Take control of your time with this framework and outpace the competition.
Intro
I’ve always had a gigantic problem. I’ve lived two lives.
One life where I was stuck, no roadmap, no goals and no hunger.
My other life? I was crushing it. I would tap into my strengths, deliver real results, and I actually felt alive both at work and at home.
The problem?
I was only able to channel my second life, my supercharged life from time to time. I would be motivated for a bit, get some work done but then would fall right back into old habits.
Knowing this — after some serious self reflection, I started to try a lot of shit.
Complex note-taking systems, expensive productivity courses, piles of unused stationery.
I even convinced myself that watching successful people’s vlogs counted as learning.
Nothing worked.
It didn’t work because none of that shit really matters. I needed to get disciplined. But that’s easier said than done.
What I craved was a system that would FORCE me into a disciplined life. I needed something to hold me accountable.
More importantly, I needed something to take the guesswork out of it when I came to sit at my desk.
That’s when I discovered what I’m going to share with you today.
The biggest productivity “hack” (if that even is a thing) that I’ve came across.
Forcing Urgency upon yourself.
Many have dubbed this method the 12 Week year. Brian Moran and Michael Lennington popularized this approach in their book. Appropriately named as the 12 Week Year.
The concept is very simple to understand. Your goal is to now achieve in 12 weeks what used to take you 12 months.
The biggest takeaway this system has taught me is this:
Before diving into the how-to, let’s understand the framework behind these tools.
Right now, 95% of people think of time in terms of years.
Nothing wrong with that in situations that need context. But it breaks down very quickly when you use it for goal planning.
So our main focus must start with discarding annualized thinking.
Which, in short is — the mistaken belief that there is plenty of time left in the year to achieve goals, which leads to a lack of urgency and reduced productivity.
It creates the perspective in your mind that all the time in the world is available, when really, it isn’t.
You lack urgency, when accompanied by annualized thinking.
We must redefine our workflow to encourage high productivity throughout every day, every week and what we will come to know as our new cycle.
The 12 week year.
How do we accomplish this lofty goal of reducing an entire year into 12 short weeks?
I’m glad you asked.
We use the method that top performers have been using for decades.
The method is called periodization.
The rich have been using this skill to move past the lazy and stagnant. If you ask me, it’s about time we steal it.
It’s all about breaking down your time into focused, concentrated periods that you dedicate to mastering a specific aspect of your life or in this case; a goal.
By viewing our calendar in the quarter system rather than annually we see vast benefits across the board in multiple areas.
- Allows better predictability, as we are much more in tune with whether we are on track or not
- Allows you to focus purely on one or two specific goals and their branch off tasks
- Allows you to overload these goals so that you have a higher chance of achieving them
- Provides a natural break and critical reset in the 13th week, that we will cover at the end
So what does this look like practically?
Consider two people chasing the same dreams. By December, they both want to: drop 20 pounds, move from hourly work to a salaried position, build their personal brand, and finish a half marathon.
Person A dives in with typical January enthusiasm. They try juggling all four goals at once, spreading their energy thin across every front. By April, nothing’s changed. No tracking. No game plan. Not even a clear vision of what success would feel like. Just burnout and disappointment.
Person B takes a different approach. They break the year into focused 12-week sprints.
Sprint 1: Drop those 20 pounds. They track every calorie, complete every workout, and monitor their progress daily. The strategy works—by week 11, they’ve hit their target.
Their plan unfolds strategically: Weight loss improves focus, boosting work performance for that Q2 promotion. Moving from hourly to salary creates time for their content side-hustle. And with a slimmer, stronger body, that Q3 half marathon becomes “easy peasy.”
While Person A remains stuck at the starting line, Person B is already celebrating multiple wins.
This is what I mean by periodization. Breaking these huge lofty ass goals into a much more manageable game plan that spans a few weeks.
Not 365 days.
This process will get you rich, healthy and living your best life.
To accomplish this though, we must master the 5 Disciplines of building an Urgent Mind.
Discipline 1 — Create a Compelling Vision
The first step you can’t ignore is compiling your future vision.
The vision you’ve always wanted for yourself.
Examine your environment, emotions, beliefs, your life purpose, everything that revolves around day to day life that your future you would be in tune with.
When you imagine a world that is freakishly crazy and makes you a bit uncomfortable — you know you are in the right spot.
Having this crazy high bar will fuel you emotionally to stay on track throughout this process.
So really, no matter how crazy you think it is — the next Elon, sitting on 20 properties throughout America, working remotely in a jungle, only having to work 4 hours a week or not working at all.
Whatever it is, you need to be emotionally connected to it so that you can use it as fuel to push you through the inevitable downs of this process.
If you still are having trouble creating a vision then focus on the anti vision. Whatever you don’t want to become, focus on the opposite of that.
Dan Koe has a great episode on this if you are curious.
Realize that as you progress towards your dreams, you will naturally move through the 4 stages of your vision:
-
Impossible: Your vision at the start, feels unattainable due to lack of a clear path to your vision
- *You must work hard during this process and overcome the uncomfortable*
- Possible: Your emotional engagement grows as the benefits of your hard work become tangible in the real world
- Probable: Your planning in the past has now made your goals feel like they are likely to be achieved.
- Given: Your vision is inevitable at this point. It is only a matter of time at the rate you are currently producing.
Only with structured planning and clarity can we move from the Impossible to Probable stage.
Execution is king, no matter how good your pla
Discipline 2 — Plan Your Execution
Now is where the fun happens.
Instead of having some imaginary goals every year and trying to figure out how we will feel in 9 months.
We only have to focus on the next 3.
This allows us to be waaaay more intentional with our actions and behaviors.
You may not be down to eat chicken, broccoli and rice every meal for 12 months but you could give it a go for 12 weeks.
This shorter time frame gives us the power to break down the lofty goals from our vision into manageable weekly and daily to do lists.
With the 12 week plan, you find out very quickly that every day counts.
Unproductive days, turn into unproductive weeks, and unproductive weeks turn into failed goals.
You simply remain in the same spot.
That’s why it’s so important to have a deep emotional bond to your vision. You falling in love with a future version of yourself that is so different from the person today that it pushes you DAILY to have agency and urgency.
Accomplish this by:
- Making tasks specific and measurable
- Keep your tasks positive
- Set tasks that stretch your abilities
- Promote accountability
- Create deadlines
Discipline 3 — Control Your Process
Controlling your process starts and ends with one thing.
Your weekly routine.
Not daily but weekly.
No more binge watching hella daily routines for inspiration.
We are focused purely on what the week will look like.
We only get 12 so we must make everyone count.
Our weekly plan will dictate which tasks are required daily to generate the necessary results for our top of mind vision.
Think of our weekly routine as the foundation builder.
Everything stems off of it.
So knowing that, we need to plan accordingly. Buy a weekly planner, print one off of canva, use a notion template, or try timestripe task manager.
Whatever it is, use it and stick to it.
Once you land on your tracker of choice, we are going to take time at the beginning of the week (I like to do mine Sunday evening) to go over our upcoming game plan for the week.
Use this time to track your progress from the previous week as well.
Discipline 4 — Measure Your Progress
With your tracking item of choice we need to start managing our progress.
Very famous cliche quote but it is real, “What isn’t measured isn’t managed”.
Understand that frequent progress monitoring can make success 2.76x more likely.
If you use a physical tracker and public accountability (i.e failing in public) you can boost the effectiveness of goal achievement by 74% alone compared to only mental tracking.
You don’t have to be blind to your own progress, you are able to see the fruits of your labor.
Celebrate the micro wins that come up throughout the weeks. Be proud of momentum.
For the best results use quantitative tracking (numbers, metrics, trackers) with qualitative reflection (journaling, personal feedback).
If that’s confusing it’s basically using your own data to ask yourself “why” and “how” did something occur or did not occur.
Be relentless with your self accountability. In order to do that, you must control your process.
Discipline 5 — Manage Your Time Effectively
Every result that you get from the 12 week year is built upon managing your time effectively.
Lucky for you, I have something that will boost your productivity by at least 50%
These time blocks aim to give you exactly what you need when you sit down to put the work in.
For me that was one of my biggest hangups. I can wake up early, go to bed late but when I sit at my desk. I have no clue what to do.
These daily time blocks fix that.
The 3 Time Management Blocks:
- Building Block (~90 Min): Set aside at least 90 minutes to build something. Anything. If you're just starting out and have no clue, then work towards building an audience. Everything starts with a crowd, whether your selling a product, service or something else — you need an audience or customer base that can buy.
- Publish Block (~45 Min): This is where we aim to publish our work. So for me this looks like publishing to youtube once a week. The other days, I'm focused on twitter/'X' (follow me if you haven't already). Whatever your mediums are, make it a daily process to upload or schedule something to get uploaded.
- Maintain Block (~30 Min): This is were we will maintain our projects. Review data, update docs, reply to emails. Also use this time to review finances, watch a video that has purpose, meditate. Whatever you feel you need to fuel you for the rest of the day.
I would front load these 3 time block.
If you get these done early in the day before your 9-5, or the weekend or any other day — you will feel accomplished no matter how the rest of the day goes.
If you want this to work, you need be doing this at least 5 days out of the week.
So we should aim to have a perfect week.
Perfect Week: Map out your whole week by first scheduling these time blocks, then fill in everything else you need to do.
We’ve talked a bit about execution along the way but it’s time to get serious about how that is accomplished.
There are 3 core principles we need to know about. These principles will wrap everything together for us.
Principle 1: Be Accountable
Self explanatory.
You have to be your own toughest critic. You know when you're bullshitting, or off of the grind.
With personal goals and business building, it’s very easy to continue to push things off further down the schedule.
You need to recognize when you are putting yourself 3rd instead of first and react accordingly.
Stop playing the victim card, don’t complain, change your behavior and try to only engage with positive people in your life.
If you can do that, then you're off to a great start.
Principle 2: Follow Through On Commitments
Accountability (1st principle) is the ownership of your actions.
Commitment (2nd principle) is a promise to perform those actions.
Commitment requires sacrifice. You won’t get far if you don’t understand that now.
If you want to change, get ahead and be dominant in your field then you must be prepared to sacrifice.
Parties, clubbing, 20+ hours gaming over the weekend. We have to stop bad habits so we can focus our energy on productive things.
Principle 3: Be Great
Stop multitasking. People think the ability to multitask is some great skill.
It is something that can be applied to certain scenarios, it should be used sparingly.
When you engage with a ton of activities, you’re really engaging with none of them.
You’re going through the motions, trying to tick off a bunch of different things in one go.
Slow down. Triple check your work. Only create value.
Take pride in your work and the rest will come. I promise.
So we finally have everything we need to succeed in our 12 week year. This game plan will undoubtedly get us ahead of 95% of people.
Be warned though, that if you falter in just one aspect of what we’ve talked about then you run the danger of becoming average again.
It’s okay to have an off day but don’t let that bleed into your whole week.
When you start this mindset shift you may see your 12 weeks playing out something like this:
Weeks 1-4: This is the habit building zone. You should be staying focused and motivated. The principles that we covered should be motivating you for an optimal experience.
Weeks 5-8: The motivation should have worn off by now. You should start to lack the urgency and be much more susceptible to distractions. Don’t — give — in. Build mental fortitude. Your future you, will thank you for it.
Weeks 9-12: You should see some sort of positive benefit from the work you’ve put in at this point. Whether it’s more views on your content, some pounds getting dropped on the scale, whatever it is — we should be seeing progress, even if it’s slightly.
There you have it. The complete guide to getting ahead of 95% of people.
Simple enough and you have some tools to use that should help pave the way for an amazing start to your journey.
Shoot me a message on X or my website if you need support. Let’s motivate each other.
See you next week.
