That’s quite a bold claim. However, it is the central tenet of a time management technique known as the 12-week year.

Developed by management consultants Brian Moran & Michael Lennington, the 12-week year provides a framework for individuals to structure their personal and professional goals around. As the name implies, the 12-week year challenges the underlying assumptions of the 12 month year. It argues that giving ourselves longer timeframes for goals can lead to inefficiencies and hamper meaningful progress towards them.

So how does it work?

Overview of the 12-Week Year

The 12–Week year is broadly founded on the following principles:

• Rather than 12 months, a year is now 12 weeks.

• Within each 12-week year you focus on 3 -4 priority goals that, if completed, would represent meaningful progress in your life.

• The specific actions required to achieve those priority goals are broken down and scheduled into the 12 weeks.

• Progress is reviewed at the beginning of each week and any corrective action taken to address missed tasks.

• At the end of the 12–week year you celebrate success and set the 3–4 priorities for the next 12-week year.

It’s a compelling framework. After all, with a 12-week year you could theoretically accomplish 4 times more than you would in a 12-month year. However, it’s important to note that the authors of the 12-week year have largely developed this framework based upon their personal experiences within industry. There is nothing wrong with this but, as far as I am aware, the 12-week year itself hasn’t been experimentally tested to determine its effectiveness.

Despite this, the 12-week year does appear to tap into certain psychological principles. So let’s take a look at a couple of reasons why the 12-week year might work from a psychological perspective.

Emphasis on Performance & Process Goals

The 12-week year encourages individuals to choose their top 3–4 goals and break them down into specific actions that need to take place each week to achieve them. At the end of each week, performance is assessed by calculating the percentage of actions that have been completed, with an 80%+ completion rate being desirable.

Setting goals is one of the most robust techniques in promoting positive behaviour change and enhancing productivity¹. Studies have consistently shown that those with goals tend to benefit from increases in performance. However, not all goals are created equally.

In general, there are three overarching types of goal:

• Outcome Goals — These focus on the end result. They are great at giving insight into the desired destination that a person wishes to go. For example, to be fluent in Polish.

• Process Goals — These focus on the specific actions that the individual needs to take in order to reach their desired result. For example, studying Polish for 20 minutes per day after work.

• Performance Goals —These focus on meeting certain personal standards along the way to achieving your outcome goal. For example, scoring 80% or higher on Polish language quizzes.

Traditional approaches to goal setting tend to emphasise outcome goals. For example, improving health and quitting smoking are some of the most common New Year’s resolutions set each year².

However, a challenge with outcome goals is that they are not fully in the control of the individual. There are often external influences that can come into play, such as an injury or a global pandemic, that hampers our ability to meet outcome goals despite our best efforts. Outcome goals also provide less detail on exactly how those goals can be attained or how we we can determine whether we’re making consistent progress towards them.

As such, process and performance goals are generally preferable — as these are much more within the individual’s control³. They also break down how the goals can be attained and provide benchmarks of progress to help us along the way.

The 12-week year taps into all three types of goals but emphasises process and performance the most. By asking people to break down their goals into weekly actions that need to be completed individuals are setting process goals. This provides a roadmap to success and a clear route to bridge the gap between current and future self. Then by asking users to review progress at the end of the week by calculating the percentage of completed tasks, and comparing it to the 80% benchmark, individuals are able to determine whether they are meeting performance goals.

Combined, the 12-week year does appear to tap into the powerful effects of goal setting that are known to psychologists.

The Fresh Start Effect

There’s nothing magical about January 1st, the beginning of the month or Monday, yet these are times when people are most likely to begin a new aspirational goal⁴.

The reason why people are more likely to start a new goal on January 1st, or on meaningful dates such as a birthday, is that they act as temporal landmarks. They are reference points that help us to separate out the seemingly endless stream of days into something more meaningful. Bookmarks to the chapters of our lives.

These bookmarks provide us with regular opportunities for us to anchor fresh starts around and they can be particularly effective for two key reasons¹:

1 — They help to create psychological distance from our past imperfections.

When we set something like a New Year’s resolution we draw a mental line in the sand. We say that those were the actions of past me, current me is going to take those experiences and craft it into something better. This separation between past and current selves allows us examine our imperfections in a way that is less threatening to our self-esteem. Recognising that our current and future selves will be able to overcome those limitations can be particularly motivating and help build momentum in pursuing our aspirational goals.

2 — They help us to see the bigger picture

As bookmarks to our lives, temporal landmarks create natural pause points. When we reach the end of a year we’ll often take a step back and reflect not only on what has happened but also where we aspire to be in the future. By disrupting the flow of our day-to-day routines they encourage us to stop and look at the bigger picture of our lives without getting bogged down by the minutiae of them. We can imagine what our lives will be like and this aspirational future can fill us with energy and drive to attain our goals.

With something like the 12-week year we are intentionally giving ourselves regular temporal landmarks to structure our goals around. They’re long enough in duration that we can make meaningful progress towards our goals but short enough that, if we mess up, we’re never too far away from our next fresh start. We can draw that psychological line in the sand and either congratulate ourselves on our achievements or move on and make the next 12-week year better without judgement.

The 12-week year is an interesting concept. By prioritising a small number of goals and condensing the monitoring period to 12 week intervals it may be possible to make meaningful progress towards our goals at a quicker pace than more traditional annualised goals.

From a psychological perspective the 12-week year potentially benefits from the fresh start effect and leverages goal setting methods that are known to be particularly effective. Whilst the 12-week year has yet to be formally researched by psychologists it is an interesting concept that warrants exploring.

If you would like to read more about the 12-week year you can order a copy of Moran & Lennington’s book here:

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

Buy The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months 1 by Moran, Brian P., Lennington, Michael…

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(This article is not sponsored. However, the above is an affiliate link, which means that if you make a purchase through it, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.)

References

1- Mento, A. J., Steel, R. P., & Karren, R. J. (1987). A meta-analytic study of the effects of goal setting on task performance: 1966–1984. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 39(1), 52–83.

2- https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/new-years-resolutions-statistics/

3- Weinberg, R. (2010). Making goals effective: A primer for coaches. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 1(2), 57–65.

4- Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582.