The 12 Week Year Review

I took something away from this book which is good as that doesn't always happen.  So many productivity books just regurgitate what others have written.  So that is a sort of recommendation.  

I am not into the restructuring your day into 2 or 3 or 4 days.  Changing your year into 12 years.  An hour into 365 hours (I made that one up).  To me this is a gimmicky approach to productivity.  

The power in this particular approach is in the tracking and scoring weekly.  It's a way of gamifying your goals.  You may or may not be a fan of gamification.  I think it has it's place.  

I use an excel spreadsheet to keep track of my lag and lead measures and score myself on the achievement of those weekly.  I then try to beat my score of the previous week.  

I probably am not making any sense as I'm probably getting ahead of myself here.  If I could download all my thoughts here onto this page without any additional work on my part, that'd be awesome.

So this book...  have you noticed how strong you start off the year?  Have you noticed how strong you end the year?  And you sort of wallow in between?  

Part of the reason you end the year so strong is that you've set a relatively short time frame for your goals as we tend to pick up the pace in the last 3 months or so of the year.  But the end of the year is an arbitrary time.  It's forced motivation.  If the end of the year is forced motivation, we can generate that at any point.  So if we treat the next 12 weeks like the final 12 weeks of the year, bingo.  Intentionally motivation on repeat.  

Because of the systems I have in place, I didn't find value in this portion of the book.  I am already a rockstar at forced motivation.  Seriously.  

The authors of the book though follow up this forced motivation with a scoring system.  Anything less than 80% is a failure in progressing your goals for the week.  Anything over 80% is considered a success.  That's where this system is a winner in my book.  

Now I just need a system that will automatically send me a new pair of running shoes every time I hit a goal and I will totally be a horse with a carrot!