How I Maximize My Productivity with the 12-Week Year

I’ve been an event planner longer than I’ve been a small business owner. My first job was for a small agency that was a leader in our area. As an employee, I learned how to become an excellent event planner, which required learning how to balance the budget for the event and assemble crews of experts from our network to pull it all off. Since I was working for a small business, it was easy for me to observe the impact my choices had on the overall business.

Later on, I would take those skills and use them to land jobs at even bigger firms. The reason those skills were so translatable is because running events allowed me to gain experience with what I would encounter as a business owner. However, to maximize my productivity I knew I had to find a productivity framework that would scale so I could juggle multiple events at once. Enter, 12-Week Year.

From Event Planner to Small Business Owner

In 2020, I suddenly found myself laid off and somewhat disenchanted with my corporate job. The money was good, the pay was steady, and I was gaining valuable experience working with corporate clients and big brands planning experiential marketing events. Despite the benefits, I was starting to feel like I was getting a little too comfortable and needed to branch out and try something new as a small business owner.

I was able to leverage my experience as an event planner to discover channels for finding clients, creating contracts, and balancing budgets. At first, everything seems very manageable but trust me that it can get complicated very quickly as a sole proprietor. I found that I was struggling to reach my goals because I was responsible for every aspect of my business – not just the events I was running. For a while, it seemed like the only solution to maximize my productivity would be to duplicate me because there were not enough hours in the day to market and manage my brand while simultaneously meeting and exceeding my client’s expectations.

Maximize Productivity with 12-Week Year

Like everyone else, I’ve been growing weary of the constant barrage of complex self-help frameworks, productivity systems, and calendar software. These tools are great, but I find they allow me to get too mired in the day-to-day tasks, which can cause me to drift off course with long-term plans. I needed a system to help me with efficient goal-setting and execution strategies to reduce the mental load required daily to meet my goals. 

I mentioned to someone in my network that I was struggling to maximize my productivity and they told me about Brian Moran’s 12-Week Year methodology. When I did a little research, I discovered that the 12-Week Year is a framework that maximizes productivity, accelerates growth, and encourages goal achievement by setting clear and attainable goals, enhancing focus and accountability, and maximizing productivity through strategic planning. The framework is designed to be flexible and adaptable and celebrate achievements and continuous improvements. 

At a high level, the 12-Week Year provides a method for setting yearly goals, and then building a plan to accomplish them in 12-Week. This provides a sense of urgency, as well as opportunities to course correct if your 12-Week plan goes off course. This gives you multiple attempts to reach your goals each year and helps you to remain engaged and laser-focused. 

Let’s discuss how I have been leveraging the 12-Week year to reach my goals as a small business owner.

Setting Clear and Attainable Goals

Event planning thrives on precise goals and timelines. The 12-Week Year emphasizes the importance of setting clear, specific, and achievable objectives within a condensed timeframe. For event planners, this means breaking down annual targets into smaller, manageable chunks, and aligning them with quarterly milestones. By narrowing the focus to just 12 weeks, business owners can maintain clarity and motivation while avoiding the overwhelm often associated with long-term planning. 

This is important for anyone who is trying to juggle multiple long-term engagements. Even though you may have more than one project at a given time, it is much easier to prioritize when your planning is constrained to a smaller block of time. When the block of time you need to plan for is too large, it is easy to get distracted by the tasks that will give you the most anxiety, even if they are further in the future than a task that we think will be simple with a shorter deadline. This can be counterproductive and lead to a lot of loose ends.

Enhancing Focus and Accountability

One of the key advantages of the 12-Week Year lies in its emphasis on focus and accountability. By committing to shorter cycles, event planners can concentrate their efforts on high-priority tasks, eliminating distractions and procrastination. Additionally, the framework encourages regular accountability check-ins, either through self-assessment or peer accountability groups. This fosters a culture of responsibility and ensures that business owners remain on track towards their goals.

To implement this principle in my own life, I decided to bring some people on board who would help hold me accountable. This can be invaluable when you are your boss. Having a gentle but firm circle of support is essential to keep you from putting your goals last. So I rounded up some like-minded people in my network for a weekly accountability meeting every Monday morning.  

This has been helpful in several ways, beyond just providing accountability for myself and the other members. Acknowledging progress and celebrating victories is essential for maintaining morale and momentum, and weekly accountability meetings are a great way to do that. The 12-Week Year encourages small business owners to celebrate milestones and achievements at the end of each cycle, reinforcing positive habits and fostering a sense of accomplishment. 

Moreover, the methodology promotes a culture of continuous improvement, wherein event planners reflect on their performance, identify areas for growth, and refine their strategies for the next 12-week cycle.

Maximize Productivity Through Strategic Planning

Small business owners need to create a roadmap for the success that they seek. The 12-Week Year advocates for strategic planning sessions at the beginning of each cycle, wherein business owners outline their objectives, identify potential obstacles and devise actionable plans to overcome them. This proactive approach enables event planners to anticipate challenges, allocate resources efficiently, and optimize their workflow for maximum productivity.

There is an old saying that goes, that even the best-laid plans can go astray. Flexibility and adaptability are a feature and not a bug of the 12-Week Year. Whether it’s responding to client demands, accommodating unexpected challenges, or capitalizing on emerging opportunities, event planners need to pivot with agility while staying aligned with their overarching goals.

In the past, putting out fires was constantly interfering with my long-term plans. The flexibility and adaptability to revise my approach is one of the reasons that the 12-Week Year has made it easier to stick with my goals and long-term plans. 

Implementing Your 12-Week Year Plan

For event planners and small business owners, adopting the principles of the 12-Week Year can yield transformative results. By setting clear goals, enhancing focus and accountability, maximizing productivity through strategic planning, embracing flexibility, and celebrating achievements, event planners can run their businesses more effectively, achieve their goals, and thrive in an increasingly competitive industry. 

By leveraging this powerful methodology, event planners can turn their visions into reality, one 12-week cycle at a time. Keep watching this space for more productivity tips for event planners and small business owners.