This week One Week One Book (OWOB) series is on “The 12 Week Year Field Guide” by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington . I can agree with the authors that perhaps this book is the most powerful approach to goal achievement system. This is the manual or the action oriented book for its original version of “The 12 Week Year “ .
I categorize this book Productivity and it helps you to achieve your goals faster with a system that being distilled in 12 weeks.
One my key take away from this book is this; Scorekeeping. It was well covered under chapter 5.
“Measurement drives execution. It is the anchor of reality. To create your best results, you will need to track your 12 Week Year results daily, weekly, and monthly! Without measurement, there is no way to react quickly enough when things are not working to ensure that you hit your 12 week goals.”
How do you apply this Scorekeeping idea?
First, must know your goal ; pick one goal from any area of your life. Example, in the area of health, your goal is to loose weight for 10kg next 12 weeks.
Second, you must know what to measure; the metrics as an indication of your progress. Two parts of measurement here ; lead and lag measure. Lead is the activities or tasks that you must do in order to achieve your goal. Lag measures is more of the results after completing / doing those tasks / activities. Example of lead measures such as number exercise you will do in a week and lag measures such as lost of 1 kg in a week. You need to maintain a journal or a record to track these metrics. Put it somewhere you can see and update easily everyday. Here is the example on how you can implement this idea;
You goal :
Lead Measures;
1.
2.
Lag Measures;
1.
2.
Third, evaluate the effectiveness of your execution. This can be done by looking at the percentage of action taken against the target set. The author recommends that if your execution rate is at minimum 80 %; you should be on the right track. Example, in week one, you ran 4 out of 5 targets, you should be on track.
Fourth, pay attention to your lead and lag measure progress. Look at overall performance of your lag and lead measures. What is the percentage of execution or achievement; is it too far off? If so, you may need to look at the reason. Do not change the plan, but looking at resolving the issues that hindering your from taking the required action. Do this review of daily and weekly basis. Perhaps you may want to record small improvement daily instead of one big jump. Example, lets improve 3 % this week vs last week position, in stead of 40% improvement at one go.
Call For Action
Pick one area of your life that you want to improve in the next 12 months.
Decide the goal you want to achieve for this area of life and start tracking the lead and lag measure as mentioned above. Best of all, buy and read this book for greater insights.
Visit the author here: https://12weekyear.com/