Have you ever laid your head down at night hating that another day has gone by and you have not made any progress towards a goal you want to achieve. You have hundreds of ideas running around in your head but you’re not sure where to begin and before you know it the days have rolled into weeks the weeks into months and the months into years.
You’re filled with regret because you see others around you doing great things, getting results and living a life happy and content. You scroll on social media and the millions of followers creators have either pisses you off, or leaves you in utter shock.
Especially when you see the type of content that is created it makes you sit back and question how is that possible, is this real? Your ambition becomes hatred and jealousy and depression begins to rear its ugly head sending you thoughts and having you think it’s all hopeless, you suck, and then you finally begin to question yourself, what am I doing with my life?
Yet for some odd reason in the back of your mind, deep in the recesses of your soul there is something still wanting to give it a try and build something great and leave you with the satisfaction that you knew you could do it, but you’re just not sure where to begin or even organize your thoughts and properly see progress. And what’s most important of all— results.
(Statistic) What if I told you there was a system to help create structure in your life and a way to create a plan where you can measure your progress and ultimately achieve your goals. It’s called 12 week year system and you’re about to learn about something that helped give me some clarity.
The Anti-vision
Before we continue I would like to breakdown a concept…
Vision. Do you have one?
You’ve probably heard many times that you need to have a vision (or a plan) for the future, but how can you when your present seems to be filled with so much chaos? The definition of vision according to Websters dictionary is the act or power of imagination. I can tell you first hand that its hard to be creative when you’re stressed and your thoughts are all over the place.
Now let me propose this question, do you know what you want to do? Many times it’s hard to define what it is and what we really want especially when life has hit so hard. You have to filter through all the noise that you built up in your mind and are constantly bombarded on a daily basis. If defining your end goal gives you trouble then let me introduce you to a concept that can help you get to your goal.
Here’s a trick I learned when you can’t think what you want to do. I’m sure its hard to be very specific when it comes to goals but let’s flip it. We all know problems are abundant and we can list up to a thousand that we have. So let’s take those problems and use them to our advantage. Instead of creating a list of what you want to do flip it and write down a list of the things you don’t want to do. Is it a little easier to come up with 10-20 things now? So here’s the trick to this list of don’ts. With all the things that you don’t want to do flip them and write the opposite of what those things are and you now have an idea of the goals you want to reach and accomplish.
This is called the anti-vision and it uses the negative aspects of what you hate and can’t stand to do to create a reverse effect to find what you really want. This has helped me through navigating through my frustrations and given me the ability to think again. Its even lead me to thinking about a future I could see for myself and imagine what that could be like (or at least what I don’t want). According to Websters definition as we defined before I was able to have vision and use the power of imagination to see a better future for myself.
This is the first step before you can even try to create a plan for yourself. You need to be able to have a goal that you deem as worthy to chase. The ability to dream again like a kid and faith that anything is possible if you can believe it.
Periodization
Now that you have a vision it’s time to understand the second part to the equation if you want to be able to put this system into action and reach your goals at record breaking speeds.
Introducing the concept of periodization. This concept was originally created for athletes by the Russians in the 1950s. It was developed to increase an athletes ability within a certain amount of time. We will use this to our advantage and develop specific skills and reach desired goals within a specific time frame.
There are 3 main principals to this concept: focus, concentration, and overload. The difference is you will focus on a specific skill over the next 4-6 weeks until you yield the desired results or mastered the skill. I like to think of this as deliberate practice with a deadline.
Imagine developing a skill you’ve always wanted to learn and it only takes you a little over a month to do. I know some questions will come up like how do I do this, or is this even possible. No worries that’s where the system comes into play.
Let me be clear how the idea of periodization works and mastering a skill (or reaching a desired goal). Remember that all goals can be broken down into sub goals and once you’ve completed those individual tasks you will have completed the overarching goal. That’s how the 4-6 weeks come into play. It takes theise sub goals and helps you to focus on one until completion and repeat each one until you reached your main goal. After that you can move on to your next goal. That is the purpose of periodization. Intense focus on a specific skill for a short period of time.
Now with that in mind lets move on to the execution plan shall we.
The Execution System
We don’t have a knowledge problem we have an execution problem.
We live in a time where knowledge is so accessible its ridiculous. We are bombarded with so much information that it seems we know a lot about everything. But when it comes to putting these ideas into practice we get stuck and have no idea where to begin. We are all just theorists and we need to learn how to be practical with these theories. This is where the execution system comes into play.
There are 3 parts to this system…
- Vision
- Goals
- Measurement
Each building on one another to complete the cycle. Shall we start off the most important.
Vision
We’ve touched on the idea of creating an anti-vision in order to learn how to create our goals. For a quick recap, an anti-vision is creating a list of the things you don’t want in your life and building your goals around them. In this section we’re going to do something a little different with the goals that we come up with. We are going to break them down into 2 parts: timeframe and areas of focus.
The first half is timeframe. With your anti-vision you are going to break them down in to 5-10 year goals. Don’t worry this will make sense in a little bit. The second part, I like to keep simple so we’re going to have 4 areas of focus to write your goals around.
- Mind
- Body
- Business
- Relationships
For these 4 areas of focus we are going to write down our don’ts (or if you know what you want write them down) as our 5-10 year goals. Once that is complete its on to the next phase
Goals
I know you’re probably thinking, I just wrote down my goals why are we doing this again. For starters your vision is what you imagine yourself to be in the next 5-10 years. Now it’s time to see how we can take those far off and lofty goals and break them into shorter goals that we can reach within a 12 week period. This requires some thinking to break down the 5-10 your goals into 3-5 years and then creating weekly and daily tasks in order to reach those goals in 12 weeks.
So weekly tasks are things that must be complete for that week and daily tasks are the ones that must be completed for that day. Now here is the beauty to making sure you stay on track and prioritize all these tasks.
Measurement
What gets measured gets mastered -Cameron Madison
If you’re not tracking what you are doing how do you know if you are making any progress. You need to know where you started, what troubles you’re having, what remains, and if what you’re doing works and will take longer than expected. All this is a result of tracking your actions daily. A simply scoring system for this is laying out how many things you want to get done during the week and marking off daily if you completed it or not. Think of this as your daily quests like in a game.
At the end of the week you tally up your numbers with a completion percentage (by 100%). This will give you basically a grade if you are on task or not. Our life is determined by the choices we make and having a spreadsheet to see what you’ve done everyday and every week will help boost our confidence to improve.
So for example let’s say you wanted to learn how to write and decided to dedicate 30mins everyday to learning. You score system will then be out of 7. So if you wrote only 5 times for the week that will be a score of 5 out of 7 which will give you a score of 71% (5 divided by 7). Now with all the task you gave yourself you will add them together and divide them by the total percentage of all the tasks you’ve given yourself. I’ve created a graphic so you can have a visual of what that looks like.
Continue to do this for the next 4-6 weeks until you dominated the new skill or completed the goal. This is the goal system to help maximize your time and get things done in a quarter of the time that we spend waiting for the end of the year to accomplish something.
Conclusion
Some of the concepts that are laid out in this article are not my own but have been inspired by the book the 12 week year. This idea of reaching your annual goals in a shorter time frame really appealed to me and I wanted to share it with you who may struggle like me coming up with a plan and reaching their goals in a shorter timespan.
Sometimes it’s not even coming up with a plan but how to manage so many interests or problems. I am currently developing and using this system myself to learn how to manage multiple interests and goals I want to achieve. I’m tired of looking back at the end of the year and not having anything to show for it.
But if I learn how to carve out time each day and each week to complete my tasks and reach my goals I can leave behind my regrets that I have put off for years. I would like to track and record my results based on my findings so stick around and see what the results are.