In the jungle of our plans and goals, sometimes you can get lost! So let's try to simplify it! Here I use 12-week planning successfully.
A few weeks ago, listening to one of my favorite Podcast I came across a great topic of the 12 week year. I will briefly describe you here 12-week planning and I will show how I used this.
The whole idea of 12-week planning comes from a book with an obvious title: The 12 week. I will honestly admit that I have not read this book yet but I will do it in the near future. I will definitely describe her brief review here.
In short, the idea is to divide the year into 4, 12-week periods. Instead of setting a goal and steps to implement it for the whole year, we plan how to spend the next 12 weeks. For example, The goal is to read 4 books over the next 12 weeks. The daily step to this implementation will be, reading 30 minutes every day in the morning.
Of course, we still have our annual and long-term goals. But here we only focus on the next 12 weeks because it is much easier to control.
I even met with opinions that it is most effective to plan the 2 most important goals related to work and personal development for the next 12 weeks. And for the next 12 weeks, we focus more on relationships with the family and improving our health, etc.
I will leave this topic here because I do not plan to do it myself. But it seems to me a very interesting approach, especially for those busiest people.
We know a lot of different methods planning our goals and ways to try to achieve them. I tried a few of them myself and it came out differently. It seems to me that planning 12 weeks and how I modified it under me, perfectly suits me.
So far, it works great!
I have simplified the whole process very much. Looking at the time at which my life is now and what my annual and long-term goals are, I've divided my first 12 weeks into the following steps:
- Learning programming, active - that is writing my own code or developing my own project (at least 1 hour daily).
- Learning programming, passive - ie watching tutorials, doing exercises, broadly expanding my knowledge about IT (at least 1 hour daily).
- Running at least 3 times a week.
- Crossfit at least 3 times a week
- At least one post on Steemit per day.
- Reading a book for at least 30 minutes a day.
It is very simply described and easy to measure.
That's what it's supposed to be!
By creating these steps, I followed the SMART methodology. But specific goals to which the above steps are to bring me closer I will describe other times on the occasion of revealing my annual goals and how I plan them.
You can divide these individual steps, for example, 1 per week or several times a week. I just did it in such a way because it's more comfortable for me to control everything.
This method allows us to understand that every day and every action counts!
Here below you can check part of my plan. It's simple and everyone can do something like that in an excel or similar program:
The results are in percent and I determine them myself which number should I write on the basis of how I feel that I have accomplished my task.
You can also use a simple method here and write: Done, Undone, Skipped.. or something similar. There is complete freedom here.
As you can see in the attached image, I keep track of the implementation of the plan on a regular basis. If the percentage in the upper right corner is less than 80%, it means that I didn't make enough in some task. I try to do everything at least in 80%.
The above 6 steps are my most important tasks during the day. According to book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I can include them in my important but not urgent tasks. I do them every day, despite the fact that their results will not come quickly.
But I am patient because I know even small step taken every day brings me closer to achieving my goals and dreams.
I wrote earlier about building habits and HabitHub and these two topics complement each other. However, these tasks mentioned in this plan are a priority. Also, when I do everything from the list below (or I know that I will have time for that later), I do my meditation, writing my victories, gratefulness or set a plan for the next day.
It's logic. First things come first!
So my 12-week planning looks like this. I suspect that after reading the book, the method will change a bit. But I wanted to share with you my method that is currently in use and which works amazingly well for me. I am sticking to my decisions more than usual. At the end, 12 weeks is not so much time, so I have to keep an eye on and keep up with my decisions.