ColdShower #72🥶🚿 Airplane mode and the 12-week year
Your brain constantly sees the tip of your nose, but chooses to tune it out for you.
Shower thought via Reddit.
The ColdShower: Weekly thoughts for better health, habits, and happiness.
“Airplane Mode”
Planning Funnel Part 3: The 12-week year
Recharge: 🥶🚿Coldshower 🥶🚿
ColdShower: (noun), a daily recharge. Little bits of wisdom through life experience and cold water.
It only took a few hours
To break from an endless loop of stressors. A vicious cycle of being “plugged in” to work, email, and consumption. Is this a familiar story for you?
When we’re stressed, we seek more stress. It’s counterintuitive. We dig ourselves deeper.
I spent a week on vacation last week. But for the first half of my vacation, my mind wasn’t there. It was preoccupied. Stuck in “work mode”.
It wasn’t until the third day that I broke from this loop. I spent the entire morning on “airplane mode” snowboarding the runs at Steamboat ski resort.
It only took a few hours. By lunch I felt different. I forgot my phone was in my pocket. When I did pick it up, I didn’t mindlessly check my email.
I felt a physical weight lift from my body. Now I’m back at work, grateful to carry that load again.
The lesson: No one will tell us when to recharge. We must build that time into our day, and on occassion, fully check-out for an extended period of time.
Cheers & Have a great week!
Refine: 🗓️🌪️“planning funnel”🗓️🌪️
The 12-week year
No Jon, it’s 52 weeks… But what if we could do more in 12 weeks than most accomplish in a full year?
That’s the promise of the 12-week year, an ultra popular book, management program, and productivity movement.
I was introduced to the concept through Ian Koniak’s Untap Your Sales Potential training. The concept of quarterly planning is not new to me (I’ve had quarterly plans and seen company quarterly goals), but I’ve never implemented it in my own workflow.
How the 12-week year works
It’s really four 12-week years, with one week of quarterly planning at the start of each new cycle.
You take your yearly goals and map that to a subset of achievable quarterly goals.
So simple. So effective. And yet I’m willing to bet highly underutilized.
What it did for my own goals
Quarterly planning forced me to break down my big yearly goals. It made me envision what I could reasonably accomplish in 12 weeks and how I should be sequencing my time across each quarter.
Let’s see it in action..
If you’ve been following along, you know that I’m working on a brand (LittleTrailRunner) and chasing a new running goal (sub-19 minute 5k)
I set Q1 goals for each of these that I had confidence I had the time and resources to achieve. It’s given me measurable goals to work towards rather than procrastinating, or being “lost” chasing amibitious goals.
I look at my quarterly plan once per week. This informs my weekly plan. For more on that.. TUNE in next week!
Still On The Toilet?
THANK YOU for making it to the end!