I used The 12 Week Year for a year and in this video I share with you the concepts in the book and how to get started using it.
The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington was a pivotal book when I first started taking goals seriously. I first heard about the book when listening to the BiggerPockets podcast in April 2020. I had been setting goals for years, but was intrigued to try this way to supercharge my goals. I encourage new investors to read it and learn about the systems that help high performers reach goals, especially for part-time investors.
Useful Resources:
BiggerPockets Money Episode where Scott Trench talks about The 12 Week Year
Free Google Sheets version of the 12 Week Year planning document used to plan The 12 Week Year for my own goals
Video Transcript
Self-made millionaire and real estate investor Scott Trench, CEO of Bigger Pockets, attributes this one book and the techniques in it to the majority of his success. I’ve read it, I’ve used it, and I’m here to help you use The 12 Week Year in your journey as a real estate investor.
In the 12 week year, Brian Moran changes our perspective on what is possible in a year when we shift our thinking. By reframing our mindset around time, restructuring our goals around a bigger vision and using some tools and techniques, you can reach your real estate investing goals faster than you thought possible.
It all starts with redefining what a year is for our goals. In the book, Brian Moran argues that people in organizations can get loads of work done in the last quarter of the year to reach their yearly goals. It’s as if people were sleeping in the first part of the year and woke up and finally realized they had to make some progress.
They start cancelling unimportant items and focus on the things that really matter most to reach their goals this year. This push is what Brian Moran wants us to think about when we redefine our thinking around a 12 Week Year. Now, he doesn’t mean just breaking down the year into regular quarters. That just defeats the purpose of what this book is all about.
He wants us to truly believe that a year is now 12 weeks long, and every week in that 12 weeks equals the amount of work that you would normally do in a one month time span. That makes every workday effectively count for a week’s worth of work in a normal calendar.
You can see the power in this time shift.
If you suddenly need to accomplish everything you usually get done in a month in one week, how would you do it? This is the essence of The 12 Week Year. You would need to strip out everything that’s not essential to the goal and get down to what’s the most essential thing you need to do to get to this end result.
So how do we start figuring out what’s most essential to get done in 12 weeks to reach our goal? This is the part where things get interesting.
If you’ve ever been to a New Year’s Eve party, you may have been around with a circle of friends sharing New Year’s resolutions. We all know resolutions don’t work. But do you know why?
These New Year’s resolutions are often just an idea without a bigger vision.
But hold up a minute. What does vision have to do with anything when we’re going to achieve our goals faster than ever before in just 12 weeks?
Hear me out. This is where I’ve gone wrong before. I used to think that having a Someday vision was fluffy and weird and didn’t make any sense for my own goal setting.
After pursuing goals in a more structured way for the past several years, I’ve realized that having a vision is actually the key to successfully reaching your goals. The vision you have for where your goals are going to take you is what propels you forward for when things get hard and when your plan starts to fall off the rails.
If coming up with the Someday vision is a little bit too weird for you, I’ve got some tips for you next on how you can make it a little more tangible.
The next time you have 10 minutes, grab a piece of paper and envision that it’s three years from today. The last three years have gone by perfectly. What happened? What have your successes in real estate been? Where are you? Who is by your side? What was going on in your mind? What’s one piece of advice you’d give yourself today?
So now take this three year idea and let’s start to narrow it down. You can’t work on all the parts of your three year vision at once, but you could start to take one element of it and start to work it into your first 12 Week Year.
So let’s start building this hypothetical first 12 week year. If your vision was to buy eight rental properties in the next three years, where do you have to start in this next 12 Weeks to get there?
Let’s take this goal and fill it in as buy one rental property in the next 12 weeks and keep using it as an example.
If you’ve never bought a rental property before, there’s a lot of steps you’re going to need to take in order to fulfill this goal in the next 12 weeks. You’ll want to break it down to the most critical actions. This is what Brian Moran calls tactics.
Tactics have a due date and they have to be done in a specific week. You can have tactics that repeat themselves if an action needs to be done on a weekly basis, or more than once in a 12 week year.
For example, You’re probably going to have to connect with some investor friendly agents, but probably only in the first week. You’ll also need to analyze properties and probably lots of them. It’s best to do something like that on a weekly basis to get to the right number of properties to find your one deal.
The point is that you’re going to have to sit down and plan the actions that are needed for you to realistically reach your goal. This part of the process can take up to a week to build out your plan, working a little bit on it every day. But that’s the key. You need to have this plan built out before you start your 12 Week Year. I put together an example plan of our hypothetical example in the description below so you can get an idea of what building out tactics for a goal looks like. It’s in Google Sheets, so you could play with it for your own goals.
So now you’ve spent a week building out your tactics and creating this weekly roadmap for your 12 Week goal. This is where the execution now starts to happen, and this is the part you want to focus on next.
Brian Moran states that more than 60% of the breakdown happens here in the execution process. Most people start to blame the plan, but you have to take a look at your execution of your plan before you kill the plan. You don’t know if the plan is working, if you don’t work the plan.
There’s a few pieces to executing the plan. First, you need to use these weekly tactics to plan your week. Set aside 15 minutes at the start of every week to take your tactics and figure out where they’re going to land on your calendar. After your first week, you’ll also want to use this time to reflect on your week and score it.
Scoring your week is the key to figuring out whether or not you’re executing your plan. Brian Moran says that if you’re scoring 85% per week on your tactics, then you’re bound to reach your goal.
The book doesn’t get into any details about how you calculate the score, but this is how I did it. I counted the number of tactics that I had scheduled for the week and then the number of tactics that I had completed that week and divided them by each other to get a score.
If I completed three out of five tactics, I’d divide three over five and multiply it by 100 to get 60%. In this example, I’d want to reflect back on my past week and figure out where that breakdown occurred. Spoiler alert for me, execution broke down at time blocking. I didn’t spend a ton of time figuring out where I was going to do something in the week and that often came to bite me by the time the week was over.
At the end of the 12 week cycle, sit down with all of your weekly scorecards and reflect on how you did. The 13th week is designed for you to spend this time to look back, see what worked, what didn’t work, and to plan your next 12 week year. Don’t get discouraged if your first 12 week year could have been better.
I found that it took a few cycles of doing the 12 Week Year to figure out where my breakdowns were happening and what I could do to improve. Once you’ve gone through a few cycles of the 12 Week Year, you’ll be able to better assess if it’s working for you.
The biggest pitfalls I had when using it was not attaching my goals to my vision and having way too many goals in 12 Week Year.
After I’ve spent more time being purposeful with my goals, I can see the power in the system of the 12 Week Year. It’s helped a lot of people reach their real estate and financial goals and even in other areas of their life. The book’s not specific to real estate at all.
This book changed my mind about goals and has helped me as a real estate investor. It helped me see the power of vision and it taught me about the power of time blocking.
If you want to hear about another book that changed my mind around goal setting. Check out this next video here in it, I talk about the system I switched to after the 12 Week Year and why, and how it’s helping me now.