The results are starting to come in from my effort on living out the strategies and tactics of the 12 Week Year, a book by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington.

I've been starting each week with a goal and breaking down tasks to make progress towards the goal. For instance, I've created a goal to practice meditation and so I have been giving myself a weekly checkbox to fill in with meditation. If I performed the task, I check it and move on to the next. I've found that I was giving myself about 25 tasks to complete each week and I had varying amounts of success in completing all the tasks that I set out to do. The 12 Week Year suggests that I hit 85% of my tasks.

I am all over the place in my performance

Yikes, I didn't hit 85% in any of my weeks. I wanted to dig deeper in to what was causing myself to have varying performance in completing the tasks that I set out to do. I found three key insights that have caused me to further optimize how I implement this program in my life:

I degraded my performance by giving myself more to do in the middle of the week without having a clear capacity to take it on.

I realized that I was making the goals harder to achieve because I would start piling on additional tasks in the middle of the week. I would start of the week with 20 tasks and then end the week with 30. After reflecting on this I will try to keep the current week sacred and defer any new tasks to future weeks.

I give myself too many tasks. 25 tasks in a week maybe doesn't sound that hard, but when each task is like moving it a mountain... it could be.

Also, tasks might require other participants and dependencies to complete. I've found that I run myself ragged trying to get as many tasks done in little time. I've found that if I define three high level goals and three tasks for each goal in a week, that it becomes more manageable and better yet there is greater focus on delivering on tasks that really matter. The way way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

I was consistently not delivering on the same task and would let it not go complete week by week.

I realized that there were some tasks I choose to not do every week. When I saw that I had not completed the task I did a gut check and said, do I really want to do this task if I am willing to not complete on it. Chances are if the task sat around for weeks, its really not that important. Lesson here, after not completing a task, powerfully choose whether or not you actually want to complete the task. There is no shame in letting an unfinished task go unfinished.

The best part of going through these exercises is discovering how to hold myself accountable and reach unparralleled levels of performance. How do you handle your task list and what systems are you using to crush your to-dos?