How to Celebrate a New Year Every Three Months
How to Celebrate a New Year Every Three Months: A Book Review for The 12 Week Year
It’s the holiday season! In the midst of decorating and parties and shopping and spending time with family and friends, you may also be thinking about the new year that’s just around the corner. Traditionally the new year brings sentiments of a fresh start, resolutions, and a general sense of getting a new lease on life. The start of a fresh year often feels like a clean slate that all too quickly gets cluttered up again with all the things we were trying to do in the old one. In short, the new year becomes the old year all over again instead of an opportunity to really achieve our goals.
Maybe we put too much meaning, and dare I say – superstition – on the dates of December 31st and January 1st. What if we could give ourselves permission to have a fresh start, say, four times per year?
That is my simplified take on the premise of the phenomenal book The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months. Instead of waiting a whole year to evaluate our results and adjust our tactics, this book suggests that we go through the year end review and new year planning in a much shorter time frame – just three months. This give us repeated opportunities through the year to tweak, learn, and change course if necessary in the journey of achieving our goals.
This book breaks down the process of turning long term goals into short term periods. Under this method, you have time to try certain approaches to your goal and then evaluate without committing yourself to a whole year of potential failure. This 12-week strategy works just as well for your personal life as it does for your business or work life. If you try a marketing approach for three months and it works, you know to stick with it. If you try a new diet plan for three months and it fails, you know it’s time to try a new tactic. It’s easier to make a commitment because it’s only three months, not a full year. You can also make changes more fluidly because you are evaluating progress more frequently.
The 12 Week Year also covers developing your vision, time management, accountability and taking ownership. It walks you through step by step and includes success stories of all different types of people who have implemented this goal achievement strategy. I’ve read a lot of goal-oriented self-help books and this is the one I repeatedly recommend to people. If you read and implement the advice in The 12 Week Year, I truly believe you will achieve what the book promises to do: take back control of your day, increase your income, balance the priorities in your life, lower your stress and accomplish your goals in record time.
If you start reading today you have plenty of time to finish the book and get started on your own first 12 week year by the calendar new year. And you know what? If you don’t finish until January 18th or February 23rd, that’s okay too – your 12 week year can start at any time. January 1st ain’t nothin’ but a number.
