One of the biggest mistakes writers make with the 12 Week Year is simple: too many goals, too many projects, not enough time.

When I was a brand new professor and just getting started with the 12 Week Year, I was in a hurry to get tenure so I stuffed my first couple plans full of ambitious goals. Write a journal article each month? Sounds great! Write a grant proposal? You bet! Collect data for future projects? No problem!

When you’re in planning mode, it’s easy to get excited and think you can draft a book, submit three essays, start a newsletter, and launch a podcast…all in the same 12 weeks.

The problem? A cluttered plan sets you up for overwhelm and disappointment. Not only didn’t I finish everything in my early plans, I got frustrated, found it more difficult to make progress, and worst of all, it stressed me out.

Then I discovered a little planning hack that really helped. Instead of writing out your 12 Week Plan in a simple list, I recommend starting with a sideways or “kanban'“ view like the one below. This is actually an image of my 12 Week Plan from twelve years ago or so. 

When you map your goals onto a page this way, you gain sharper focus on the two very important things:

• Exactly how many major projects you’re juggling

• How much you’re asking yourself to get done each month

When I see the plan like this, I get a much better feel for how realistic it is. If you start seeing a really long list in a given month, you know you’re probably asking too much. As you get experience with planning, you’ll get a great feel for your “speed limit,” how many things you can get done each month. I found, for example, that my limit was one big writing thing and one big data thing per month. Once I knew that, I could see in a heartbeat whether a plan was going to work.

I think of this 12 week plan view as a dashboard for your writing life: clear, simple, and honest about your bandwidth.

If you want your 12 Week Plan to succeed, don’t just make a list. Make your goals tactics visible.

Try sketching your plan this way before you launch your next 12 week year. You might be surprised how much easier it is to focus—and how much more satisfying it feels to finish.

Thanks for the writing you do, and thanks for reading mine. I'll see you next Friday.

Happy writing,

Trevor