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The 12 Week Year — Chapter-05: One Week at a Time
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Chapter 5 One Week at a Time Long-term results are created by the actions you take every day. Sir William Osler, founder of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said that the secret of his success was living his life in “day-tight compartments.” What he found was that, while we plan for the future, we act in the day. To be truly effective, your daily activity must align with your long-term vision, strategies, and tactics. In the end, you have greater control over your actions than you do your results. Your results are created by your actions. That’s why it is so important to construct plans that are not only numbers-based, but also identify specific, critical activity. “The greatest predictor of your future are your daily actions.” The physical universe will not respond to your desires, no matter how passionate or intense they are. The one thing that moves the universe is action. As we discussed earlier, vision matters in that it defines the end game and the overall direction you want to go. Vision also provides the motivation to act, but vision without action is just a dream. It is the consistent action that turns a dream into reality. This is where progress most often breaks down. Most of us aspire to improve some area of our lives. Whether you want to earn more money, find a new job, meet the right mate, lose a few pounds, improve a relationship, or be a better golfer, parent, or person, desire alone is not enough. It’s not enough to have the intention of changing; you have to act on that intention for things to get better—and not just once, but consistently. As the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius pointed out: “The fall of dropping
water wears away the stone.” Consistent action on the critical tasks needed to reach your goal is the key to getting what you want in life. Your current actions are creating your future. If you want to know what your future holds, look to your actions; they are the best predictor of your future. You want to predict your future health, look at your current eating and exercise habits. You want to predict the health of your marriage, look at your interactions with your spouse. You want to predict your career path and future income, look at the actions you take each business day. Your actions tell the story. The Weekly Plan “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson The weekly plan is a powerful tool that translates your 12 week plan into daily and weekly action. The weekly plan is the instrument that organizes and focuses your week. It becomes your weekly game plan. This will keep you on track with your core activity each day. Weekly plans allow you to structure your activities so that you are focused on both the long-term and short-term tasks that are truly important. This allows you to stay focused and productive in the moment instead of getting caught up in all the noise and distractions that easily derail you. The weekly plan is not a glorified to-do list; rather it reflects the critical strategic activity from your 12 week plan that needs to take place this week in order for you to achieve your goals. The starting point for an effective weekly plan is your 12 week plan. The 12 week plan contains all of the tactics you need to execute in order to achieve your 12 week goals. Each tactic has a designated week for completion, and these tactics drive your weekly plan by dictating your daily actions. The weekly plan then is simply a derivative of the 12 week plan— in essence a one-twelfth slice of the 12 week plan. To use your weekly plan effectively, you will need to spend the first 15 or 20 minutes at the beginning of each week to review your progress from the
past week and plan the upcoming one. In addition, the first five minutes of each day should be spent reviewing your weekly plan to plan that day’s activities. A 12 Week Year creates greater focus by highlighting the value of each week. With the 12 Week Year, a year is now equivalent to 12 weeks, a month is now a week, and a week is now a day. When you look at it this way, the importance and power of each day becomes even greater. Your weekly plan enables you to focus your actions and be great at a few things rather than mediocre at many. To ensure that you get the most from your efforts, a weekly plan is a powerful and indispensable tool. Your weekly plan encompasses your strategies and priorities, your long- term and short-term tasks, and your commitments in the context of time. It helps you focus on the elements of your plan that must happen each week to keep you on track with your 12 Week Year goals. Your goals in turn keep you on track with your vision. Everything is powerfully aligned. To really benefit from this tool you will need to carry it with you and work from it on a daily basis. Start each day with your weekly plan. Check in with it several times throughout the day. If you’ve scheduled a tactic to be completed that day, don’t go home until it is done. This ensures that the critically important tasks, your plan tactics, are completed each week. Visit our website at www.12WeekYear.com to see a sample of a weekly plan and the other tools in our Achieve! website. The weekly plan, more than any other tool, will help you execute on a daily and weekly basis and will help you achieve your vision!