps, lump complicated time-consuming processes into a single tactic, and have actions out of sequence. Worse yet, rather than specifying the actions needed to reach the goal, many times the plan is just a collection of thoughts and ideas. It would be like driving from Miami to Chicago using directions that said something like, “get in your car and drive in the general direction of Chicago.” Plans like this are way too common and they keep you from executing. Writing an effective 12 week plan is key to accomplishing great things in only 12 weeks. The plan defines the actions that you will need to take each week of the 12 to reach your goal. Long-Term Capacity versus Short- Term Results Plans can both build capacity for the future and drive short-term results. Every plan should have a goal to drive results in the current 12 weeks. If the plan is for your business, this means that it should always target income to be realized in the current 12 weeks. Some plans may also target building future capacity. Capacity objectives include such things as pursuing education, hiring staff, updating technology, implementing new systems, and so on. Effort and resources expended to build capacity happens immediately, while the benefits are realized sometime in the future. That’s why it’s important to always have activity in your plan that creates required short-term results. Effective Plan Structure The structure of the plan that you write matters if you want to set yourself up to be successful. A good plan starts with a good goal. If your goal is not specific or measureable, the plan that you write will also be vague. The more specific and measureable your 12 week goals, the easier it will be to write a solid 12 week plan. Many 12 week efforts are comprised of two or three goals. For example, you might have a 12 week goal to lose 10 pounds and another goal to generate $105,000 in new business. Each of these goals then becomes a planning target for which you need to write tactics. Tactics for the weight goal are specific actions you must take to achieve your desired weight. If you are working to lose weight, your tactics might include limit calorie intake to 1,200 per day and do 20 minutes of cardio three times per week. Note that these tactics start with a verb, and are complete sentences. The way that you write your goals and tactics matters. Your income goal of $105,000 would have a separate set of tactics. There are five criteria that will help you create better 12 week plans when you are writing goals and tactics: Criteria 1: Make them specific and measurable. For each goal and/or tactic, be sure to quantify and qualify what success looks like. How many calls will you make? How many pounds will you lose? How far will you run? How much income will you earn? The more specific you can be, the better! Criteria 2: State them positively. Focus on what you want to happen that is positive. For example, rather than focusing on a 2 percent error rate, you would target a 98 percent accuracy rate. Criteria 3: Ensure they are a realistic stretch. If you can accomplish the goal without doing anything differently, then you probably need to stretch more. If it is absolutely impossible, then factor it back a little. If you have never asked for a business referral in your life, a tactic like “Ask for referrals in every client interaction” might be a bridge too far. A more realistic tactic that will still be a stretch might be “Ask for a referral in at least one client meeting each week.” Criteria 4: Assign accountability. This applies to people who are executing as part of a team (if you’re on your own, the accountability is all yours). Individual accountability for each goal and tactic is critical! Everyone’s challenge is no one’s challenge. Criteria 5: Be time-bound. There is nothing like a deadline to get things started and keep them moving. Make sure to include a date by which the goal is to be reached, or the tactic is to be executed. In addition to the previous criteria, each tactic should start with a verb, be a complete sentence, and be executable as written in the week that it is due. Figure 14.1 illustrates a sample 12 week plan. Figure 14.1 A sample 12 week plan. Establish Your 12 Week Goals Deciding where you are going is the first step to getting there. Effective planning absolutely begins with a well-written, specific, and measureable 12 week goal—a goal that you own, that, if you hit it, creates meaningful benefits for you—a goal that makes a difference. The 12 week goal is the bridge between your vision and your 12 week plan. Your 12 week goal should be a realistic stretch for you. If it isn’t realistic, you will become discouraged. If it isn’t a stretch you don’t need the 12 Week Year because your current way of operating will achieve your goal. It’s now time to set your 12 week goal that aligns with your long-term vision and also represents greatness for you in and of itself in the next 12 weeks. Get started by going back to Chapter 13 to review your long-term and three-year visions. Decide on the progress that you are willing to commit to achieving in the next 12 weeks. Once you’ve decided on your 12 week goal, record it. 12 Week Goal(s) ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ The best 12 week goals are realistic but enough of a stretch that they will call on you to deliver your very best. Why is your 12 week goal important to you? If you hit it, what will be different? ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ Writing Your 12 Week Plan Now it’s time to write your first 12 week plan. The plan is the roadmap needed to reach your 12 week goals. The best plans are focused on one or two things that you want to make progress on in the next 12 weeks. The fewer goals and weekly actions there are, the easier the plan will be to execute. As George Patton once said, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” Don’t overanalyze the content of your plan. Don’t be concerned that your plan isn’t perfect—there are no perfect plans. Once you have a good plan, your execution of the tactics will help you to learn what works best so you can refine your plan from there. Keep in mind that at its most basic level, planning is just problem solving. Your plan solves the problem of how to close the gap between your results today and your 12 week goal. To get started, write your first 12 week goal as Goal 1. Write each additional goal separately. You may find that you have just one goal; that’s fine. Next, for each of your goals, define the highest-priority daily and weekly actions that you must take to reach that goal. In order to do this it might be helpful to brainstorm on a separate sheet of paper all the things you could do and then select the ones that will have the greatest impact. Some actions may be repeating (e.g., “work out each day”), while other actions will happen only once in the 12 weeks (e.g.,“join a health club”). For those actions you decide to implement write them as full sentences that start with a verb and describe the action that you intend to take. Finally, specify in the “Week Due” column the week (1 through 12) in which you intend to execute each action. Goal 1:___________________________________________ Tactics Week Due                         Goal 2:___________________________________________ Tactics Week Due Tactics Week Due                 Goal 3:___________________________________________ Tactics Week Due                     Before you put your plan down, ask yourself these questions: What actions will you struggle with? ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ What will you do to overcome those struggles? ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ Thinking Shift Without a well-written plan, you are setting yourself up for poor execution. The way you think about planning itself is going to affect the quality of your plan and your success with the 12 week year overall. Let’s take a look at some common mental breakdowns that might get in your way. Most people know that they are supposed to work from a plan, but if their experience has been that their plan rarely gets executed, they won’t take the time to create a well-written one. If that has been your experience with planning, remember that a 12 week plan is quite different. A 12 week plan gets down to the critical actions that you will need to take each week to reach your goal. Actions make all the difference in a plan. You can’t act on the objectives or goals that make up a typical 12 month plan, but you can execute the actions that make up a 12 week plan. Another thinking barrier to effective planning is that you don’t have enough time to plan. This thinking is common, but it is flawed. Years ago I was involved in an informal study that showed the time benefit of planning. If you take time to plan before engaging with a complex task, you reduce the overall time required to complete the task by as much as 20 percent. Team Application As a team leader, having your team engaged with the 12 Week Year can be transformational. Imagine if everyone on your team fully owned their aspirational visions and their 12 week goals. What would be different for you if your team was consistently executing on their highest value activities week in and week out? There are a few things that you can do as a manager to help your team get on the 12 Week Year quickly and with greatest impact. The first step is to ask them to read The 12 Week Year, and have them work through the vision and planning templates. After they have created their vision and plan, schedule an individual sit-down with each person on your team to review their 12 week goals and plans. The purpose of this meeting is to refine their plan and to establish your role in helping them reach their 12 week goal. As you conduct these meetings with your team, start the conversation by focusing on their 12 week goals. Do they own the goal or are they just interested in it? Is the goal realistic and still a stretch for them? Do they believe that they can reach their goal? Make appropriate suggestions for changing their goal if necessary, but make sure that the goal remains theirs, not yours, if you want them to own it. Once you have finished with the 12 week goal, shift to their tactical plan. As you provide coaching advice, seek to keep their plans focused on just the fewest number of goals, and fewest number of tactics that are needed to reach each goal. Refer to the criteria earlier in the chapter for well-written goals and tactics for ideas on how to help them improve their plans. Team Planning As a manager, or as a member of a team, sometimes it is necessary to create joint goals and plans. Often effective team planning can more effectively leverage talent and resources than individual plans can. The process of team planning is similar to the individual process except that the team sets a goal and builds a plan jointly. Ask for participant input toward the overall goal for the 12 weeks. Finalize the goal with the team and ensure that they own the goal jointly and individually. Next, brainstorm the tactics needed to reach each goal; then, select the smallest possible number of the brainstormed tactics that, when executed, will attain the goal. It is important that each tactic be assigned to one individual even if several people will work on it. Individual accountability for tactics is critical to drive the team execution process. However, if one of the team tactics will be completed individually by multiple team members, you will be better served by assigning a subset of the team goal to each team member. For example, if the team tactic is to conduct 20 prospecting meetings per week, and there are four team members, each might be individually assigned five prospecting meetings as their individual tactic. There are two last bits of advice when planning for teams: First, don’t overestimate the capacity of your team. The best team plans are succinct and contain the minimal amount of activity to reach the team goal—no more. Second, don’t front-load the plan; instead, if possible, balance the actions over the entire 12 weeks. Common Pitfalls and Success Tips Don’t let these five common pitfalls derail your achievement: Pitfall 1: Your 12 week plan does not align with your long-term vision. It is important that your 12 week goals and your plan are aligned with, and an extension of, your longer-term vision. When you set your goals, be certain that they are connected to your vision and determine where you need to be at the end of 12 weeks to be on pace with your long-term goals. Pitfall 2: You aren’t staying focused Focus is critical. If you establish too many goals, you end up with too many priorities and too many tactics to effectively execute. Everything cannot be a priority. You will need to say no to some things in order to be great at the things that matter most. It takes courage to limit your focus to a few key areas. Remember, each 12 weeks is a new year. Imagine if every 12 weeks you identified one or two key areas and went after those with passion and focus. Then, at the end of that 12 week period, you identified one or two new areas to focus on. The 12 Week Year is designed to help you focus on a few key areas and make significant progress in a short period of time. Pitfall 3: You don’t make the tough choices. For each goal, it’s not uncommon to identify 8, 10, or more tactics (actions) you could take to move the ball down the field. In most cases, implementing every tactic you can think of is not necessary and, in fact, can be a hindrance. Although it’s helpful to brainstorm all the tactics you can think of, that doesn’t mean you have to implement all of them. Trying to execute too many tactics can spread you too thin and leave you feeling overwhelmed. Despite this, it’s important to remember that there is no right number of tactics. As with your goals, the general rule is less is more. If you can accomplish the goal with four tactics, then you don’t need five. Brainstorm all the tactics you can, and then select the critical few. Pitfall 4: You don’t keep it simple. The task of planning can become very complex. In some companies, entire departments exist for the sole purpose of drafting strategic plans. For the purposes of The 12 Week Year, keep it simple. If you feel like it’s getting too complicated, it probably is. Focus on a few key areas and the actions you can take to hit your goals. Pitfall 5: You don’t make it meaningful. You must build your plan around the most important items or there will be too little traction for you in the implementation phase. Too often people build their plan around the goals that someone else thinks are important. Although executing your plan is not complex, it is not necessarily easy, either. If your plan is not meaningful to you, then you will struggle to execute it. Be certain that you focus on the areas that matter most.