The 12 Week Year Changed My Life
Purpose check, vision board check, but I was still stuck in a 9-to-5 that I hated. It’s June 2024. I’m clocking eight hours a day in marketing, drained, dreaming of something else. But what? So, I gave myself one 12-week sprint to turn big dreams into daily actions and results. Today, I’ll show you how I planned it, how effective it was, and how it collapsed later.
My version of The 12 Week Year methodology
by Brian P. Moran & Michael Lennington
- ✅ Establish a compelling vision.
- ✅ Create a list of everything you want to have, do, and be before you die.
- Think of 3 things you want written on your tombstone to help clarify this.
- ✅ Envision your long-term goals: 5, 10, 20+ years (Order your Have, Do, Be’s in 5, 10, and 15 years).
- ✅ Decide on your mid-term goals: 1-3 years.
- ✅ Map it out as a Flow chart in Miro.com or Draw.io
- ✅ Create your first short-term plan: 12-Week Plan
- Decide on 2-3 outcomes.
- Set your SMART goals. Consider the challenges and solutions for each one.
- Create an action plan/schedule for each goal: daily & weekly activities.
About me
Hello world. I’m Michél Lipan, ex-9-5-er turned founder, sharing my journey building MELIA, a data-driven wellness app from scratch. I share the ups, the downs, and the lessons learned from building the life of my dreams.
So, here’s how to turn vague outcomes into a living schedule.
Building my 12-Week Sprint
Step 1: Short-term goals
Step one is to set your short-term goals.
I decided my first 12-week sprint was only going to have two goals.
- Prioritise my health because energy, longevity, and stress management are non-negotiable.
- Choose a new career path that I could fund the life that I had mapped out on my vision board. I’ll link the video on how I found my purpose and created my vision board.
Step 2: Weekly targets
Step two is to set your weekly targets.
The 12 Week Year book says to create smart goals. So these are goals that are:
- Specific: like strength training and not exercise more. That’s super vague.
- Measurable. So choose a number like make 10 sales calls. Not increase sales. It’s not measurable.
- Achievable. So strength training six days a week is not achievable for me right now.
- Relevant to your mid and long-term goals that you set and
- Time-based. So this can be weekly, daily, or by X date.
Okay. So, for my weekly health goals, I chose:
- x3 Strength workouts,
- x7 Outdoor walks,
- Get back to 53 kg (my healthy mass), and
- Strict lights out, so I get enough sleep.
- For my career, I chose to set x6 focused hours of research or work.
And it’s as easy as that.
Step 3: Daily actions
So, step three is setting your daily actions.
I chose to load everything into my TimeTune app that I’d already been using for years because pre-planning avoids decision fatigue.
The 12 Week Year book advises that for each action, you need to ask yourself what obstacles might get in the way and come up with solutions to each challenge in advance.
So, I knew that I had to gym before work because if I leave it to after work, it doesn’t happen.
Trying to fit my daily walks in. South African sunsets in the winter are early and safety is an issue and I didn’t want to eat dinner too late. So, I reclaimed 30 minutes during work hours. Yes, a tiny rebellion to walk in daylight.
I made a point of when I needed to finish work so that I can eat dinner on time and end up going to sleep on time because whenever I would work late, I would eat dinner late and then go to sleep late. So, I also decided a 9:00 p.m. bedtime, my watch says that I’m awake for about an hour overnight and need 30 minutes to fall asleep. So, back calculating from a 6:00 a.m. wake up means lights out at 9.
Weekends were for new career time. I set aside three hours in the morning um on Saturday and Sunday when I’m freshest because weekday evenings were just trash energy-wise.
What worked
This worked for me for the rest of the year. I was very productive. I achieved my short-term goals. I was exercising regularly, getting enough sleep most nights, counting and cutting my calories, and I dropped back down to my healthy mass. And I drafted MELIA’s first concept deck by August.
I quit my job end of September. First sprint over, I created a new schedule in Google Calendar so I could keep my time structured and overlay my personal calendars and commitments. This also worked for some time.
What broke: hard lessons & honest takeaways
But 2025 arrived, and soon the wheels came off. A jam-packed calendar, more house chores after quitting, dwindling savings, and the sheer scope of MELIA, unresolved trauma bubbling up, and more health issues crippled me. I’d worked my last day of employment in 2024 on a Friday, already burnt out, and started founder mode the next day on a Saturday. No break.
See, I wasn’t quite ready to quit yet. The plan was to be making money already from my business before I quit, but I got a big push from work and decided it was now or never, and to make the most of a less-than-ideal situation. As a founder, you don’t get weekends or holidays unless you give them to yourself. And with my less-than-ideal savings, I was on a fast clock.
Pretty soon, it didn’t matter what I achieved in a day. No matter how hard I pushed myself, I always felt behind. It was never good enough. And in April, I ended up in the ER and got a wakeup call from the doctor. So, I learned some valuable lessons.
Life never goes as planned
Life never goes as planned. I need to accept that it is out of my control. Stop blaming myself and rather master the ability to adapt quickly. Rigid time-optimised schedules look productive, but they’re not sustainable if they fall apart every time life happens, and they make no time for rest and fun.
I was battling enormous health challenges, mental and physical. And instead of giving myself kindness and patience, I push myself harder. I’m running out of money. There’s no time to rest. And of course, this made everything worse.
The problem with being goal-driven
The problem with being goal-driven is that our focus is on the outcome and not enjoying the process. I was so focused on the destination and optimising every moment of my day for productivity that I completely forgot to enjoy the journey and denied myself needs.
Grind culture is great until your health invoice arrives.
If you quit your job
If you quit your job before you’re making enough money to lose that income or you have enough savings to take you the distance, just understand that financial pressure is a special kind of stress on yourself and your relationship.
But I choose this suffering over the suffering my job gave me any day. I think many people agree. Would rather make do with less than suffer a toxic or dead-end job any longer.
Make time for mental health
Make time for your mental health, or it’ll make time for you. I was so focused on my physical pain and health that I completely ignored my mental health, having no clue that they were connected. Doctors don’t tell you this. It was time to get help, but I could never afford therapy, and now that I was unemployed, I definitely couldn’t. I was trying to stretch my savings as far as possible, so I told myself I’d have to wait until my business was making enough revenue before I could get therapy.
After landing in the ER, I found out that my medical aid covers 15 therapy sessions a year. So, I went to see a psychologist and started my mental health journey. I was diagnosed with severe trauma, depression, anxiety, and PTSD that I’d unknowingly been battling for years. I was really surprised, but also so relieved to finally have an explanation for all the struggles that I’ve been battling daily.
I had all these invisible challenges on my plate that I and everyone around me never took into account. And I’m never going to thrive or perform at the level I expect of myself until I address these issues.
Rest and play aren’t things we have to earn
Rest and play aren’t things we have to earn. We need them. My therapist helped me see that my inability to give myself permission to rest and my feelings of never being good enough came from my childhood. My parents taught us as children that our needs didn’t matter and that we had to earn play through work, school work, endless house chores, and parenting myself and my sisters because they didn’t want to.
At the age of 10, my days looked like this. I’d wake myself up in the morning while my parents were fast asleep till probably around midday. I’d get myself and my sisters ready, make breakfast, pack lunches. Then I’d walk us to school in the dark with my baby sister in the pram, I was barely tall enough to see over the handle. Walk past men relieving themselves on the side of the road to school, drop off my baby sister at daycare, and walk my middle sister and myself to primary school. At school, I was a top-three academic performer every year and a competitive athlete.
After school, I get my sisters and walk back home to find no parents. I’d make them food, put them to bed, clean up, do my homework, and go to sleep.
Weekends were spent getting up early to take care of my sisters, cleaning the house from top to bottom, mowing the lawn, pulling weeds. My parents would be drinking and doing drugs at trance parties hours away, leaving us locked in the house for the entire weekend, from Friday afternoon till sometimes Monday morning, with their phone switched off to conserve battery power.
One time, I showed my mother I got 90% on a test, thinking she’d be proud of me. Instead, her response was, “Where’s the other 10%?” To which I said, “The rest of the class got 60%, my grade is exceptional.” And she replied, “The rest of the class isn’t my child. You are. Do better!”
They expected absolute perfection. A standard I could ever meet. So, my childhood was endless work, very little play, and no credit. And unknowingly, I carried these burdens into adulthood. If my parents got home and any work wasn’t done, we’d be beaten. Like Cinderella’s stepmom, my mother told us, “I better see my reflection in every spoon.”
My therapist helped me see that to this day, I carry that fear and anxiety from childhood with me, that I’m not allowed to rest. I have to work, otherwise something terrible will happen.
Our modern society values productivity as a measure of a human’s worth. So relaxation and play, especially when not earned through work, is seen as laziness, and therefore you’re a bad citizen. You’re not contributing to society. This is toxic. It’s why we’re so stressed and burnt out. Rest and fun are biological needs, not rewards.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
And lastly, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s better to go slower and take longer than to suffer the entire journey to your destination, never stopping along the way to look up and enjoy the view, making yourself so miserable in the process that you don’t even want your goals anymore, and you give up.
The reality is, if I’m not happy now, I probably won’t be happy at my destination either because getting there won’t solve all my problems. It’ll just give me new ones. Instead, I need to master taking challenges in my stride.
I won’t have the gift of my youth much longer. And once it’s gone, there’s no amount of money that can buy it back, and I’ll regret not enjoying it.
The 12 Week Year helped me discover my purpose, my vision, and the stepping stones needed to get there. It helped me get my A into G and make big changes in a short span of time.
Now, the next video is about how to enjoy the process of getting there.
Next: “Tiny Experiments” rescue plan
When my health and productivity collapsed, a counterintuitive psychology fix saved me: 2-hour tiny experiments. By taking all the pressure off myself and allowing myself to follow my curiosity, my weekly output went from 2 hours to 47 hours with no extra stress.
So, if you’re burnt out, struggling with your health, overwhelmed by the pressures of life and packed schedules, not enjoying the grind, or you still can’t figure out your daily actions or your dream life, then this next video is for you.
So, comment one short-term goal from your 12 Week sprint if you’re trying one. I’ll put the 12 Week Year planning template in the description. And subscribe so you don’t miss the tiny experiment rescue plan.
Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Time to rest.
