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

Chapter 14

Develop Your 12 Week Plan

This chapter will guide you through the development of your first 12 week plan. Before you create a 12 week plan, you must define and commit to your vision. If you have not already done so, be sure to work through Chapter 13, “Establish Your Vision,” to prepare you to set an effective 12 week goal and to create a solid plan to reach it.

Planning Is Beneficial

Unless your job is mostly reactionary in nature, it’s hard to argue against the value of planning. Planning enables you to allocate your time and resources to your highest-value opportunities, it increases your odds of successfully hitting your goals, it helps you to coordinate your team, and it creates a competitive advantage.

In spite of the proven benefits of working from a plan, not everyone does so. One reason for this is that many people have a bias for taking action. While an action bias can be a good thing, it can also get in the way of effective execution. We can get impatient, and want to get on with things too quickly. An effective plan takes time to create, and it requires some hard work. It may seem counterintuitive, but by taking time to plan up front, the overall time and effort to complete a task can be significantly reduced.

Another reason that many people don’t work from a plan is that they have a belief that goes something like, “I already know what I need to do, so I don’t need a plan to get it done.” On the surface this may seem reasonable, but unfortunately there is ...