Q1 is officially a wrap! I’m feeling pretty good about how it ended and super excited about the next quarter. Let me tell you how it went!
This year I planned to do the 12 Week Year to see if it would make a difference in trying to reach my goals in life. If you don't know what it is, it's breaking up our normal 12-month year into four quarters or 12 weeks. The idea is that you treat each quarter as a separate year. So instead of having 52 weeks in a year, you will only have 12 weeks. In their book The 12 Week Year, Brian P. Morgan and Michael Lennington explain that typically at the end of the year, there are all these deadlines and everyone is rushing to get it all done (Morgan & Lennington, 2013). Breaking the year up into 4 small quarters, you have a smaller deadline. You’re more inclined to get more done when your deadline is coming up fast rather than procrastinating because you have so much time to get it done - or at least you think you do. Because we believe we have time, we often forget about it due to other things occurring, and then when we get closer to the deadline and the task isn’t completed, we are left scrambling. Outside of work-related things, in our personal lives, we may not do anything at all. I typically fall in line with the narrative that things just don't happen.
In the book, it is suggested that you work on a small part of your goal daily no matter what and you’ll find that you get more completed. It made sense to me. This is something that I did before, but I didn’t realize it until I read some of the book. 2021 was the only year, so far, that I reached every New Year's resolution I created for myself. The difference of that year in my life, verses other ones is that I remained focused and didn’t allow myself to get distracted. I made a game plan and I stuck to it. Every day I came home I worked on something that would help take me to the next step to get closer to what I wanted. I created my plan using the SMART goal method and then worked my way backward to figure out what small steps I needed to take to reach the big goal. This is also how I structured my coaching business and what I walk my clients through. It works. 2021, turned out to be a pretty good year for me, so I wanted to make it happen again. The 12 Week Year, seems to be very similar but to me, it’s slightly a more aggressive approach. Not a scary aggressive approach just one you need to be more intentional about because of the shorter deadline schedule.
So at the end of 2024, I wrote out the goals I would like to accomplish in the next year and then I asked Chatgpt to help me come up with a game plan to get these various goals done in bite-size pieces. I could have done this myself because I’ve done it before, but I JUST discovered Chatgpt (It’s okay, you can laugh). I’ve always been scared to use it, but that’s a story for another time. It was so much quicker for me to use that system than me spend additional time creating it myself.
All this to say, I am well pleased with myself and I think everyone should be doing the 12-week-year process. If you have some dreams that haunt you at night or just keep coming up, this could be a good start for you.
Okay, enough of my yapping, I’m sure you’d like to see what I completed. Below, you will see a screenshot of my Notion account and how I set it up. What I am showing you isn’t all of my personal goals but it is the majority and most important ones for me. In the first picture, you will see first the area of my life I want to attack, then what the goal for the end of the year is, and then finally what I intend to do for each of those areas within the first 12 weeks or Q1.
Now in the second picture, you will see what I accomplished. I kilt that! That is not to say I didn't slack off, because I did for two weeks. However, I reminded myself of what my dreams are. I said it once and I’ll say it again. . If I don't do it, who will? Nobody, exactly. So get up, stop wishing, and start doing. Your dreams will never be anything if you don’t take some action. I’m very excited to get started in Q2 and I’m hopeful that I can be successful and reach the next goals for all these areas over the next 12 weeks. I will of course keep you updated.
If you have any questions, or if you’d like help creating your own, I’d love to hear from you and help you out! It’s not too late, you can get started with this whenever you want. Feel free to comment below or shoot me a private message or email at pachionm@urbetteru.com
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If you made it this far, thanks for reading my post! While I have you, I wanted to share my new website pachionbreona.com I’d love for you to check it out and share it with your friends or someone you know who could benefit from my services. If that person is you, please book a free consultation with me. I’d love to hear from you, get to know you, and share some encouragement.
If you’d like to get to know more about me, my story, and all about the why behind everything that I’m about check out my chapter in Deserts To Mountaintops: The Pilgrimage Of Motherhood. Get your copy here: https://a.co/d/iAHDKEN
❤️ Pachion Breona