The 12 Week Year – Book Review

I love The 12 Week Year! I read it for the first time at the end of 2018 and have been using its goal formatting ever since. I purchased it in audio and listen to it at least once a year as a refresher.

The Basics. Instead of making annual goals, you make 12-week goals and each week is a month and after 12 weeks, it’s a year. I LOVE to set goals, but we all lose interest in things when the goal seems to drag on. We’re full steam ahead in January and laugh in the face of danger as we know what we can get done in a year! But by March, we’ve lost said steam and we’re already behind on what we thought we would get done.

This system helped me weed through the goals I kind of want to accomplish to focus on those that I really want to achieve. It’s also broken into categories like Physical, Relationships, Finacial, Intellectual, etc. And with such a short period of time (12-weeks), goals aren’t so large. They’re broken down into more manageable bits. For example, if you want to write a book, instead of “Write a book by December.” It’s more like “Write 12 chapters of my book in 12 weeks.” With 52 weeks in a year, if you write 1 chapter a week, you could have your book well and done by December, and the task of eating the whale isn’t quite so daunting.

Here are a few examples of two of my goals:

Physical: “Be Healthy.” Don’t we all need a little more health? I have a daily water goal, a daily step goal, and lifting two times a week.

Relationships: Weekly Adventure with Kiddo. Sometimes it’s something large, like going camping or to a National Park (we hit three last year) and sometimes it’s just going swimming. Either way, I am spending time building a very important relationship, and creating memories.

I especially like the weekly evaluation. I keep all my check-ins and like to go back and see goals I have accomplished. I purchased the 12 Week Year Workbook last year, and can’t say I find it very helpful, but I have taken the format from the book and made it my own, so it seemed a bit unnecessary for me.

I would totally recommend The 12 Week Year and I hope you find that you enjoy it as well!