2025 - The 12 Week Year

2025 is a 12 week year and here's why. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the weeniecast. I have a little confession to make. I have a small addiction that I'm not actually interested in solving because I actually really enjoy it. And I think you probably have this addiction as well. And I mean, birds of a feather, right? We tend to like to stick with people who are similar to us. So I'm just going to come out with it.

I'm addicted to buying planners that I convince myself will fix my life. On my desk behind me, I have a stack of these planners and I love them and I'm never getting rid of them. And I bop in and out of them. And to be honest, none of them have actually fulfilled on that promise of fixing my life. And to be fair, none of the marketing for these planners said, Katie McManus, this is going to fix your life. But I convinced myself that they would and I am not going to give up on that hope.

I like a lot of business owners, I'm really, really good at making a plan to plan to create a plan to maybe plan to actually do the thing. I love anything that is calendary. I think one of the reasons I love planning is because it makes me feel like I'm in control. It makes me feel like I own my time. It makes me feel like I can control the outcome, the results that I want to go after. There are two conflicting belief systems around setting goals.

One is that once you set a goal and you name it to a bunch of people, you're far more likely to reach that goal because you don't want to disappoint them. You don't want to fail at that goal because you don't want people to see that you didn't reach it.

Now, the other belief system around it is that for a lot of people, naming a goal actually makes you less likely to reach it because just the mere action of sharing that goal with other people gives you enough dopamine to feel like you've already reached it. And why am I sharing all this with you? Well, I want to give you a little insight to how I am living my life in 2025. This is a grand experiment, much like all of these journals.

And I don't know if it's going to work, but I'm really, really excited for it. My dear friend Sandy Milano, which if you're ever thinking about buying a house on Cape Cod, she is the best real Estate agent on Cape Cod. She's absolutely incredible, has excellent service for her clients. She turned me on to this book called the 12 Week Year. And something you should know about Sandy is I think she sold around 100 houses last year, something like that.

It's an insane amount of houses for a real estate agent. Like even a fraction of that is an insane amount of houses. So when Sandy recommends a system or a book to me, I listen. Because if she's doing it, even if I do it in half asset or quarter asset or eighth asset, I know it's going to be effective for me. And the whole concept of the 12 week year is that you don't make year long goals, which I have to say I was hesitant about because I love me some year long goals.

I love some big declarative statements about here's where I'm going to be 12 months from now and blah blah, blah, blah. It makes me feel good, it makes me feel powerful, it makes me feel like I've already done it. But feeling good and powerful and like you've already done it is not the same as having done it. And looking back at my life and at my pile of planners that I still have great hope for, I realize that this actually has never worked for me.

I go through my journal and I look at the goals that I've set for myself in past years and how ambitious they were and how I did not reach them. Usually I forgot about them in like festival February, if I even made it that far. Because here's the thing about me is I am not so much a marathoner. I do far better with little sprints because that's really my attention span. That's the amount of time I can stay really engaged and interested in something. And I like getting that early win.

If I don't get the early win, then I kind of lose steam going for the bigger win.

So the 12 week year has you do away with those big year long goals and you may be thinking, okay, well 12 weeks, so you probably break the year up into like 12 week batches, which is quarters, right Katie? No, actually no, that's not how it goes. The whole premise of the 12 week year is that you do things in 12 week spurts and that's it. And you don't think beyond that.

You identify smaller areas of your life that you want to see a dramatic improvement over the next 12 weeks and you work on that and that alone. And the reason you don't stack them, the reason you don't break it up into here are the four quarters of the year. Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington argue that we're just not good fortune tellers, which I have to agree. I'm not a good fortune teller. There's a reason why I don't sell psychic for readings.

How many times have I made plans for the whole year? And then something dramatic happened in March that changed everything. For instance, in 2022, when I set my plans for the year, I did not foresee that my dog would get deathly ill and need to be in the ICU at Penn for five nights. Thank God she made it. But of course, that was a very extreme expensive week. So that threw off some of my financial goals for the year. And that's okay. I was happy to make the adjustment.

But it also kicked off me changing my mind about living in Philadelphia, which meant that I moved, which again, was not in the plans. So in the first quarter of that year, everything about my life had changed. If I were trying to stick to the 12 month goal, how easy do you think it would be for me to stick to the 12 month goal? If you're guessing that it was probably pretty hard, you're right. And actually, I didn't stick to the goal. I didn't stick to the plan. I remade the plan.

And then I remade the plan again when other things changed in my life. And then I remade the plan again when other things changed. And by the time I got to the end of the year, I hadn't reached anywhere near the goal that I'd had. When we set up a year, we with a whole plan for how every single month is gonna go and how every quarter is gonna go.

Not only do we not create time and space and flexibility for those major life events that are going to happen because we're human and that's how life goes to kind of things up and change things, but we also activate that part in our brain that says, oh, well, you know, this is the goal for the whole year. I don't get it done this time, I can get it done next time. If I don't get it done this time, I can get it done next week or next month or next quarter.

And it's kind of like that thing where you tell yourself, well, I kind of want to lose 20 pounds. Okay, cool. So if I want to lose 20 pounds, I probably need to start a diet and I need to start exercising. Cool. All right, well, today's a Thursday, right? Thursdays aren't good to start things on. So what I'll do is I will Start my diet on Monday, because Monday is a very natural start for something like that. And then I'll also start going to the gym on Monday.

And then of course, like, yeah, maybe you start your diet on Monday, but like something happens in your life and you don't get to the gym. Well, okay, well, I didn't start going to the gym today, so I'll start going to the gym next week. We get so precious about it starting at the right time. And because it's like this big amorphous goal, we think, okay, well, there's always next week and there's always next week and there's always next week.

And before we know it, it's been a year and we've like started a diet 17 times. We've been to the gym eight times. And if you do the math on your, on your monthly membership, those were very, very expensive solo trips to the gym. What would the difference be if you just started by eating three more servings of vegetables on that Thursday? What would be different if you said, okay, well, I don't have time to go to the gym today, but I have to take my dog for a walk anyway.

I'll just make, make it a longer walk. I'll do some lunges while I'm out there. Imagine the difference it would have if you just started on the day you imagined. I want to do this instead of doing the, oh, well, I'll do it later and I'll do it later and I'll do it later. You're just doing it already. It's just naturally already happening. And while sure it's not a proper visit to the gym, say you do 40 lunges and you do it three times a week while you take your dog for a walk.

Imagine how much stronger your legs are going to be after doing that for three weeks versus you holding out for, oh well, lunges have to happen at the gym. It only counts as a workout if I'm in that building with those walls and other people who are wearing too tight clothing and sweating and also feeling uncomfortable.

One of the things that I love about the 12 week gear is that it doesn't prioritize the result. I mean, it does like the whole thing. The whole system is designed so you can get the result, but it doesn't focus success on you gaining the result. It focuses success on you taking the actions that are required for you to reach that result.

One of my superpowers, along with my buying of planners that I have really, really high hopes will solve all the problems in my Life is I'll make all or nothing plans. I will make workout routines that are all or nothing. I have to follow the routine exactly or else it's a complete failure. I will create social media plans for myself and my business that I have to follow perfectly or else it's a failure, right?

And I will make graphs, I will go into Notion or ClickUp and I will create all of these project management setups so that I can track how perfectly I do everything. I will brought out analog style. One of my favorite things is to take some graph paper and if you also like graph paper, or even better dot grid paper to plot out how perfectly you're going to run your life in the future.

Even though there's no proof that you've ever been able to follow a schedule that you've made for yourself, ever for a day in your life. Welcome to the family. You're in good company. I think we're pretty fun to hang out with. I am the queen of creating these plans and then not following the plan. I'm the queen of drawing out the perfect week long schedule and then not following it and then just doing it again the next week and the next week and the next week.

For funsies obviously, because it doesn't serve any other purpose. The 12 week year is not about that. The 12 week year has you assign yourself the different activities that you need to do every day, every week and every month and even some one off projects. And you either do it or you don't. If you don't do it, you don't throw out the whole 12 week plan.

You just chart it, you just track it so that occasionally when you check in on your progress, you're able to see, okay, cool, I've done 60% of the things that I told myself I would do. Am I getting the results that I want? Because if you're already getting the results that you you want that'll help you reach that goal, amazing. Maybe you didn't need to do the other 40% of the stuff, right?

But if you're doing 60% and you're getting halfway there, it's meant to light a fire under your ass to actually go and do the other 40% because it'll help you reach your goal at the end of the 12 weeks. It's not an all or nothing plan. It's meant for you to live your life like an experiment, to run your business like an experiment experiment. And I'm going to say this like I did well in science class. I didn't.

But any Good scientist will tell you that while you're running an experiment, you have to track the data. You have to track every single step that you took. You have to explain the metrics, because otherwise you won't have a solid conclusion at the end of the experiment. You won't know what worked. So I'm really excited for the 12 week year and this first little round of it that I'm doing.

Not only because it's having me focus in on the core actions that I need to take to reach these goals, but it's also having me focus in specifically on a select few goals that I want to work on in the first portion of this year. Because just like I get all or nothing with my activities, I also get all or nothing about all the things that I want to accomplish. Accomplish. I want to sell out my program. I want to write a nonfiction book about your favorite self.

And if you want to learn more about the favorite self model, you can go and listen to a little taster of it in episode 100. But I want to write a book about that. I also want to write a fantasy novel, you know, and I have an idea for a really good one and I should probably start writing that before I forget about it or I lose the juice around the idea. There are a couple programs that I want to launch and have been massively successful.

Obviously the Gay Birthday Club, my nonprofit, I want to get that up and running. I want to have an amazing first annual event. Like as. As a term, first annual doesn't really make sense because annual is yearly. But anyway, there are so many goals that I have and yet when I try to go for all of them, I don't reach any of them. I know this when I work with clients and they come in with a menu of services that they are excited to sell in their business. My advice to them is sell one.

A confused buyer never buys. And you are your marketing team. You are the only person who's going to be posting and sharing about these services. For one, you're not going to do any of them credit by trying to market all of them. You're not going to be able to build a case for why someone should buy one program when you're trying to build a case for three different ones. And also the people who are following you, they're not seeing every single post that you share, right?

So they're just going to get confused. Oh, she does this. Oh, now she does this. Oh, now she does this other thing. Oh, now she. Now she's back to doing that. First thing again, they're not going to know how you're useful to them. They're not going to start being able to build a story for why they should hire you if you keep changing the market on them. Right? Just like in how we run our businesses, this is true in our lives. If we're trying to do too many things, it just does not work.

There's this great book called the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I cannot recommend it enough. If you're looking for a book to listen to or to read. And even after knowing this book and referring to it for years and years and years, I still try to do this. I try to change all of my habits all at once. It just does not work that way.

One of the examples he uses in the book is he shares about how he had this habit of getting up in like mid afternoon at work and going down to the little cafeteria at his workplace and getting a cookie, which, I mean, if you're having a cookie every single day, probably not that healthy, right? And so he started trying to change the habit. And so, so he would change like the type of snack he'd go for. He'd try not to go down to the cafeteria at all. He'd try to have a little snack at his desk.

Throughout this whole process of trying to change this habit, what he realized, and he, he did this through trial and error, is that it wasn't actually the cookie that he wanted. What he wanted was the banter, the camaraderie that he'd experienced when he was down at the cafeteria around that time. And he'd get to check in with other humans, his coworkers, who were all, you know, otherwise working in their own little cubicles or offices.

He needed that injection of socialization, you know, and the cookie he found was actually just an excuse his subconscious had come up with to get him to that point in that place where he could see these people and have a little mental break from his work. Now imagine figuring that out while you're also trying to go to the gym for an hour every single day. And you're also trying to work on your novel, and you're also trying to start a business.

And you're also trying to do this, and you're also trying to do that. Be really hard to do that trial and error and see what parts actually work and don't work for you in each area of that. And so for full transparency, I have four different goals that I'm working on right now. They do fold in together.

And so I'm going to actually be sharing as I go through this 12 week year, this first little iteration of this, how it's going and what I like about it and what I don't like about it. And of course like the parts that I struggle with and the parts that are really making me better as a business owner. So the four areas that I'm working on is I have an income goal. I want to sign a certain dollar amount in new business in the next 12 weeks.

Now to support that, I have a whole list of actions that I've broken down into the day, the week, the month. And then of course there are some action items that are just one time things. Now another one is that I'm actually doing a full rebrand and I'm already halfway through this. So like the visual stuff is the thing that needs to happen next. And of course all this will fold into the work that I'm doing for this income goal.

The third goal is I want to sell a certain amount of tickets to an event that I'm launching in March. And you'll be getting more information about this as we release the information to the public. I'm really excited about it, but that goal in particular, if I'm able to reach even a fraction of it, will set me up to reach the goal that I plan on setting for myself, which I know is kind of cheating. It's not really the 12 week year kind of thing.

But I'm doing this intentionally so that I am more likely to succeed at that next level goal for this big project. And again, I am being being vague on purpose because we haven't announced yet. And then finally, I do have a personal fitness goal tied to this and it's a little pedantic to explain, so I don't want to bore you with it. And those are the only things I'm allowing myself to work on in the next 12 weeks. Do I want to start, slash, finish my books? Absolutely.

Are there a gazillion other things that I would also like to add to this list? Yeah, sure. But I know that if I don't focus on just a few things, then I'm not going to make progress in any of them. And for the sake of changing how I do work so I can be more effective in my work, I need to do this at a smaller scale so that I can really track what works and what doesn't work. Now this is something that I'm rolling out to my clients if they so choose to also follow a 12 week year.

So if you're curious about what that would look like, if you want support in building your business anyway, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy call with me. Because it's easier together, or so the book says. It's easier with accountability, and with people who can both call you on your bullshit, keep you inspired, and also share how it's going for them. That camaraderie really does keep you going.

And if you want to book a call to learn more about any of my programs, you can go to weeniecast.com strategycall and if you have any questions about how this goes, please do write them in the reviews for the weeniecast, we look at every single one. And if, while you're there, you could also give a recommendation for what you like about the podcast, we would really appreciate that.